Hacker News Reader

brianclementson Web Security – Client side certs

It's even hard for those trying to understand it (I'll speak for myself coming from a non-CS background), and that's not even the same battle as implementing all the separate parts in an efficient way day to day. I've worked on my own bash cli tool[1] for more efficient openssl usage and mentioned it here before.[2] Only after that project was I able to finally understand the concepts enough to use the thing at all.

[1]https://github.com/brianclements/pkictl

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10257074

brianclementson Ask HN: Is using your real name at HN a noob behaviour?

I vote no (clearly). Here's how I break down the reasoning:

In the HN community, non-constructive commenting is pretty strongly discouraged and moderated, so the urge to say things that normally would make someone want to hide their comments behind an anonymous name is pretty limited already.

So if nefarious activity is already not your goal, it simply becomes a personal preference. Why hide honest questions and discussion?

The only exception I can think of is if you're not well versed in the various knowledge domains that are popular here and don't want to give that fact away. I don't think that's a good reason at all though to be honest. I've felt this community be pretty accepting of honest questions and thoughtful input as long as you are honest with yourself as to what you're area of expertise is and you've done due diligence to the topic. If you're guessing something, you are going to be called out pretty quick. Don't ask for easily searchable facts, it's a waste of everyones time. Ask for opinions, experiences, etc.

brianclementson The best icon is a text label

I think the first sighting of the hamburger was actually from the flat/sans Google redesign of 2013. It popped up on Android first, then the web apps, then everywhere.

brianclementson The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Are you planning on releasing/revealing the code at all?

brianclementson The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

As a Workflowy user, I needed a way to do this and found it in the Colt[1] add-on for firefox. I use the following custom formats to insert tabs and newlines and it produces pretty slick bookmarks in Workflowy's bullet style for me.

Standard bookmark with optional quote via highlighting:

    %T %N %B %U %N %L %N %?[S{"%S"}]

Long form quote:

    via %U%N%L%N%N%?[S{"%S"}]

Long form quote with annotations:

    #note via %U%N%L%N%N%?[S{"%S"}]%N----%N

If I highlight your post and use the first template, it displays as:

    The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases | Hacker News
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739227
        12/18/2015, 10:04:11 AM
        "A friend showed me http://gethibou.com/ yesterday. Basically the idea seems to be that you bookmark a page, highlight what you want to remember and they use spaced-repetition to help you remember it. It might go along well with the PK that you created yourself."

[1]http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/colt

brianclementson The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements [pdf]

I always believed that if anyone is intellectually honest with themselves about creating human-level machine intelligence, they need to devote just as much time to making philosophical and psychological design choices about the overall system as they do the programming implementation of those choices.

brianclementson America’s FISA court names five lawyers as public advocates

So if they really did pick an "impressive" list, I'm curious what their incentive was for doing so? What is that selection process and who does it? Anyone know?

brianclementson Elon Musk: Only a Carbon Tax Will Accelerate the World's Exit from Fossil Fuels

I think it's a bootstrapping issue. What does one do first when they want an entirely new power ecosystem? I would argue it's wiser to start with the sexy public facing segment on the demand side (awesome looking electric sports cars) and have the public start this exact conversation and demand the infrastructure changes. Because it seems like a pretty steep climb for one to try to make this huge change simply by supply side first.

brianclementson I feel therefore I am

"A slew of books over the past two decades have proffered solutions to the ‘problem’ of consciousness. Among the best known are Christof Koch’s The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (2004); Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman’s A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (2000); Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999); and the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s bluntly titled Consciousness Explained (1991)."

Used it for the book list.

brianclementson Parental Incentives and Early Childhood Achievement

Paper at: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/gecc_final.pdf

brianclementson World on cusp of 'post-antibiotic era'

I really enjoyed this episode (as I do all the episodes really).

The key information they presented was that just because bacteria evolve quickly to modern forms of antibiotics, doesn't mean they don't also reduce to their tolerance to older (in this case, 1000 years older) antibiotic-like medicines that we would dismiss outright because it wasn't created in the modern age. Old medicine was very much trial and error, but it doesn't mean it can't also be effective or worth looking into deeper for ideas.

brianclementson Benefits of Sarcasm

This is anecdotal, sure, but I think worth noting. Of my youngest students that I teach, starting around 4 or 5, I've consistently noticed that the most developmentally advanced students in terms of language, patience, and focus are the ones that have very sarcastic and witty conversations with their parents and/or me. They are also always very pleasant to work with (sense of humor!). There are times where I am surprised the student even understands that what's being said isn't literal, but they do get it and will joke back.

