Hacker News Reader

X4on [SECURITY] [DSA 2826-1] denyhosts can be abused to block any IP

Users of fail2ban shouldn't lay back, it hits you too [1]:

     logger -p auth.warning -t 'sshd[123]' 'Illegal user user1 from 1.2.3.4'

[1] http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ_german#Was_muss_i...

X4on A Slashdot comment on Google Fiber "no servers" clause (2012)

Why is it illegal, that's the question! It does not harm anyone!

Ok, but one doesn't need to fully own the cable, to run a startup's server on it. They can forbid SMTP servers, ok, but HTTP etc. should be allowed.

You mean I need my own hacker satellite to own it? Even then, how would you connect your satellite to the network?

X4on Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

Okaaayyy... Can I buy NAD+? Or is the magic in using sIRNA[1] to inject NAD+ into the pathway?

I have read on Wikipedia that our body can generate it.

Moneyquote: "In organisms, NAD+ can be synthesized from simple building-blocks (de novo) from the amino acids tryptophan or aspartic acid. In an alternative fashion, more complex components of the coenzymes are taken up from food as the vitamin called niacin. Similar compounds are released by reactions that break down the structure of NAD+. These preformed components then pass through a salvage pathway that recycles them back into the active form. Some NAD+ is also converted into nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADP+); the chemistry of this related coenzyme is similar to that of NAD+, but it has different roles in metabolism." [2]

And: "This NAD+ is carried into the mitochondrion by a specific membrane transport protein, since the coenzyme cannot diffuse across membranes." Link: http://www.jbc.org/content/281/3/1524 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16291748

I can buy Tryptophan [3] and D-Aspartic Acid (DAA) [4] pretty easily and legaly. Would an overdose in Tryptophan have the same effect? UPDATE: http://aminoacidstudies.org/l-tryptophan/ Yes, Tryptophan overdose is bad!

I'm sorry, I'm pretty good at absorbing all kinds of scientific materials, but I am really not familiar with all the "body science". That's why I'm asking you, if you know what would happen with regular Tryptophan overdose. I know that DAA can destroy Neurons when overdosed and should only be used according to the RDA.

I don't buy that it's sooo expensive. That's either because researcher's monthly wage is astronomers, or the lab equipment they think is needed is too expensive. I am sure it can be done much much cheaper without the advantages of mass production. You and I currently synthesize the NAD+ thing for free!! The problem they solved, should be repeatable with cheaper equipment or even at home. I would like to have a cat, dog, hamsters or fish that live longer. (Parrot's already live pretty long, but I guess they'd be funnier with more NAD too) --

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_interfering_RNA

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinamide_adenine_dinucleoti...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryptophan

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-aspartic_acid

X4on Show HN: I started a repo for sharing algorithm implementations

That can be done and should be done. In IRC #rosettacode on freenode and ask if someone of the admins will add: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:WikimediaGitCheckout or if you can contribute something to their wiki's sourcecode. It IS GPL, so you will be able to retrieve the code! :)

X4on Show HN: I started a repo for sharing algorithm implementations

https://github.com/jbrownlee/CleverAlgorithms/tree/master/sr...

X4on REST API Alternatives

checking out the rfc. cool, thanks!

X4on REST API Alternatives

That sounds like an amazing experience you had. I can feel the pain! Had to write a custom compiler and backend and vm for it in school. And none of us had experience in C or Assembler. The compiler created a custom bytecode assembly that the VM had to run. Then another group made an FGPA and CPU that runs the code natively. Our prof's hobby was to write an OS for that board. But somehow we managed to do it. I still wow, when I look at the code. It makes me think.. how did I write that?

X4on REST API Alternatives

wow, I'm amazed by your responses. Kudos to HN & I wish all of you "Happy New Year and a Merry Christmas" (⌐■_■)-♉

X4on A Slashdot comment on Google Fiber "no servers" clause (2012)

It makes their monopoly only stronger. So to say, for any innovator who wants to use his OWN Internet connection to host whatever s/he deems good, it is prohibited by Google. Ok, that's unfair!

X4on REST API Alternatives

You probably never heard about these, but these are the best for Binary protocols. If you know something else, or better please post.

BEEP: http://www.aspl.es/vortex/

BSON: http://bsonspec.org/ (Binary Json)

X4on Single assignment C

Oh My God.. I tried to learn APL for about two days some years ago and all I gorked was just basic stuff. Then I found out J and recommended that to our APL loving Prof. who converted from his about $2000 expensive prorietary APL symbolic minfu to the free J alternative. I could write much more with J, but Julia still feels more natural.

I've not made any speed comparisons, but maybe you can give APL, J, Julia and SAC a bench? That would be neat! A simple hello world like example, for example using the same FFT algorithm, or "addition" loop would be enough.

