Hacker News Reader

technoguyrobon And "e" Appears from Nowhere: Quick Numerical Experiment with Clojure

Could be an easy Putnam problem.

technoguyrobon Procrastinating Again? How to Kick the Habit.

Bookmarked this HN page for later so I can make the obvious joke about this article.

technoguyrobon Yehuda Yudkowsky, 1985-2004

I'd like to live for a time, sure, but even five hundred years might be too long. I'd either get driven insane by the constant bow-shocks of ever advancing culture, or I'd lapse into some kind of boredom-induced stupor.

It's not wrong either for the rest of us to be curious.

technoguyrobon Announcing my free book on Vim

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I thought David was kidding. Jesus.

technoguyrobon Do Passwords Scale?

Centralization. (OpenID)

technoguyrobon DNS Drama Exposed (Dramatically)

Indeed. The title should have appended: "...dramatically."

technoguyrobon A solution for the "send email to relatives when I die" problem

What if your business partner dies? I thought everyone needs to confirm you are dead? What if they are dead?

technoguyrobon A Proof of the Halting Problem's Undecidability in Verse

Sing this out loud in a low voice...awesome.

technoguyrobon Is Gmail Safe? How do you protect yourself from these kind of attacks?

The same key can be used for each session...when the Gmail page is being generated, I am saying this embedded in-line key can be associated TO the user's cookie, so that there is a one-to-one correspondence between this "Javascript cookie/session variable" and the user's actual cookie. There is no problem whatsoever. The only thing to be done is the exact same authentication that Google has to do to determine from which authenticated user chat requests are coming from (or any other AJAX request sent to Gmail).

EDIT: To answer your question of "are they doing some kind of lookup for each AJAX request?" Well of course, since they already have to look up a user's ID, account information, etc. based on the cookie they send.

technoguyrobon Is Gmail Safe? How do you protect yourself from these kind of attacks?

And the Gmail engineers should add an opt-out "high security" mode that checks the referer to make sure the form submission is coming from Gmail itself and not some outside website. This way people who like to use custom/blank referers can ignore this security concern if they want, and all the rest of us can prevent the risk of this problem.

EDIT: Or how about just adding an in-line Javascript variable? Say, on all Gmail pages, you could embed this in the page:

   <script>var SECURITY_KEY = "918028cd79a5ba47e83e6ba68d036ca3";</script>

And then when sending AJAX or form requests in the background, make sure to include that as a request parameter. That way, even if the user has the right authentication cookies, external websites won't be able to fool Gmail into thinking they are Gmail.

Really, this doesn't seem like a very hard problem to solve...couple lines of code...

technoguyrobon Sounds Like Bach

Reading that article made me expect a future in which a musician will not be known for a particular composition, but for the algorithm he devised for creating music of a particular flavor.

This only goes to show that eventually, all fields of knowledge will be nothing except mathematics!

technoguyrobon My Public Apology

Hahahaha, I like the profile update.

technoguyrobon Sounds Like Bach

The Reddit discussion on this is really good:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7eoth/sounds_li...

technoguyrobon My Public Apology

Sweet, I can now say I've been told "fuck you[r downvotes]" by a professor from Cornell.

technoguyrobon JQuery magicpreview plug-in

XSS detection is not just as simple as that. For example, in IE, entering the following produces a pop-up:

   <table style="background-image:url(javascript:alert(1))"><tr><td>Hi</td></tr></table>

However, read debt's comment below. XSS is irrelevant here since "XSS" means cross-site scripting, i.e., ,managing to embed Javascript into pages someone ELSE sees. Only the client sees this, it doesn't get reproduced for anyone else.

technoguyrobon Michael Crichton on talent: "I just work hard"

I think mediocrity is sort of the complement to laziness, in that respect. For example, settling for a cubicle job that drains you because you don't think you can do anything better or don't want to--that's still "laziness" in the way you're describing.

technoguyrobon Stop Me If You've Seen This Word Before

http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=lang%3A...

technoguyrobon Stop Me If You've Seen This Word Before

http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=lang%3A...

technoguyrobon 500 Exabytes per Raindrop

This is John Baez. I am pretty sure he has read GEB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baez

technoguyrobon How people really use the iPhone

Some people read that presentation in NOT full screen?

Maybe someone should write a "How People Really Use Slideshare" post...

technoguyrobon Change.gov

Wow.

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=20...

technoguyrobon Google Now Indexes Scanned Documents (Scribd acquisition to follow shortly)

I am a mathematics student and sometimes need to look up papers. A lot of these papers are in journals not available online and have references to more of such papers. This can sometimes make even understanding a relatively simple proof that could be explain in a book in a few pages a gruesome all-day ordeal where 3/4th of the time is spent looking up references.

It would be really freaking cool if Google (Scholar?) could scan these articles into PDFs, then attempt to OCR the references and see if Google has indexed those, then embed hyperlinks to the references. This is technically feasible, and I imagine it would really make a lot of researchers very happy.

technoguyrobon The Economist endorses Barack Obama

Oh wow, learn something new each day, huh...

technoguyrobon Knuth is no longer mailing out checks for $2.56

"Account balances as of 31 October 2008:"

But it's the 30th today....

technoguyrobon My theory on Eliezer Yudkowsky's AI-Box Experiment

I have previously asked Eliezer publicly on Hacker News this question (he has an account on here):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195959

technoguyrobon [dead]

I can actually pronounce that. :) I spent an hour one afternoon learning how to, and now it's instinct.

http://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliog...

technoguyrobon What will happen when Clock Speeds stop increasing?

And with the recent discovery that graphene nanoribbons may be able to replace silicon as the semiconductor in processors at least one researcher predicts that clock speeds in the terahertz range may be possible.[1]

Has anyone ever heard of this or have enough technical background to expound? I am really curious.

Either way, I suppose it is far off, certainly not any time soon.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_speed

technoguyrobon Gmail and Hotmail Captchas Cracked

With the history of unusual ways things have been discovered in science, I'm not sure if that is sarcasm.

technoguyrobon What will happen when Clock Speeds stop increasing?

Will I ever be able to buy a 10Ghz CPU?

Someone please comfort me.

technoguyrobon What will happen when Clock Speeds stop increasing?

Maybe that's why the brain decided to go with parallel processing...