I'm convinced this type of rhetoric forces an additional cognitive load on the child's brain that helps with context, perspective, and self-awareness which in my mind, are the absolute most powerful aspects of becoming an intelligent individual. This is sort of the basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as well and is the most important "gateway" concept when teaching anyone anything.

brianclementson Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything

The first part sounds like a play on the Picasso quote "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up"[1] and the second half sounds like something Ken Robinson said in his TED talk about creativity[2].

What's interesting about the underlying implications of all these quotes to me is that what makes a good physicist, a good artist, or a good anything, is the unabashed curiosity, a willingness to experiment without being stopped by fear of failure, and the state of play that one must be in to unleash creative approaches and new connections.

[1]http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/p/pablopicas169744.... [2]https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_cre...

brianclementson Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything

At it's core, creativity is play. Play is how we first learned to be creative, and that's the only state we can be in that achieves it.

brianclementson The Doomsday Invention: Will AI bring us utopia or destruction?

Just like any technology, it depends on the morals of those who invent it first and/or control it. The real question is this: should it be closed or open source?

brianclementson In L.A., One Way to Beat Traffic Runs into Backlash

I wouldn't call it terrible, life is nice in your car compared to say walking around in an east coast city during the winter if you have no car. Especially when it comes to grocery shopping. So I'd call it a trade off. Maybe SF is exempt from this a bit, but city living in a city that has some real weather (my experience was on the east coast) always struck me as very hard on it's human inhabitants compared to the car centric LA lifestyle.

brianclementson Xkcd Password Generator

The most important thing I realized when it comes to passwords was the classification into 2 types: strong passwords (keys, local login, local encryption, master passwords for password managers) which is best generated using the Xkcd method, and then the less obvious disposable passwords (all non-local usage, i.e. websites and other temporary need). For the later, I use SuperGenPass[1]. It ensures that 1) my passwords are not reused across sites and 2) they are strong without the need to remember them directly. Because SGP uses hashes, it is very easy to add counters to existing passwords/secret phrases and create a brand new password without much mental effort. I've outlined such a procedure in the issues[2]. Using counters in the "secret" field, I will probably never ever need to change my master passphrase.

I won't deny though that for mobile use, it's a bit cumbersome. The Android app is fine and free[3], and iOS app is a buck[4]. And overall it's a pain if you must login to sites frequently (ideally, using a native app reduces this greatly, login once until you manually logout).

It's also pretty confusing for non-technical people to get behind. I actually sent out an entire email blast to friends and family giving them my best attempt at an explanation, argument, and tutorial of how to use it. I don't think anyone did it.

So while the interface is kind of clumsy, the strategy is solid and I love knowing that I can use it.

[1]: http://www.supergenpass.com

[2]: https://github.com/chriszarate/supergenpass/issues/40#issuec...

[3]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.staticfre...

[4]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/supergenpass/id451606360?mt=...

brianclementson The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity [pdf]

I went on a google quest about this topic. Mapping my way through postscript, file encoding, pdf, xml, json. I eventually found my way onto a format that was right under my nose all along that kind of does all this. epub! Can extract to plain text, web, pdf, view natively, it's comprised of layers that you can use or not use, etc. Submitted it as it's own topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563472

brianclementson Assembly is shutting down December 6, 2015

>"I think the idea has a chance one day but it needs time to grow organically, I don't think it can work as a VC backed company that is expected to grow however many percent month on month..."

I think that is the key. The open source process just works on a much slower time frame then what is required of what was pretty much a VC business model.

>"...if they had built the platform and then had their employees focused on leading projects, being the passionate leaders projects need and giving the community"

I do think a platform like this could work, they would have to incorporate what is essentially a match making service between founders and the existing open source projects. Once a project finds a critical mass of clarity, it gets infused with purpose and direction by a founder.

brianclementson The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity [pdf]

Everyone is biased to some extent by their own fields of study, and as the saying goes, to a person with a hammer, every problem is a nail. Since AI fields have long been incubated by people in the software fields, it becomes a language/data/algorithm problem. And not that those things aren't important, they definitely are a piece of the puzzle. But ask them more philosophical, pedagogical, or creativity based questions, and they are easily stumped. You need to know what your trying to emulate! Or at least have a philosophical view on what consciousness or creativity is first.

I've long imagined what a software spec would look like for one trying to build an AI. I imagine it would be equal parts technical and philosophical.

