Hacker News Reader

aprescotton Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard? (2007)

The presentation on the vulnerability, from the two Microsoft employees, for those interested: http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf

Amusingly, from the PDF:

> WHAT WE ARE NOT SAYING:

> NIST intentionally put a back door in this PRNG

aprescotton Is there a backdoor in Truecrypt? (2010)

> Very few people compile the Windows binaries from source; it is exceedingly difficult to generate binaries from source that match the binaries provided by Truecrypt (due to compiler options, etc.)

I don't know if Tor considers itself hard to compile, but they recently announced the intent to avoid this issue through deterministic builds[1], so it was interesting to see this mentioned here for TrueCrypt.

[1]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/deterministic-builds-part-o...

aprescotton Poll: Would you vote online if you could?

I believe homomorphic encryption would address this.

aprescotton Web server in one line of bash

This seems to be straight from Wikipedia and then wrapped in a while loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcat#Setting_up_a_one-shot_w...

netcat's cool, but the post could've gone a bit further. If it's an intro "how to do this", maybe explain the moving parts for beginners?

aprescotton Single Tweet Sends Apple Shares Soaring

The difficulty of relying on the same name for separate ideas. :)

aprescotton Single Tweet Sends Apple Shares Soaring

Not necessarily refuting what you're saying, but here's an interesting take on "purely by chance" from Buffett, by analogy of coin flipping and getting a run of heads: http://www.tilsonfunds.com/superinvestors.html

aprescotton Single Tweet Sends Apple Shares Soaring

I'm not an investor but I've read both of Graham's main books. I don't think value investing in the Graham sense would lead you to a company as big as Apple, and certainly not with the company's stock as 75% of a portfolio!

aprescotton One Second on the Internet

You can at least look at the difference each second, when the figures update.

aprescotton I Wasn’t Prepared to Work

If the start of this post put you off because it sounds arrogant, please keep reading. It is an intentional setup to highlight the core point, which I think is in this paragraph:

But the environment matters a lot less than the fact that when I get home from work—which is a two hour commute each way (sorry, I can’t afford to live in downtown San Francisco)—I just feel like being mentally incapacitated. Occasionally I have a little spark of brilliance (relative, not absolute) that motivates me to write a short bit of code, but the code is never more than one or two hundred lines. It usually consists of some little trick.

That is: you cannot fight your day-to-day work — long-term — by working on your own stuff, when you get home after already spending 6-7 hours working and thinking in a particular way. The author tagged it "sad" for a reason.

aprescotton Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License

I don't think this is true. MIT explicitly allows sublicensing, meaning you can essentially just change the license on any derivative. The copyright notice needs to remain, though.

aprescotton The //* /*/ //*/ comment toggle trick

The trouble with this is that you now have to switch "commented" to "active" and vice versa, when I think the aim was to have a single-char switch (although the syntax is pretty horrible, to be honest).

aprescotton Soylent Month Three

This seems to be a common complaint, and the response seems to frequently be: you don't need to replace all your food intake. 50% of the time you eat you might find it tedious and boring, so you can leave the other 50% for pleasurable eating and cooking or whatever else you enjoy about non-clinical cuisine!

aprescotton Google Maps: “Treasure Map” mode

I followed this to a geometer's compass at 29.14,129.19, but there doesn't seem to be any other coordinates. (One before that was at 24.3775,124.1555.)

aprescotton Worst CAPTCHA Ever

Damn you, Poe! :(

aprescotton Worst CAPTCHA Ever

I don't really understand this approach. Won't the false positive rate be close to 100%? Humans are going to get the captcha right every time. If it's supposed to be a honeypot system, the input should be hidden from human users to avoid that problem.

aprescotton We are currently taking a DDoS attack and are working to mitigate

As I said, it's doable with scripts and whatnot, but transparent and built into git would be awesome. I see it as something you just set up on a remote repository server. No need to make N developers aware of it, or aware of the script, or resolving the script breaking, or having a ton of implementations of said script across different teams and companies.

