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Seylerius

102 karma · joined January 21, 2016

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/seylerius; my proof: https://keybase.io/seylerius/sigs/p6LGiv-kIvqF277meWepAjgCCSnQYJICpF-CWmpy6_I ]
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Seylerius··on Passerine: A small extensible language designed for concise expression
This memory management looks pretty shiny, but is there any way to get down to manual allocation as well?
Seylerius··on Show HN: Zircle UI – a circular zooming user interface library based on Vue.js
Certainly allow it, but provide a sane default, too. If you don't, people wiill be more likely to do something stupid than they would be otherwise.
Seylerius··on Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries
It seems like what3words is precisely as helpful as standard coordinates, with the exception that coordinates don't depend on a proprietary company.
Seylerius··on Launch HN: Lambda School (YC S17) – CS education that's free until you get a job
This is an awesome idea. What I'd really like to know, however, is if any of the existing loan options will accept this as schooling in order to loan a student money for living expenses. Some students already have a family, and thus they cannot crash at a flophouse.
Seylerius··on Possible routes for distributed anti-abuse systems
Constraint programming is an interesting model to discuss here. I've been looking into machine-generated constraints, and there's a lot of potential for transparency when you get into constraint-producing functions that also produce labels, and then go further up the abstraction ladder from there. Structured right, you can produce dynamic labeled matchers, especially if you build a UI tool for marking particular hateful elements of hate speech.
Seylerius··on Wycheproof – Tests that check cryptographic software for known weaknesses
This is a fascinating project. The hardest part of writing crypto software will always be avoiding the little mistakes, and every time we can bottle the understanding needed to detect some of them, we free cognitive labor for finding others. This is a necessary part of the future of crypto development. I tip my hat to the Wycheproof team!
Seylerius··on I'm giving up on PGP
The device could be something like a modified USB condom, but with more processing power. It would have to have all drivers locked unless a sensor verified that nothing was plugged into the suspicious end, and use a fundamentally limited set of drivers. On connection, it looks for any filesystems on the suspicious device, mounts them, and offers them up by proxy as filesystems to the host machine. Nice idea.
Seylerius··on A tool to make Windows builds reproducible
On the one hand, my knee-jerk reaction to this involves a meaningful amount of Windows-hate. In short: there is a tight limit to the amount of trust I can give to any build on a platform that I can't build.

On the other hand, reproducible builds are /important/. The better we can trust our tools and verify that they're exactly what we think they are, the less we need to worry about the security of our tools, and the more we can get on with /using them/.

In the end, despite enabling the continued use of a deeply proprietary and anti-freedom platform, this is a good thing.

Seylerius··on Intel Security True Key
Yet another reason why this is a horrible idea.
Seylerius··on Intel Security True Key
This is an adorably bad idea:

+ As fdik said above, you can't change your fingerprint or face easily, and it's always public

+ Face recognition and fingerprint scanning are not robust against spoofing — there are known ways to circumvent both

+ You can be compelled to authenticate a biometric without a warrant

Don't use biometrics as a password; use them as a username.

Seylerius··on Tell HN: Riseup.net fails to update canary; fingerprints deleted without notice
If "quarter" is defined as "3 months", we're officially just on the outside of a quarter since the last update — 3 months and 5 days, to be precise.