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blintzing

72 karma · joined June 30, 2015

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blintzing··on OnlyKey: Open-Source Alternative to YubiKey
If the device doesn't have a secure element, how can anyone take it seriously as a strong root of trust? The page lists several recent attacks on secure element, but that's not really enough to convince me that no secure element is needed.
blintzing··on The State of Rust on Haiku
There’s a nice Stanford class I took called CS 140E that had students write an OS for the Raspeberry Pi in Rust. There are actually some benefits to using Rust at this level, though it can be a bit cumbersome at times.

Check it out here: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs140e/

blintzing··on Dilbert: Startup idea
Another great startup/app development Dilbert:

http://dilbert.com/strip/2011-02-12

blintzing··on Flexbox in 5 minutes
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/

CSS-Tricks has a pretty handy guide, too. If I need a quick reference when developing, that and MDN are my go to.

blintzing··on ‘Sometimes in one place and sometimes in another’: Agnes Cooper in Southwark, 1619
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd

The Latin librae, solidi, and denarii became pounds, shillings and pence.

There are 12 pence in a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound.

So, "£6 30s 4d" is (6)+(30/20)+(4/240)= £ 7.51

It's rather odd that such an exact amount was given, which is what the sentence points out.

blintzing··on The many ways of parallel computing with Julia [video]
A big thing Julia has going for it is that it plays nicely with Fortran. Lots of legacy numerical computing code has already been written in Fortran, so it's a big draw for some companies.
blintzing··on Who owns copyright to Deep Dream images?
If I write a computer program (say a Processing sketch) that generates an image, who owns the copyright to the image?
blintzing··on Google+ Photos Is Shutting Down
How many grandmas (or even casual Google users) knew that though? Do they read Google's blog?

(Also, not to be picky, but I see no mention of Google+ Photos (let alone its status as "deprecated legacy") on the announcement blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/picture-this-fresh-ap...)

blintzing··on Google+ Photos Is Shutting Down
Isn't it funny that we're even having this conversation? That Google can offer two products, differentiated by a single character (Google+ Photos and Google Photos), with few obvious indicators as to which I should use?

It's confusing to me, but trying to explain it to my mom is absolutely impossible. I wonder whether the average user even knows there's a difference between the two. It's a perfect example of unnecessary redundancy.

blintzing··on Will Our Understanding of Math Deteriorate Over Time?
> Stuff like prime numbers have eaten up millions of brain hours of highly intelligent people

I think the idea that brilliant minds have been 'wasted' on prime numbers is nonsense. Don't 'highly intelligent people' have the right to pursue what interests them, and even disregarding that, won't they do their best work on problems that interest them?

Even further, is learning anything that is not practical or useful a 'waste'? Certainly not. Calculus might not be of the utmost importance career-wise for an aspiring musician, but learning it helps us think in new ways.

> The vast majority of "useless" mathematics really do turn out to be useless.

That's fine! So long as we strike gold every once in a while (cryptography, which is pretty essential to the internet functioning as anything more than a bulletin board), math is doing it's job.

blintzing··on Will Our Understanding of Math Deteriorate Over Time?
But sometimes the connection between "beautiful art project" and "practical tools" is totally unexpected. We often invest time in projects that seem simply like "beautiful art", and then much later stumble upon something practical.

I think a great example of this is cryptography. The foundations of it come from number theory (prime numbers, modular arithmetic, elliptic curves), but the subject of number theory, before the advent of computing, was possibly the most useless kinds of mathematical 'art' that could have existed. I imagine it was the mathematical equivalent of frolicking in the fields.

Mathematicians explored Fermat's little theorem starting in 1640, but they didn't do it because they knew it'd be useful several hundred years later in RSA. They did it simply because math is worth exploring in itself.

Even if you don't subscribe to the idea that we should pursue math for math's sake, history shows us that it's very difficult to know what parts of math will be useful to humanity, especially hundreds of years later. Since people work best on what they find interesting, mathematicians should continue exploring the topics that most interest them, because we really can't say with any certainty what will prove useful (or even essential) to future generations.

blintzing··on Datomic Best Practices
I was very interested, but pretty disappointed that Datomic is completely closed source. Maybe this is a little mean, but what could be more "simple" than being able to read, understand, and modify the database you rely on?

Neo4j, though marketed differently, is a similar approach (but the Community version is GPLv3 and Enterprise is AGPLv3). The Cypher query language is declarative in a similar way to Datomic - the biggest missing feature is transactions.

blintzing··on United declares 4-digit pin login and lack of SSL “functioning as designed”
Is he perhaps joking? Even a brief read of the Wikipedia article makes it clear that NP-hard isn't a mathematical expression in which 'N' stands for a number...
blintzing··on This Industry is Fucked
How is what the author described "one pronounced incident"? One email or IRC message could be a "pronounced incident". What she describes is clearly much worse, and points to a deep problem - not an one-off "incident".