X4on Netflix uses FreeBSD 9.0

The morale of the society and demand makes one or the other successful. You and I feel that companies today, that means 2013, have finally decided to try OSS seriously and this is something what other companies imitate. Monkey style, the first adopter's success is giving clue for those afraid of trying new things. The corporate culture is not too big to fail too and I believe that hirings of new or younger managers like Marissa Meyer will help to kill corporate culture to some degree, even if it's not where we would like to have it. To be precise, making corporate culture an open culture. One that shares, despite the cost and risk of monkey style adaption by their opponents. This is what I'm waiting for. (Yes I know what she did, but it's nonetheless getting better for Yahoo, or hopefully so)

That means, for developers who build a startup using the XaaS business model, only MIT or BSD works really well. While LGPL and GPL may work, but require legal steps, where there is no money for lawyers and such. These startups cannot compete against the corporate enterprise market, like Google for example. And according to the theory of "The rich get richer", this will not change, unless someone clever enough, uses system theory to subvert and defeat the corporate culture, or the whole society backs this idea, ie. to stop the inevitable destruction of the remaining planetary resources. Guess why SpaceX wants to mine asteroids. It's not that resources are rare or something, they are simply rare, because someone with the budget reserved a large amount for himself, to control the market. Yes this is virtually a power Google also has, it could make the barrier of entry for any startup so hard, that those who want succeed need to be financed by them (through acquiring) or by visionary investors. Please don't get this as Google hate, it's just a logical observation and I am also doing human errors from time to time. When you find a logical flaw, I'm curious to discuss that with you.

X4on Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder – Review

SiVal, your comment makes all of us at HN expect that every Article has such a TL;DR

anyhow, thanks for summing it up. Saves quite some time, when people do this. I am really glad, when there is an article where the top-voted comment says, "you must read all of this, really" or something with along that lines or sentient. Because that's the main reason HN exists, to provide resources that ARE valuable for y-combinator people and their friends.

X4on Snowden ally Appelbaum claims his Berlin apartment was invaded

That IS Guerilla Strategy then. Crazy. I hope he has videos about it and publishes these. He should install a 6th Alarm that shoots an electrified fisher-net and can shoot with a taser gun, in case the owner is detected too near.

It's interesting that I learned what guerilla strategy is from a robot in a science fiction movie.

Scene from the movie "Red Planet" from the year 2000: http://youtu.be/GltSAI25gaA?t=5s

Story in this scene: The reason why the AMEE didn't kill the Astronauts, was because it wanted leave a wounded back, to demotivate the moral of the others, so that they choose worse strategies to fight against AMEE's plans. One of the Astronauts asked, why didn't she kill all of us and only wound him. The other guy said: It's because she knows all about "Guerilla Strategy" and she applies that to reach her goals. She punctuated him, so that he will die, but slowly, which is to break our moral.

X4on How Dogecoin changed my perspective on cryptocurrency

Just asking, but isn't there a flaw in the logic and that this is actually not a one-way, but a two-way system? Like folowing:

* TWTR → USD → BTC → DOGE → MYCOMPANY *

* MYCOMPANY → DOGE -> BTC → USD → TWTR

X4 on The React tutorial rewritten in Om

It's not exactly locatable at one location, but you can read about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliometrics to see this analysis pattern used.
PS: It took me 2hours to remember the word Cliometrics. I usually cannot forget things, but when I do, I remember the beginning of a word. Which is totally frustrating, however I suddenly remembered it.

X4 on The React tutorial rewritten in Om

Yes, exactly. I just reflect about the thinking in react and propose that there is a pattern from past to today. Say that language controls our thinking and believe that TDA and Graph computation can solve these problems.
I would like to add that all of this is highly similar to AI and rebuilding our brains. Because those are also highly networked units that can topologically independently compute in parallel and in batches.
What all of this leads us to is compression or entropy and the moral of the story is that entropy is the function of state.

X4 on The React tutorial rewritten in Om

I see a recurring pattern in here! We all started seeing mixing markup, style and logic before 2000. Pre 2000 was ruled by functional programming and the decade before was ruled by procedual programming.
Then we rapidly started to "encapsulate", when OOP boomed. Now "packaging" is the main problem every programming language and OS has to solve. Today we end up implementing lightweight packages, so called components and we think it's a new idea to use statemachines to keep the interdependent component's state coherent. This idea was influenced by the boom of Interpred programming languages. Although 40 years ago, there were programs that only focused on allowing "components", which were "pluggable" modules back then, to be controlled by the DataFlow Pattern [1].
To formalize the main problem of the HTML,CSS and Javascript abstractions, blended into the DOM, we have to recognize that Data (Input) and UI (Output) are bound to States (Data Flows [2]). A solution to these problem is to use the FBP paradigm [3] in the browser engine and to implement the UI as an array of graphs. Usage of vectors allow the use of highly advanced mathematical solutions to be used to apply a optimization much easier than it is possible today, without rewriting the browser engine. For instance creating a UI now just means dragging and dropping items into a pane, which creates a matrix of number sequences that have relations to each other, yes basically a graph.
Because the UI and State is deterministic (except for Networks protocols!?), we can use the Knaster–Tarski theorem [4] to solve such DataFlow problems. Using Topological Data Analysis (TDA), we can even get deep level insight into UI & usage patterns that evolve and recur.
"Control of the language we use can be used to restrict our thinking. I find that this pattern is proving George Orwell's Newspeak [6] is similar to programming languages today.
What do I know, so please correct me when you think that there is no such pattern, or when you think something is wrong in what I said. So that others will profit from it.
--
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow_programming
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knaster%E2%80%93Tarski_theorem
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages_b...
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

X4 on The React tutorial rewritten in Om

hah, I just wanted to post this! Dear catshirt, you were faster =) I am really curious on the differences between om an pump, do you already have any practical experience with any of these, so you can share your insight?
tbh. I found out about pump, by reading the github issues in OM.

