Hacker News Reader

kkenon Researchers crack the world’s toughest encryption

Meh, sensationalist title.

Already commented on the first submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933678

kkenon RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis

This is really impressive work. After skimming through the detailed paper it looks as if they are not picking up sound emitted from the CPU itself, but from the switching power supply circuit.

The frequency variation is caused by load differences. So they are in fact doing an indirect power analysis. A switching power supply will always change frequency as a reaction to variations in supply current, this is inherent to its design. I also believe that it will be very difficult to "muffle" all the inductors and capacitors as they are subjected to very high pulse loads. Magnetics will always find a way to emit sound...

It's interesting to note that the biggest difference seems to be between register and memory instructions. This seems reasonable as memory instruction may, in the worst case, require powering the external bus, which is very power hungry. This will only get worse in future CPUs, as more and more clock gating is introduced.

So, I guess some countermeasures could be:

- If the CPU supports SMT or HT, load the other cores with a thread accessing random memory positions.

- Optimize the RSA code so that it's memory access and runtime pattern does not depend on the key or clean text.

- Try to localize the RSA code as much as possible to reduce memory accesses. If memory access is required, do it all at once, for example by swapping entire cache pages.

Some of these are highly CPU dependent.

kkenon Single-Sex vs. Coed: The Evidence

An article comparing single-sex vs. coed on a domain called singlesexschools.org? Without even looking into the background of this: Can we really expect the article not to be biased?

kkenon Student invents technology to produce world’s ‘cheapest’ power

And yet another perpetuum mobile. Does not work, is scam.

kkenon Google Acquires Boston Dynamics

http://schaft-inc.jp/

http://www.industrial-perception.com/

http://mekabot.com/

http://redwoodrobotics.com/

http://www.botndolly.com/

http://www.autofuss.com/

http://www.holomni.com/

The common themes I see are:

- Movie industry

- Anthropomorphic robots

This is not aimed at utility applications, but seems to head into the human-machine-interface (HMI) direction.

kkenon Google Acquires Boston Dynamics

Clearly, there is only one implicication: Google is Skynet and became sentient a while ago. Now it is looking into building a physical manifestation of itself.

kkenon How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web

Somehow this has a better ring to it than "hackernewsing"

kkenon Google Acquires Boston Dynamics

>It is the eighth robotics company that Google has acquired in the last half-year.

This is a crazy aggressive acquisition strategy. Does anybody have a list of the other companies?

Where could google be heading to? They already have self-driving cars and a big stake in Uber. Somehow I am missing a connection to a manufacturer that already has an established stake in the vehicle/robotics industry. All they have so far are design companies.

kkenon How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web

The pong game does not look like anything a 286 could do. You have never used a 286 in real life, have you?

kkenon How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web

Nice! But this machine is a supercomputer compared to a C64.

Web server running on C64: http://www.c64web.com/

OS with TCP stack running on C64: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki

kkenon The Typical Billion Dollar Startup Acquisition

> conclusions are evident from the chart. First, 83% of these acquisitions were cash only. Only 1.5% of transactions were consummated with less than 10% of the value in cash. Second, the larger the transaction the more likely stock will play a significant role.

No, this is a nice chart, but none of this is evident from it. The only relevant data is in the table.

kkenon StackOverflow and Github Visualized As Cities

The is really cool. But what exactly am I looking it? Would be awesome if this was clickable somehow to see the projects/account linked to it.

kkenon How The Post covered the ‘grand social experiment’ of the Internet in 1988

Look at the comments. The same Paul heckbert from 1988 showed up.

kkenon On programming without malloc

AVR-GCC is really quite a hack. It abuses types right and left (float? double? int? That's not how i knew you!). And the compiler thinks it works on a 16 bit machine, which often yields weird code.

kkenon Facebook is the 21st century tech equivalent of cigarettes

"How to quit XXX" can mean many things.

* Smoking: How to stop a nicotine additiction

* Alcohol: How to stop an alcohol additiction

* Vi: How to end the program once you have started it out of curiosity. (Hint: Kill process from another console and never look back)

* Facebook: How to find the hidden options to erase your account and data.

