Hacker News Reader

spinon Neuroscientists decode the brain activity of the worm

Yes. The worm c.elegans has 302 neurons, connected in a specific way.

From the article:

"For almost 30 years, the list of connections between individual neurons has been known. Despite the low number of neurons, its neuronal networks possesse a high degree of complexity and sophisticated behavioral output; the worm thus represents an animal of choice to study brain function."

spinon USB/IP Project

I feel the same way (that ethernet is a perfectly good way of moving data around), so I created this a while back as a side project:

  https://github.com/mfassler/eFirmata

Basically, I wanted USB, but I wanted much longer cable-lengths than USB, so I used ethernet.

spinon The Art of PNG Glitch

I am reminded of the story behind the cover art for the soundtrack to "The Social Network": http://www.rob-sheridan.com/TSN/

spinon The network is hostile

I've often thought about this, but came to the opposite conclusion: a laptop is the smallest thing you can trust. The keyboard sends data to the CPU. The CPU sends data to the screen. The CPU does encryption and talks to the network.

I feel like there's no point in trying to chop it down any smaller than that. All you're doing is shifting trust from "system A" to "system B", without really changing anything.

spinon Advisory Guidelines for UDP Deployment

I mean using these things over the Internet. People play games over the Internet and use VoIP over the Internet. I think these are great technologies, and I don't want to cripple them by forcing them onto TCP.

spinon Advisory Guidelines for UDP Deployment

Many real-time applications can tolerate some packet loss, and if packets arrive out-of-order there's no benefit to re-sending them. I'm thinking of real-time games and VoIP, for example. TCP is a bad fit for these use cases. The only thing that works across nearly all routers is UDP.

I'd be more interested in making UDP more secure (and learning more about best practices) than to "avoid using UDP as a transport when possible".

spinon Own-Mailbox, the first 100% confidential mailbox

I know a lot of programmers who shiver at the thought of managing their own servers...

I used to be a sysadmin; now I'm a programmer. I love to host my own webservers and the like. But email? That's just a never-ending uphill battle. Between spam, and whitelists, and botnets constantly port-scanning your server (hope I've got all the latest patches, etc..).

For me, GMail solved this. GMail solved spam, and hassle. (At the cost of all my privacy being in the hands of a for-profit corporation.)

spinon What's Wrong with Deep Learning?

I really like the book "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" by Christopher Bishop. It's packed full of all the latest-and-greatest algorithms.

WRT your question, an interesting "feature" of that book is that it was published just before deep neural networks started taking off, so there's no mention of DNNs in the book. You can see what the world was like right when they started taking off.

spinon Snowden Document Search

Isn't that the basic purpose of Tor?

spinon The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks

The "DQN" (Deep Q Network) stuff from Google DeepMind has states. (And actions that transition from state to state.) This comes from Reinforcement Learning theory. (The Q-Learner from Reinforcement Learning is the "Q" in Deep Q Networks.) [doi:10.1038/nature14236]

Suri and Shultz argue that dopamine in the mammalian brain follows the "reward prediction error" from Reinforcement Learning [doi:10.1016/S0306-4522(98)00697-6] (Indeed the DQN paper mentions dopamine in the very first paragraph.)

Because of this, I am very excited about DQN. (I do think that it's only a building block towards building a self-aware brain, though.)

spinon White House Takes Security Pitch to Silicon Valley

> ...even as he acknowledged that the documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, "showed there was a difference in view between what we were doing and what people perceived us as doing."

That one boggles my mind. On 2013, Mar 12, Clapper lied to congress about NSA spying. The purpose of a lie is so that people perceive something different from reality. So they achieved their goal, they're just sorry they got caught.

spinon We may have witnessed a NSA "Shotgiant" TAO-like action

  "as the NSA grows in both size and power..."

Do you consider this to be a foregone conclusion? Is this not something to be resisted or reversed?

spinon Ask HN: How to Deal with a Conservative Family?

A low GPA can keep you out of a good grad school. (A low GPA can keep you out of officer school, if he wants to join the military as an officer.) 5 or 10 years down the road, yeah, it doesn't matter. But for his very next step after graduation, it probably does. (And next steps lead to next-next steps which lead to next-next-next steps.)