X4 on The Future of JavaScript MVCs

Why don't you precompute the space things use, including the text that is drawn using a matrix? You could easily calculate the baseline of anything by just doing matrix multiplications then.
However, I think you would still end up using a hack. The general idea of creating a replacement for the DOM has bugged me for a while too. It is a great to replace the DOM completely by a statemachine, I think. We need a New Document Model that supports "Batch Operations", is "Stateful" and uses the latest best performing algorithms published to do so.
Components are the CORRECT way, I fully agree with the facebook team here.
It seems that there is one guy who ALREADY DID all those things and replaced the DOM by something that's more akin to 2013's technology requirements. Link: http://www.nidium.com/

X4 on I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its premise as flawed

I have personally talked to a few granddads who were alive at that time, many years ago. I wanted to hear from them, if and why they supported the nazi regime. That's because as a kid, when you hear these things, you're getting suspect of your own neighbors.
However, when I talked to those granddads, it became very clear that they knew what was going on. They not only had a sharp memory of what happened, but also tried to make their ideology and actions appear harmless. It's always the same story. "I had no idea what was going on. And what could I have done, even if I knew it?"
The stinky story falls apart, when they start explaining how it was back then. After an hour of talk you get the sense that they try to defend something that is simply illogical. Most Germans today, don't agree with any part of the NS-Period, but cannot get rid of their own hate against Jews, colored people or different people. You've recently read this story about the guy who got him self arrested, right? Try to suit up like a Jew, a Black, a Gay or any other enemy of the old regime and you will really understand how it is. On Halloween you can go out as one without looking weird, but even though the setup is artificial, I'm sure you will get reactions that you wouldn't expect and from people from whom you wouldn't expect it.
Once a disabled man knocked our door and asked for a signature. He tried to use sales tactics to get his signature, but when I found out what it was for, which he strongly tried to hide, I was shocked. He blatantly tried to get our votes for their nazi party. That's not a year ago. Of course, I told him to go the f* out of here and that he should read a book, which explains how his own party burned people like him alive, and then think about his political views.

X4 on I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its premise as flawed

that's a lie.

X4 on I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its premise as flawed

That sounds like Game Theory, although much much more serious. The problem in this case is that it's Game Theory without (Social) System Theory cannot give an answer to this question. To me such an act would be, as you stated, the "End of Faith".

X4 on Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes

You surely don't mean total silence like in the article, but in a relatively silent room. I can imagine that you need the silence to build the worlds and for sensemaking, when you read.
The mode your brain works in the office and when reading a book are entirely different. You can visually, emotionally, auditory, or sensually build worlds just using your imagination which is fed by reading the words and sentences of your book. In the office, you can at most have a daydream though. What you do at the office is switching between multiple inputs and silence would only intensify individual signals. That's why many people like to hear music or prefer a little more noise to reduce the intensity the inputs have on you. By input I mean each task you do, including observing things, selecting and choosing the actions you want to do, plan in advance, keep a record and order of things, imagine future action, or dream about outcomes. and situations

X4 on Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes

I thought the same, but don't forget about the sounds of your laptop you usually don't hear. And your heartbeat, stomach, all the abdominal noises, even your own breathing noise will start to annoy you. Let's exclude the deprivation from any physical or social contact (ok, admitted. for hackers that's maybe not such a big problem). I don't think that wifi works in such a chamber.

X4 on RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis

Without taking party, I am deeply impressed at an increasing rate and with honest respect to the ingenuity of the research that's coming from Tel Aviv, Israel and from Switzerland. There is no other country except the USA which makes such leaps in technological progress. That's my honest image of the research. I'm personally reading many of their publications and from various other journals too.

X4 on The NSA: An Inside View

Thank you :)

X4 on WhatsApp on your computer: Pidgin plugin

Yes there is a pidgin web-client, I can't recall the URL though. Sorry.

X4 on WhatsApp on your computer: Pidgin plugin

Yes it still does. It's stupid and and I don't know why they didn't fix it. :(

X4 on CSS Variables in Firefox Nightly

I also hoped for a macro style color function that just text-replaces all occurrences of color: hackernews with #ff6600 when you define hackernews as def: hackernews, #ff6600; That would allow total mumbo jumbo style CSS-Sheets that look like Java or C++, if the authors would go that crazy..
However, I think that just copying how mixins and variables work in SCSS work into the CSS4 spec would do wonders. I'm 100% for it