Doesn't help if you use GitHub for issues, of course, but hey!

aprescotton We are currently taking a DDoS attack and are working to mitigate

You know what I want? Transparent failover somehow baked into git remotes.

    you <--> (X <--> Y)

If you push to and pull from X, and X should be unavailable, automatically start using Y. When X is pushed to, check with Y first to keep in sync. There are ways to push to multiple remotes by defining multiple remote URLs, but then it's a harder problem of dealing with downtime.

aprescotton An apology to open source

Unless an employee contract says otherwise, the default copyright position is that all work done is part of "work-for-hire".[1] There are a few reasons for this, and Joel Spolsky covered them pretty well.[2]

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

[2]: http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422/if-im-working-...

aprescotton An apology to open source

Speak to them and get an exemption, even on a case-by-case basis. Those ideas need to not die out, and you might find that being able to give life to them makes you simply a better employee.

aprescotton Show HN: Super simple static blog generator, Benjen

It maybe isn't simple enough for Joe Blow to use (yet?), but I started working on Serif[1] specifically to get away from having to manage the filesystem, without losing the simplicity of everything just being files. Having a web interface to edit content makes a big difference. (It still supports ignoring the interface entirely, while keeping certain things automatic like fine-grained timestamps.)

Jekyll, which it is similar to, had stagnated by the time I'd first put it up on GitHub, but it's probably closer in "philosophy" to Statamic[2].

[1]: https://github.com/aprescott/serif

[2]: http://statamic.com/

aprescotton Man steals $33 million from Australian casino in 'Ocean's Eleven'-esque heist

Not only that, in Ocean's Eleven they don't just place bets, they break into a vault, so the only similarity with the film seems to be that a camera feed was involved.

aprescotton Yes `yes no`

Here's something similar that is cumbersome to stop, but not so disastrous:

    yes 'yes yes&' | sh

aprescotton Credit Card Fees Take Effect Sunday

but the amount legally permissible will be between 1.5 percent and 4 percent of your purchase price

What's the reasoning behind a legal minimum? Why prevent a 1% fee?

aprescotton What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

For results you click on? Those will be handled independently from the /search?q= URL.

aprescotton What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

You can now use HTTPS on the www subdomain. Try https://www.google.com/search?q=%s as the URL to use. I consistently get this turned into https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&qscrl=1 which makes it easy enough to cut out the qscrl parameter for linking purposes.

aprescotton GitHub now has Issue Attachments

Would it not be useful to have test cases covering the broken behaviour (making it not specific to the issue, but rather stuff you could add in a commit)?

aprescotton I quit Twitter for a month and it changed my thinking about mostly everything.

The best part of this is of course the piece of generic template at the bottom. :)

If you want to read about what I've learned about the software business, leadership, and team-building, follow me on Twitter.

aprescotton Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking

In this case, Hanselman is the clear winner with three votes, whereas the other two candidates each have two votes. This is how our elections are held today.

This is dependent on the exact election taking place. With the US presidential elections, my understanding is that a plurality of electoral college votes is not enough to win, you need an actual majority. In the event of a simple plurality win with no majority, the result is decided by the House of Representatives (which may itself be tied).

aprescotton Ask HN: How do you write great sentences, paragraphs, or articles?

I think I'd agree with you.

One aspect that I think can sometimes be troubling, is whether it's fine to just have a blog that is a miscellaneous collection of stuff covering a variety of topics, versus a blog that is about X, Y or Z at the outset. I guess this is just "the blogger trap" ( http://www.marco.org/2009/04/05/avoiding-the-blogger-trap ), but I get the impression that a blog for a specific subject would have a better reception, versus "I'm just going to write about whatever" which might have less reliability, in a sense.

aprescotton Ask HN: How do you write great sentences, paragraphs, or articles?

3. Blog something every day. Doesn't matter what it is but spend at least 30 minutes writing about something.

Do you suggest it be a publicly readable "something" that gets blogged, or does it not matter if it's only for yourself, in your view?