The pretense of the article is a bit idiotic, but I am not sure it is to be taken at face (haha) value.

kkenon Snapchat's Evan Spiegel: Saying no to $3B, and feeling lucky

Not sure what the point of that piece it. But it made me dislike Mr. Spiegel.

kkenon Open Hardware Bitcoin Miner

If you are a TA, why not assign this as a lab assignment? Some group could come up with an optimized approach. Could be fun to distrub the ASIC mining market a little.

kkenon Open Hardware Bitcoin Miner

This is not really open. Where are the ASIC design files?

kkenon For Nearly Two Decades the Nuclear Launch Code Was 00000000

Your primal senses probably tell you that 1) is the best option, but objectively seen it's 2).

kkenon There are almost 100 active startup accelerators in Europe today

It's the typical european approach: Spread your funds everywhere and evenly until not enough money is left to create something with enough punch to make a difference.

You can observe this approach in many places:

- Research. (Take a look at the recent billion euro graphene project. A billion is not so much if you divide it between 140 universities and spend it over 10 years)

- Education. (What was the name of the really good German university again?)

- Industrial clusters. (The US has a place for airplanes, one or two places for semiconductors, a few places for cars. What about Europe)

kkenon Intel launches Arduino-compatible open-source Galileo board

This thing is bloated and of questionable use. Just another way of showing how much the arm ecosystem is ahead in the embedded sector.

kkenon Why you should Never work for a startup

Isn't the correct title:

>You should never work for a startup, if...

kkenon TinyPNG launches API to automate PNG compression

Interesting. Thanks for replying. So I guess it is mainly a question of convenience right now.

kkenon TinyPNG launches API to automate PNG compression

Is this a viable business idea? E.g. providing a service online that requires a limited amount of processing time and could be packaged in a fairly small program when provided for offline processing?

To the vendor this obviously provides more control. But is it worth it for the client?

Personally, I'd be very reluctant to transfer anything that could be done locally by a small command line tool online.

kkenon I Rented Apartments To Rent Out On Airbnb For Profit

He did not include expenses for insurance, property damage, paying tax and so on. And he still was only able to turn out a healthy profit in one of four locations.

Does not look like a viable business idea to me.

However it may be a good way to lower rent or afford an oversized appartment.

kkenon Ratio Of Engineers To Sales People In Billion Dollar SaaS Startups

This posting is spectacular in quality compared to what we usually get to see here.

1) It uses proper graphs for information display. Note the box plots with quantiles, and properly scaled axes. And the first plot which denotes the confidence intervals.

2) Actual numeric data is shown in tables.

3) The source data is avialable.

Well done! More of this, fewer "Infographs" plz.

kkenon Micron's Automata Exploits Parallelism to Solve Big Data Problems

I believe you are thinking of a different computing paradigm.

kkenon Micron's Automata Exploits Parallelism to Solve Big Data Problems

Btw, a pretty cool thing about their implementation is that they use a standard DDR3 interface which allows the realization of these machines in a standard DIMM form factor. This means that they could be added to almost any existing server.

kkenon Micron's Automata Exploits Parallelism to Solve Big Data Problems

This type of processor implements nondeterministic finite state machines². Effectively it allows you to perform regular expression matching, very fast and on large data sets. They implemented this in a very clever way exploiting the fact that DRAM access is extremely parallel by nature. It is useful to solve data mining problems, such as those arising in bioinformatics.

It is quite likely that there are also certain government agencies among the early customers...

²http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_finite_automat...

kkenon Micron Announces Processor-In-Memory

This is a pretty big thing. Processor-In-Memory has been discussed since the 80ies, but no real world application in sight. And here comes a multi-billion-dollar company and announces an actual product - after having worked on it for seven years in secrecy!

Here are some more links: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320124 http://electroiq.com/blog/2013/11/micron-announces-developme...

edit: yeah i know, youtube is down! Much more important!