On the flip side: Linus Torvalds inventing Linux, or Guido van Rossum inventing Python has, I'm sure, benefited their own careers. I'm totally down with doing the "crazy, hippie, open-source thing" because it's your passion.

But: I'm guessing that Linus and Guido (and pg and others...) all did very well as undergrads. If you're destined to be an open-source badass (or a startup badass), then 4 years of good grades shouldn't be too painful.

(And, I'll just say it, anecdotally: finishing my physics degree made me into a smarter, better person. At the time, my quantum mechanics classes were the hardest things that I had ever done in my life. And now, my own hobbies are just as hard... and rewarding.)

edit: I'd like to mention that I didn't graduate college until I was 28. I can totally empathize with following an unusual path in life that your family doesn't approve of.

spinon Why I Will Never Go Back to the United States

Don't ever lie. Lying to a cop is a crime. (and/or it could get you into worse trouble later on...) But, like the parent-poster said: tell a simple, boring story.

(You think that you're out to have fun on this exciting new adventure in life... your vacation!, your new business trip!, whatever. But they're looking for anything strange. They are bored, boring, unimaginative government bureaucrats. Give them the simple, bored, boring, short (but honest) summary of "the purpose of your visit". TFA said that getting searched is "just like in the movies!"... don't do that. Just... don't. Do not share any enthusiasm about anything with CBP.)

spinon UK spies continue “quantum insert” attack via LinkedIn, Slashdot pages

You can't have actual oversight of your employees if they are actively lying to you. Therefore, you should fire employees that lie to you.

spinon After traffic stop, man forced to have x-ray, enema, anal probes and colonoscopy

(replying to my own post...)

I'm remembering back to the L.A. riots, after the Rodney King beating. I'm a white guy, and I was watching the riots on TV in high school. I wasn't sure what to make of it at the time. Maybe things haven't changed much?... (sadly...)

spinon After traffic stop, man forced to have x-ray, enema, anal probes and colonoscopy

Over the past several years, this has been bothering me more and more, too.

If it's "we did this horrible thing, but made some money" or "we did this horrible thing, and locked up some terrible bad guy", then at least there's some kind of logic to it. But we keep hearing these stories of: someone in power does some whacked-out stupid mean shit to someone who's in no position to resist. And it goes unchecked and unpunished?...

I don't mean to be hand-wringing and preaching to the choir here,... but yeah -- I'm baffled and scared, too. I think there's a streak of American culture that enjoys hurting people just for the sake of hurting people.

spinon NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

Personally, I don't read that much into it. I see it as: some geek is proud of this technical accomplishment (in an a-moral way). Perhaps he/she even gets a kick about "getting away with something naughty"...

(I do find it sickeningly arrogant, though.)

spinon Why Isn’t Programming Futuristic?

We could just put all the books in one, big room, just aisles and aisle of shelves, everything numbered sequentially. We could even build a library as one long hallway -- one single line of books.

But we choose to divide our buildings up into rooms. We choose to create that hierarchy.

Edit: I suppose, though, that our minds evolved to operate in physical space. Go hunt some zebra, go climb a tree... things like that...

spinon Why Isn’t Programming Futuristic?

I'm starting to think that the reason we keep building tree-like data structures is because that's how our minds work. We can intuitively grasp hierarchies of categories (a tree structure), with the occasional exception (a symlink to another location).

Because we intuitively see the world in this way, we are good at building and maintaining systems that work in this way.

Anything more sophisticated than that (algebra, relational databases) requires a lot of study and practice to get good at.

spinon Can I Be Trusted?

Haha. And I use Linux -- and I usually leave SELinux turned on... so my OS is infested with NSA-written software.

(I do think about this sometimes... I guess I just hope that "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". I hope.)

spinon America knows everything

If he broke the rules of his visa, then deport him. Stick him on a plane and send him home. (Perhaps refuse him entry in the future, if that's what the law says...)

