Hacker News Reader

martin_kon Bringing passkeys to Android and Chrome

> Unless the service you are trying to use requires that you use a particular model of authenticator, which the service provider can enforce via attestation.

Android's implementation of passkeys currently does not support attestation. https://groups.google.com/a/fidoalliance.org/g/fido-dev/c/nh...

Neither does Apple's, I believe.

martin_kon NASA - Remember the 13th

  <meta name="author" content="Bilderbergs; FEMA; NASA.GOV">

martin_kon NSA critics Ilija Trojanov: German writer must not enter the U.S.

Trojanow published his own account of the events here: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3...

Apparently he had already been denied a work visa without explanation last year by the US consulate in Munich. However, that decision was apparently later reversed after protests from Washington University in St. Louis. Since that must have been before the Snowden leaks and NSA protests, I'd say it doubtful if those are really connected to his more recent refusal of entry.

Edit: To be clear, I am not suggesting that his refusal was not politically motivated. But the original article suggests (or rather quotes author Juli Zeh on suggesting) a direct connection to the NSA protests and their petition against NSA surveillance.

martin_kon Android KitKat

It's a pun towards Project Butter. http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/27/android-jelly-bean-official...

martin_kon XKeyscore: NSA program collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'

You've got your timeline wrong. Facebook didn't support HTTPS for anything but user login until 2011.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/blog/blog.php?post=486790652130

martin_kon The Drone that Killed my Grandson

Read closely. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed in a separate drone strike, two weeks after his father's death. The real target of that second drone strike is currently unknown.

martin_kon Protecting E-Mail from Eavesdropping

I think it was mentioned somewhere that Snowden used GPG in his communication with Greenwald. At least some people inside the NSA seem to regard it as secure.

martin_kon Students Question the NSA at Recruiting Session [audio]

I found this part particularly interesting: "Our business is apolitical, okay? We do not generate the intelligence requirements. They're levied on us. And so if there is a requirement for foreign intelligence concerning this issue or this region or whatever, then that is [...] what we are going after. That is the intelligence target we are going after because it is the requirement."

I think as engineers, we have a certain degree of responsibility for how our work is used. To say your work is apolitical when you're in the business of spying on people is quite the statement, especially if "people" is basically everybody. (I am aware that the speaker is probably not an engineer and it wasn't an engineering recruiting program, but the same can be said about their field, I'd assume.)

martin_kon Students Question the NSA at Recruiting Session [audio]

Some background on the event and recording: http://mobandmultitude.com/2013/07/02/the-nsa-comes-recruiti...

edit: Cached version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

martin_kon Basic income as an answer to all out automation

Not true. With the exception of CSU perhaps, every party with a seat in the Bundestag either has internally passed its own concept for a basic income or is discussing the idea: [1] http://www.die-linke-grundeinkommen.de/WordPress/ [2] http://www.gruene-partei.de/cms/partei/dokbin/207/207470.auf... [3] http://www3.fdp-bundesverband.de/files/363/Abschlb-Buergerge... [4] http://www.kas.de/wf/de/33.20403/ [5] http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/wiso/06193.pdf

martin_kon [dead]

That's worldwide sales while the article seems to compare against USA sales (but forgets to mention this).

martin_kon "Hackathon" Has Been Trademarked in Germany

It's the same agency that does http://www.nerd-zone.com/, which seems to be partially funded by public money.

Edit: The agency also has a word mark on "Nerd Zone", both seem to be motivated by this: http://www.nerd-zone.com/hackathon.

martin_kon Gmail now refusing to fetch using self-signed certs

Disallowing self-signed certificates doesn't improve security of unencrypted connections, but it increases security of all connections using SSL/TLS. It doesn't make you more secure (you don't have strong authenticity in any of those cases), but it certainly makes me more secure.