I personally think more AI firms and researchers need to permanently employ professional artists, teachers, and creative types. But perhaps I too may be biased ;)

brianclementson The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity [pdf]

I think the only way for everyone to get what they really want is to separate the "view" from the data. You can pack a lot of metadata, links, binary data (pictures) into a standardized and compressed format, then you can allow all the various mediums (web, desktop view, in-app text only, in-app pictures only, etc.) to create their own support/plugins for accessing that data package. Ship one package, view everywhere. And the plugins can be made for that medium safely from scratch. They can even simplify/allow/disallow certain categories of info as needed (allow text, disable links, don't view pictures) so that the data morphs to the needs of the medium/plugin.

addendum: I would add that mediums are usually just incidental and necessary means to get to content. Why force everyone to adopt a medium (adobe binaries) to get to the real focus? The content? Instead, just package the content, and people are great and finding their own paths to it via plugins if the interface and code is open and standardized.

brianclementson Complex problem made simple sends computer scientists wild

I agree too, if I was allowed to editorialize I would have sterilized it.

brianclementson What causes autism? Environmental risks are hard to identify

This research suggests a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental factors: https://www.autismspeaks.org/node/110641

brianclementson Gmail, We Need to Talk

I've referred to it in conversations as movement vs progress: things that progress you forward toward a goal, or simply movement which could be in circles, backwards, side to side, hand waving etc.

brianclementson Google News Lab

Looks like all the same tools they've always had available, but now with a nice front page to access them all.

brianclementson Curio: A Modern Library for Reliable Concurrent I/O Using Python Coroutines

In other words, newmotors, just like you learned how to deal with paragraph and word minimums in school, on HN, you need to fluff your positive gratitude in a bit more specificity to match the vernacular: Why do you think it's cool? How does it positively affect whatever you are working on or what your interests are in?

brianclementson Why 'Follow Your Passion' Is the World's Worst Career Advice

I think Elizabeth Gilbert had a better take on the topic:

"I am a big advocate for the pursuit of curiosity. You've maybe heard me talk about this before? We are constantly being told to pursue our passions in life, but there are times when passion is a TALL ORDER, and really hard to reach. In seasons of confusion, of loss, of boredom, of insecurity, of distraction, the idea of "passion" can feel completely inaccessible and impossible. In such times, you are lucky to be able to get your laundry done (that sometimes feels as high as you can aim) and when someone tells you to follow your passion, you want to give them the middle finger. (Go ahead and do it, by the way. But wait till their back is turned, out of civility.)

But curiosity, I have found, is always within reach.

Passion is a tower of flame, but curiosity is a tiny tap on the shoulder — a little whisper in the ear that says, "Hey, that's kind of interesting…"

Passion is rare; curiosity is everyday.

Curiosity is therefore a lot easier to reach at at times than full-on passion — and the stakes are lower, easier to manage.

The trick is to just follow your small moments of curiosity. It doesn't take a massive effort. Just turn your head an inch. Pause for a instant. Respond to what has caught your attention. Look into it a bit. Is there something there for you? A piece of information?

For me, a lifetime devoted to creativity is nothing but a scavenger hunt — where each successive clue is another tiny little hit of curiosity. Pick each one up, unfold it, see where it leads you next.

Small steps.

Keep doing that, and I promise you: The curiosity will eventually lead you to the passion.

And that'll be the end of boredom." [1]

[1] http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/one-of-the-greatest-quotes-o...

brianclementson The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad

Thaler comes from the behavioral economics world, and I'd say his work on "nudging", and even the term "nudge" predates the dark patterns site. His book nudge is from 2008[1], while the DNS info for dark patterns shows creation in 2010. His mentioning of the UX examples was probably a brief crossover example between worlds that occurred to him to highlight an instance, but I'd say it didn't occur to him to scour the software development UX world for existing terminology because, well, it's probably not familiar to him at all.

Popularity on a Google search of a software term is of course going to win the popularity contest, it's the Internet. Do the same search of economic journals and you'll probably find the bias toward "nudge" over "dark patterns" in an extreme way. Different ideas proliferate on different mediums.

I do strongly recommend checking out some of the Freakonomics podcasts[2] and blog posts that involve Thaler. Extremely interesting and useful across many disciplines!

[1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/102715/richar...

[2] http://freakonomics.com/?s=thaler&x=0&y=0

brianclementson Breaches, traders, plain text passwords, ethical disclosure and 000webhost

Probably right. But wouldn't action like that only have mild effect on the value of the stolen data anyway? There were no other announcements that came along with the forced password reset, so most people not knowing any better would change their passwords for 000webhost only and move on. But isn't the real value in cross-referencing multi-use passwords on other sites? I would imagine that only a very small percentage of 13 million users that are met with a forced password reset would proceed to then change that password everywhere it's used.

Fun thought experiment: What would you do differently if you were to actually set up a front operation solely for the gathering of password/email credentials from unsuspecting users? Would you make it stupid simple for people to hack such as 000webhost? Thereby dodging blame, or would you just leak the data in secret in obfuscated chunks so as not to give away the source?

brianclementson Breaches, traders, plain text passwords, ethical disclosure and 000webhost

After reading all that, am I the only one who thinks that sites with security practices that egregious aren't simply fronts or traps for mining this kind of information?