Hacker News Reader

I found your issue about this: https://github.com/justwatchcom/gopass/issues/462

It sounds serious, for sure, and this software deals with sensitive data, so that is important to keep in mind (though, it versions with Git, so that's a nice safety). I just want to point out how responsive they were in your issue: it appears there was a fix merged in less than a day later!

gburton Gopass – 1k stars later

I've had zero issues and found the team to be very responsive on Github. I worked with the team to help spec. out the XKCD password generating feature and it was done literally a week later. I've become a bit of an evangelist for the tool!

gburton Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

Without making any judgement on whether it is a useful transactional "currency," I hear this sort of thing a lot, but I don't understand it. Surely either BTC is a good transaction mechanism or it isn't and the rampant increase in value is largely irrelevant.

You could convert USD to BTC and buy something while maintaining exactly the same held balance, no?

gburton New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

No one said it has to raise revenue. This whole process could be revenue neutral. Give direct cash injections to the bottom 20% to offset the cost. This is about incentives, not revenue.

gburton Never Completed Game

  230809200519
  152120080518
  140709011420

Hint: Letters.

gburton Never Completed Game

That number has some significant meaning. You'll have to Google it, the author expects exact answers.

gburton Never Completed Game

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gburton Super Mario 64 Online Release [video]

How do people do things like this? They manage to achieve pretty sophisticated modifications to compiled games without access to the source code. Is it really just disassembly and careful low-level work?

gburton Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

These seems likely to me too, but until someone demonstrates it, I'm less certain. GANs are notoriously unstable and it is still quite hard to produce useful models with them.

gburton Ravens OL John Urschel, 26, retires abruptly, two days after CTE study

That same player is a PhD candidate in mathematics. I think that's important.

gburton Ravens OL John Urschel, 26, retires abruptly, two days after CTE study

This is a strong testament to the value of the research. The researchers may have saved this guy's brain, if not his life.

gburton Petition to open source Flash

Preservation and reduction of bit rot is a great reason to open source Flash or ensure there is always a definitive version available, even if all the browsers should ban it because it is a messy, unperformant security liability.

gburton Petition to open source Flash

This is a really short-sighted perspective. Letting Flash die would be a serious contributor to bit rot. Archival of all the historical content created in Flash is a respectable goal even if we should _never use Flash again for anything new_.

gburton How to create a private Ethereum network

I read the article and he doesn't really answer why this is beneficial. If you have an arbiter of truth, isn't it just a really inefficient database?

gburton Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator (2009)

How could rolling dice be "more random" by any meaningful definition of randomness than random.org? Rolling dice is a pretty trivial physics problem with really hard to observe parameters... parameters that the machine reduces the dimensionality of considerably.

gburton EPA: Pruitt will launch program to 'critique' climate science

This makes the naive assumption that the people evaluating the conversation are rigorous logicians who are not moved by emotional appeals and bad logic that confirms what they want to believe.

gburton How much your computer can do in a second

The `bcrypt` question seems out-of-place. It has a configurable cost parameter, so almost any of the answers is correct.

gburton Research Debt

This is a really awesome perspective.

gburton SEC Rejects Rule Change for Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Fund [pdf]

Yes. Evidence of early releases of this sort of information shows up in market data regularly.

gburton Google Goes Public with Unpatched Microsoft Edge and IE Vulnerability

The distinction is game theoretical. The fact this is a process that has no exception sets the standard and doesn't allow more "costly" bugs to be ignored knowing that they will continue to embargo anyway.

This process and the costly signal associated ensures better behaviour from vendors in the long run.

gburton What should you think about when using Facebook?

Instead of transmitting obviously fake data, record the genuine data of other users (randomly and anonymously, of course) and retransmit it. It poisons the association while being much more difficult to fuzz out.

gburton New Study Finds Performance-Enhancing Drugs for Chess

For myself, I usually find that at some point (sometimes quite early) I find no gain in moving along the time-quality frontier.

Specifically, I find that an extra unit of time would seem to provide no change in quality. I think this might imply that I've "maxed out" and any need to move along the frontier would need to be met with a requisite increase in ability.

gburton Blueprint – A React UI toolkit for the web

  Blueprint is an open source project developed at Palantir.

gburton It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

This unfortunate obsession with new and shiny in the Valley is why we have to learn lessons like the benefits of relational databases over and over. Most of the new stuff isn't improved, it is simply different.

gburton How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

You should put an email address in your profile if you're serious about acting as routing service for "lost" GC support.

gburton GitLab Major Security Update for CVE-2016-4340

Yes.

gburton ‘Utopia for Realists?’ – a review

How do supporters of the UBI deal with the real estate valuation problem? It seems that assets that are highly immobile and have elasticity that is directly proportional to income would eat up all or almost all of the transfer.

It is possible that there is a counterbalancing effect of people being able to live outside of the big city, but I still suspect a form of "minimum rent" would arise in the case there was a UBI and the whole transfer would end up consolidating with a few landlords.

gburton NES classic ‘Punch-Out’ has an Easter egg that went undiscovered for 29 years

I agree now that it is not likely to have been a mere coincidence of RNGs or timings.

gburton NES classic ‘Punch-Out’ has an Easter egg that went undiscovered for 29 years

I think this is just a coincidence. There's probably co-incident timings that cause his duck motion to happen at the same time as the punch.

gburton 20 lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)

Sorry, I intended to quote your last sentence, applying a confidence interval to a reinforcement learning system, especially with respect to multi-armed bandits / adaptive experiments, but if I have to dig in to some signal processing stuff I am happy to do that.

It seems the conformal prediction link has some relation. I will dig, thanks.