In western democracies, we have this notion of "the punishment should fit the crime". All this harassment and intimidation at the border accomplishes nothing useful. It is power for the sake of power. It is entertainment for people who enjoy having power over other people (like CBP).

spinon Lavabit SSL Cert Revoked

Getting a warrant to search one person's inbox seems pretty reasonable to me. (Seems pretty analogous to searching one person's rented storage space.)

Forcing Lavabit to hand over everything seems like searching all storage lockers, even for people who are suspected of nothing. That's way over the line for me.

spinon The Difference Between Funny and LOL

To all the nay-sayers (sibling to this comment here), I just want to say: I thought the talk (er, slide show) was very, very interesting. I didn't even notice anything special about the slide-show.

It worked for me. ("worked" as in: made me intrigued about an interesting topic.)

spinon Bruce Schneier has changed his PGP key to 4096 bits

I'm just speculating here... but I think it could be done PC-to-PC up to 100mbit. IIRC, there's a "link" signal that normally exists -- you'll have to configure both cards to ignore the link signal. (Which, I suppose, would mean that this wouldn't work going to a switch or hub with factory-default firmware.)

Half-duplex, 100mbit, ignore link. I suppose it can be done?....

spinon Our Newfound Fear of Risk

I have another explanation: If you have more kids, you don't have time to watch after them all as much.

spinon Startup - Bill Watterson, a cartoonist's advice

If you're living alone on a desert island, there's one job available: scavenging for food. It doesn't matter if you're a genius mathematician or something, your job is to search for food.

If you're in a town full of dotcom businesses, you can probably find a job building web-apps in JavaScript. (Hey, it's a million times better than scavenging for food...)

I really like this cartoon. It's exactly how I feel about "having a day job" vs "doing something cool".

I've been reading PG's essays for a long time. Since back around the time that he created Y Combinator in the first place. I think his essays are brilliant and honest and inspiring.

But at the end of the day... I just don't care about starting a company. If I can live a normal, middle-class life and have a normal, middle-class retirement.... then, man, I really don't give a shit about getting rich. I have an endless supply of awesome things to work on and think about.

spinon Protecting Against Leakers

I'm baffled. One the one hand, the NSA wants their employees to "uphold and defend the constitution". On the other hand, they want their employees to keep secrets.

(... It is possible for these two things to not be in conflict with each other...)

They want their employees to honor the commitments they've made. At the same time they're lying to congress and the FISC.

Dear NSA: Let me help you un-fuck your business: Stop requiring your employees to uphold and defend the constitution. Stop hiring people who believe that the NSA should be held accountable to the citizens and/or to the congress.

(Perhaps you should start by creating a cult of personality around a strong, charismatic leader. And for the signing-in ceremony, instead of swearing to "defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic", maybe they could just wipe their asses with a copy of the Bill of Rights.)

If you do this, you will never have another Edward Snowden again. I guarantee it.

spinon The flawed psychology of government mass surveillance

"...those that do [show creativity and original thinking], will do so regardless of reward or risk."

I disagree. I think that there will be some people who will be creative no matter what. There will some people who won't be creative no matter what. And there will be some people in the middle who could swing either way.

As an example: I think that Steve Jobs would've been creative and ambitious no matter what. But I don't think that Wozniak would've been ambitious if it wasn't for Jobs pushing him.

Certain environments foster creativity and experimenting. US colleges are full of weird intellectuals with crazy ideas. OTOH, Your typical, say, police department (or most government agencies...) is not.

The environment that we live in will tend to sway people in one direction or the other. (... just look at the environment of S.V. or YCombinator...)

spinon Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods

I live in an apartment in Tokyo (not any near as cramped as these places, though). I've stayed at guest houses in Hong Kong and Tokyo. I love it. I don't miss living in a house at all. (I sure don't miss mowing the lawn or shoveling snow off the sidewalk, either.)

I used to romanticize about these kinds of places. I explored them a bit and I liked it. (These days, I'm living in a fairly normal apartment, though. Normal job, normal life.)

I've stayed at guesthouses where I've had lots of socializing with the neighbors. I've had some fun times (and some not-so-fun times...) If you're curious, give it shot!...