Hacker News Reader

timdierkson Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)

It has definitely been that.

timdierkson Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)

The tweaks were minor (smaller than for any other version revision), and mostly just the IETF marking its territory and doing something other than blessing the SSL 3.0 protocol as-is.

timdierkson Randar: A Minecraft exploit that uses LLL lattice reduction to crack server RNG

That's me! Thanks for pulling up the quote from long ago:

> "With his obvious technical skill, and his "cheat early and often" attitude, Tim could have a promising career as an AI programmer in the computer games industry. :)"

Instead took a path of security, authoring the TLS RFC and principal engineer in Google security. Thanks for the flashback.

timdierkson Apple stole $100s from me, Customer Service says there's nothing they can do

I work for a FAANG and it's a violation of company policy for me to profit from privileges associated with my employment.

timdierkson What the Heck Is a ‘Reverse Repo Note’ and What Happened to All of Tether’s?

https://archive.md/uNduU

timdierkson The full story of the RSA hack can finally be told

No, it's a symmetric system, they're just random values.

timdierkson Electoral College Decision Tree

At least in NY, I don't see how this is possible because I can send in an absentee ballot and then invalidate it by voting on election day in-person. So I don't see how they can open any of the secrecy envelopes, let alone count any ballots, until they've determined if the ballot in the envelope should be counted, and they can't do that until they get the poll book back from my election site at the end of in-person voting. (But maybe NY is one of these 8 states due to this rule?)

timdierkson The Joy of Cryptography

As someone with domain expertise in both distributed systems and crypto, I'll say "not crypto"; it's relatively well-understood and most of the people who get value out of it don't need to work on it, they can just use what already exists. By comparison, one needs detailed knowledge of distributed systems to make effective use of them, so expertise has broader value. I suspect ML/AI is similar to distributed systems in impact and value, maybe with broader market applicability, but I don't know as much about it in practice.

timdierkson Hand Scraping a Truly Flat Plane (1908) [pdf]

https://epdf.pub/foundations-of-mechanical-accuracy.html

timdierkson Inside a Titan missile guidance computer

"Inventing Accuracy" is a fascinating history of ICBM inertial guidance. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inventing-accuracy

timdierkson Google to Offer a Best Price Guarantee on Certain Flights

When this happens, go to https://matrix.itasoftware.com and find the specific itinerary you're looking for, which will give you the specific fare codes, etc. which you should use to book. I believe this ticket is available, it's just that the people you're speaking with can't find it in their system (that said, you don't say what fare you saw, so it's hard for me to be sure I see the same fare you do). Specifically, the bit under "Fare Construction".

Fare Construction (can be useful to travel agents) CPH SK X/MAN VS NYC 500.77HLHF06MN NUC 500.77 END ROE 6.637696 XT 161ZO 167UB 39YC 47XY 27XA 124US 646YQ

I wish that Google Flights would offer a way to get this info in the UI; it's not common but not greatly unusual to be in this position (where Flights can find the fare but the UIs available to consumers can't book it).

timdierkson MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

This is simply not true: it's explicitly not the intent of the GPL, and furthermore the GPL is clearly a contract which explicitly spells out its intent, not a vague document whose spirit needs to be interpreted.

timdierkson Uncaptcha2: Defeat ReCaptcha with Google Speech2Text

This is irrelevant. Speech-to-text costs $0.006 per invocation (for < 15 seconds) [1], or you can solve 166 captchas for $1. There are already services out there which will solve captchas for $0.50/1000 [2], an order of magnitude cheaper. The fact that Google has a service which will do this inefficiently changes nothing about the threat/cost ecosystem. CAPTCHAs aren't about being a perfect defense, they're about increasing cost to operate at scale.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/pricing

[2] https://2captcha.com/, the first hit I found with the search [captcha solving serving price]

Disclosure: I work for Google on security and cloud, but not on anything related to captchas or speech to text.

timdierkson Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

The Internet is assembled out of duct tape. We apologize for the design.

timdierkson Spotify hits 83M paying subscribers, more than double Apple Music’s 40M

Google Play Music has a cleanly integrated locker, which I love, loads of my favorite music isn't available from services.

Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on anything related to music.

timdierkson 2018 MacBook Pro Review

https://github.com/github/SoftU2F

timdierkson 2018 MacBook Pro Review

https://github.com/github/SoftU2F

https://www.yubico.com/product/yubikey-4-series/#yubikey-4c-...

timdierkson The hotel bathroom puzzle

Today's generation of software engineers maybe, but thankfully humanity is a lot bigger than that. There are huge numbers of engineers who come up with practical non-digital solutions; take a look at farming or manufacturing equipment.

timdierkson Every Ruler in Europe Every Year Since 400 BC

Came hoping it was going to be a history of measuring length over the last few millennia.

timdierkson The end of Iridium flares?

You should seek out a flare if you can, it's much much brighter than seeing a satellite or the ISS, as impressive as those are.

timdierkson Google is buying Chelsea Market building for over $2B

The skybridge to "nowhere" just ends in another building which Google doesn't lease space to, so it is more of a "skylounge"; open at one end to Google, closed at the other, suspended three storied above 15th St. https://goo.gl/maps/Qzc4ZEB5hdw

timdierkson Fish: A user-friendly command line shell for macOS, Linux, etc

Yes, SQLite has robust multiprocess locking and transaction support. https://sqlite.org/faq.html#q5

timdierkson Ask HN: I want to work for Google, but I don't even have a BA/BS

Are you qualified for the job, independent of a degree? For example, have you done similar work or have other experience such that, despite not having a degree, you could reasonably assert that you can do this job as well as someone trained in the field? (Not "I'm sure I can learn it"--are you ready now?) If so, email me a resume and a cover letter that makes that argument, and if I think it's plausible, I'll refer you for the role.

timdierkson Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator

See it in action at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n8LNxGbZbs. Better than LavaRand.

timdierkson What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)

Buying Google pre-IPO is a very clever trade, you must be a market wizard.

timdierkson Critics say WeWork is an overvalued real-estate play

Yeah, this is the state of affairs at Google, for example.

timdierkson This Font Makes Sparklines Out of Numbers

The font is open-source, available here: https://github.com/aftertheflood/spark

timdierkson Regex Puzzle

Never mind, this was an error in the https://regexcrossword.com/playerpuzzles/595e5542d2433 version, which has a (.) where it should have a \1 in row 2 (thanks to @angry_albatross).

timdierkson Regex Puzzle

I believe column E is under-constrained; a solution with column E = "YYYY " or "OOOO " passes the tests, but is clearly not what's intended.

timdierkson Blue Apron May Need to Raise More Money Soon After Shrunken IPO

There's little to no reason to downplay risks in the prospectus, so the statements of material risk are always doom-filled. (Prospective investors don't take such statements as final, but failure to disclose a possible risk has a big downside.)