When Gmail fetches email from my provider, which has a certificate signed by a trusted CA, it would have previously accepted any self-signed certificate from an active MITM.

martin_kon Show HN: iPG - YC Interview Simulator

Press N

martin_kon IPv6 now deployed across entire T-Mobile US network

Apparently the iPhone doesn't support it. Quite sad since they actually enabled IPv6 support in iOS4.

martin_kon First brain image of a dream created

If you compare it to the number of dreams people have around the world each night, it probably is rare. But then, it's not that difficult to learn and you also find quite a lot of people whose dreams are usually lucid without really being aware of the difference.

martin_kon First brain image of a dream created

Similar studies have been conducted by LaBerge and others for decades now. I did a brief search and found two examples: One that measured EEG for clenching hands (in 1986!) and one that measured cardio-vascular activity for performing squats. So the novelty here is probably the use of fMRI. This is probably difficult because sleeping in these things is not exactly comfortable.

martin_kon The machine's view of time, if nanoseconds were seconds

Well, it depends on the hard drives you're using, and the exact access pattern, but sequential access to disk can be even faster than random access to RAM.[0] This of course doesn't really matter to average Joe, since he has little influence on how data is read from his disk. But if you're say, a database developer, it does matter quite a bit.

[0] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1536616.1536632

martin_kon The machine's view of time, if nanoseconds were seconds

Nice analogy. From a technical standpoint, however, access patterns often make a bigger difference than the type of your storage device. The difference between sequential access on disk and sequential access on SSD isn't nearly as big as random access on disk compared to sequential access on disk.

martin_kon Apple intern's thesis leaks secret project to port Mac OS X to ARM processors

Apple has had Darwin on ARM processors for quite some time. It's called iOS. The cited project was porting Darwin to a certain ARMv5 chip. I don't know a lot about the ARM architecture, but from what I understand the original iPhone was already run by an ARMv6 and ARMv5 is pretty obsolete. So this can hardly be interpreted as part of a serious effort to port OS X to ARM.

martin_kon Silly Python riddle

Your 2.6 has a bug http://bugs.python.org/issue4748.

martin_kon Silly Python riddle

You're right. I am still referring to that particular part of your blog post:

  >> So that’s the only case I can think of where Python
  >> completely throws away the value of a lambda function.

martin_kon Silly Python riddle

The value of the lambda is the generator object. How else could you call list() on it if it was thrown away?

martin_kon Silly Python riddle

Yes, but I think this is cleared up if you consider that calling a generator function does not execute its body, but return generator object. It doesn't really matter if it's a lambda or a regular named function.

martin_kon Silly Python riddle

As i said, f() returns a generator object in this case. So you're calling list on a generator that yields None once, the result of which is a list that contains None. If you change the `yield` to `yield "foobar"`, list(f()) will get you `["foobar"]`.

Edit: Perhaps, to clear things up more, about where the value 7 went- your snippet can be expressed without using lambdas as

  >>> def g(x):
  ...  return 7
  ... 
  >>> def f():
  ...  v = (yield)
  ...  g(v)
  ... 
  >>> list(f())
  [None]

Note that there's no return before g(v) because generators (at least in 2.7) can only yield, not return a value.

martin_kon Silly Python riddle

You're right, it isn't. The presence of yield makes the return value of f() a generator object. The function body is not executed initially. When you call .next() on the generator object execution starts and runs until it hits the first yield, raising a NameError because g is not defined.

edit: typo

martin_kon Silly Python riddle

I'm not sure, why you think the value of the lambda function is thrown away. The lambda function returns a generator object. The function body of a generator is generally not executed until you call .next() on it, so that's why you don't get a NameError instantly. Also the value, that you .send() into the generator is not thrown away either. In your example the generator just runs into an exception before it goes into a state in which it would accept a .send() call. Just consider this modified example:

  >>> f=lambda: (yield)
  >>> gen=f()
  >>> gen.next()
  >>> gen.send('foobar')
  'foobar'

martin_kon Zeitgeist 2011: How the World Searched

So, apparently the 9 fastest falling search terms of 2011 are social networking sites.

martin_kon Entries — Node.js Knockout

http://wandercircus.com/

A flying circus company of sophisticated robots playing your favorite theater and movie scenes in IRC.

martin_kon Berlins new techno beat. why international tech startups should move to berlin.

Hamburg and Munich are among the most expensive places in Europe. Living costs in Berlin are probably half (you can rent a place for under 200 EUR if you wnat). There is also a much better startup and developer scene. So if you are into the whole startup thing, Berlin is pretty great.

And the crime rate, schools, ... compared to the US? Really? ;)