1,925 karma · joined March 22, 2010
I agree. I had plenty of strange abstractions and crutches when starting out learning Japanese, and starting in romaji was absolutely fine. While the post wouldn't benefit me now, starting out any useful mental shortcuts to producing Japanese would have been most welcome.
Trigeminal Neuralgia is one of them. The condition is just... pain. Lot's of pain. More pain than anyone should ever have to go through. When I have episodes, I often feel awe that it's even possible for someone to feel such an incredible amount of pain.
Challenges in life help to shape you, make you who you are. But I do feel that this particular challenge was one where it would have been nice to have learned the same lessons some other way. I hope sincerely that treatment based on this research can help.
I did the challenges years ago when you had to email in for them. Since then I can count at least five occasions where having done the challenges has allowed me to identify vulnerabilities in real-world crypto. I was usually able to recommend fixes that in theory made those codebases more secure. This is keeping in mind that I'm at best a hobbyist security researcher and just barely a professional developer.
I think there are about seven or eight people on Earth that I would trust to securely implement cryptography in their code. For the rest of us I'm happy with doing the best we can with libraries that make that easy (NaCl), and otherwise trying to find ways to break the thing. The cryptopals challenges help you do that, so that's where I'd recommend a developer start.
Since you program too, do you think there is much crossover? Some analogous form of practice that makes you a more effective coder?
I work with threedaymonk and the reason that he came across this way is that he is a remarkably nice, well-intentioned, polite person.
I should probably point out that "maximising my billable time" isn't really an important goal for me as a freelancer, so we're likely talking about a different business model. You'll hear this a lot from patio11 and tptacek, but overwhelmingly, my goal is to provide as much business value to my clients as possible and charge accordingly.
You don't necessarily have to position yourself as a content marketing/CRO/Security/Sandwich-making consultant to do this, just find a way to make or save your clients buckets of cash and you can charge them whatever you want.
*: That makes me sound like some sort of rockstar freelancer, but in reality I'm a boringly average Rails developer. I get and keep clients by working really hard on sales and treating existing, long-term clients like my family's financial security depends on them (hint: it does!).
Snarky but true: implementing this was roughly as hard as reading a comment by tptacek about billing weekly, deciding that I bill weekly, and then telling all existing clients and future clients that I now bill weekly.
There are some types of non-muslims (open apostates) that would be putting themselves in real physical danger by entering your average mosque in Islamabad and praying. We have a local ex-muslims meetup in London and stories of threats + actual physical violence from family and "community" are more common than not.
It also goes without saying that if there's no women's section and you have a vagina, you're shit out of luck.
[0]: Sakana-tei 11 Maddox Street, London W1S 2QF
I make my money primarily by building software for small businesses and startups. I charge about £2500 a week for this, and am booked about 50-75% of the time. This is supplemented by the occasional workshop where I teach developers about web application security through the lens of RoR applications, which net me about £5k a pop depending on how well they sell. I have one employee who I'm training up to take on some client work for me so that I can focus on drumming up new business and building products that will provide a sustainable income that isn't linked to the amount of time we put in.
> I do work part time as a developer in a start up and can't help feeling i'm building a dream for someone else.
Some people are bitten by this bug and some aren't. I know perfectly good career developers who are content to turn up, do a good days work and get a regular pay check at the end of every month. If you ever do start your own business and go out on your own, you too will long for the days when you could do the same and have guaranteed monthly cashflow.
> but i can't help feeling that the current university paradigm of work hard, good grades, get a job seems to be bit of a misnomer unless you're happy building things to make others wealthy whilst you earn £30,000 a year?
In this market, after a few years you'll be doubling to tripling that salary. I know a guy who's been on the job two years and cleared £65K. That's not at a city IB, just a plain old startup. It was only a matter of time before London developer salaries caught up with what you might get in the states.
Git has plenty of crypto in it, namely GPG (for signing tags), SSH and SSL (for transport). Using off-the-shelf crypto like this doesn't strike me as "inventing your own crypto".
> people assume it is resistant to malicious attack
Exactly what's the threat model here? I can't conceive of a malicious attack that exploits gits reliance of on SHA1 as a message digest that doesn't also require write access to your filesystem.
I think your argument stems from the fact that SHA1 is deemed insecure and therefore anything associated with it must also be insecure. As I said in the previous thread, git doesn't use SHA1 to make any of the guarantees that cryptography is typically used to make.
It's usage is to prevent accidental corruption in the everyday usage of git (the sort that mercurial appears to have been prone to in the past), not to protect against a malicious adversary with write access to the filesystem.
https://watsi.org/profile/d619049fdda6-mathayo
I put in a $100 this morning, let's get little baby Mathayo's head fixed :)