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I appreciate your mentioning overthewire and claiming that you'd hire someone on the basis of their ability to make it through these challenges.

I do wish more CTFs kept their challenges online after the competition: good ones and these wargames form what are essentially the problem sets for a top-tier exploit engineering program.

I cut my teeth on these wargames, as well as pwnable.kr/tw and, of course, microcorruption. While working through some of these challenges and finally popping a shell was definitely satisfying, I'm not sure I'll feel "elite" until perhaps I take home master of pwn at cansecwest.

You would trust the OMS to do what exactly? Opine on computer science theory? Perhaps. Do solid work for you? That's a much closer call, in my opinion.

As non-degreed developer who is looking to transition to security work, I was initially excited to see this program but had a similar reaction after looking at the curriculum.

Potential gems on the list might be the OS or networking course if they are run something like MIT's 6.828 with lots of lab coding and perhaps a bit of hand-holding, but if you can just clone last semester's 6.828 repo and get osdev'ing, why drop 10k to spend most of your time on courses that look like yawn central?

I think what I really wanted to see was a lab-focused curriculum for aspiring vulnerability researchers, so perhaps I was bound to be disappointed.

Is there some route to naloxone that I am not aware of that doesn't start from some opiate or opium alkaloid? The morphine total syntheses I've read were rather involved and low-yield. Perhaps progress made on the biosynthetic step through reticuline? That would be exciting.

Thank you, and thank you to the grandparent.

It's quite fantastic to be schooled by old-time lispers (only 6 years of lisp here).

Only in implementation internals? I'm fairly certain I've encountered it in other unexported package symbols in library code, things like struct constructors where you want a "smarter" "make-my-struct" function. But perhaps I misremember.

> What will you do if three or more modules want the same function name? Tack on %%, %%%, ...

Certainly not!

I think your points are all very fair: it would be a smell, and is evidence of a need for improvements at a more structural level. It just smells a little less than a seemingly purposeful misspelling to my nose.

Sure, sure. But while it's definitely not in the standard, I do see it all over, and it's something I picked up from reading a lot of other people's lisp. SBCL internals, for example. You might not like the convention and chose not to follow along with it, but I would be surprised if, after 18 years of lisp, you had never seen it before, and would choose to misspell an accessor to prevent a clash instead of naming it differently.

Edit: ah, I think I understand. I don't mean to imply that all accessors should be named in this way. That would be gross.

Heh. If you see [1], they define a function called "user-email" (spelled correctly). The lisp convention here would be to define the accessor as something like "%user-email." While the code isn't too bad, these little things betray a lack of knowledge of lisp lore. Perhaps another reason for the rewrite was that the team actually didn't have much experience writing lisp code.

[1] https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0/blob/bb4fbdb5871...

My understanding is that shielded transactions were made opt-in due to time and resource needs in computing their zero-knowledge proofs. Hopefully they can improve this and do away with unshielded transactions altogether in the future.

It's fine if you want to defend monero's technology, but attacking the researchers credibility because of their association with a competing project? That's some weak sauce in my opinion.

One side is actually doing the work and publishing attacks, even if they are against zcash (shielding/deshielding). The other has some questionable twitter conversations about a hypothetical backdoor. Zcash zk-snarks are backdoored? Proof of concept or GTFO is the law of the land, my dude.

Yes, it is fragile (less than five minutes, man!) but hardly unreadable to the macro-accustomed eye.

A "real" implementation would do more processing of the forms in the list read by read-delimited-list and perform appropriate checks. This is more to just give you a sense of how trivial it is to extend the language.

I don't actually know python well enough (I had to look up "list comprehension") to say, but I would estimate that it would only take a page or so of code to give you something fully-featured and robust.

In practice, I would never abuse the reader like this when typical "loop" expressions are enough to do these kind of things (and more).

Why do you need the meta-capabilities of lisp? Well, language designers are human and can't predict all the features that you might find useful. Take, for example, list comprehensions.

I added some basic ones to common lisp in a couple of minutes.

  (defun read-comprehension (stream char)
    (declare (ignore char))
    (destructuring-bind (expr for var in list &optional if filter-exp)
        (read-delimited-list #\] stream)
      `(loop ,for ,var ,in ,list
          ,@(when filter-exp `(,if ,filter-exp))
          collect ,expr)))

  (set-macro-character #\[ #'read-comprehension)

  (eval (read-from-string "[(+ x 1) for x in '(1 2 3) if (> x 2)]"))
  ;; => (4)

The CL condition system separates the signaling of a condition (of which errors are a subtype), the handling of a condition, and the definition of recovery strategies (restarts).

Instead of unwinding the stack when a condition is signaled, handler code is invoked in the dynamic context of the signal and thus has much more information available to decide how to recover.

If a decision on how to recover can't be made programmatically, the system kicks out to the user where they are presented with the choices you have given them.

See: http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.h... for more.

I might even prefer 5 average lisp programmers to 50 code monkeys.

How well do you know lisp?

That depends heavily on what your day to day problems are.

If you work in a complex or rapidly evolving domain, I cannot think of a better choice than Lisp. If you are doing a lot of text processing or writing CRUD apps, then you will probably not get much benefit.

I was paging through some old symbolics lisp machine code the other day and while I found some subtle differences in style, it was not so different from modern CL code. I think the differences that are to be found are less about the way one writes lisp and more that these days people make use of "standard" things like quicklisp, alexandria, fiveam, and other utility/portability libraries that didn't exist back then.

Edit:

I suppose a major change was that back then, CLOS was not yet part of the standard. There was a competing system being used at the time called flavors that had a lot of the same features. No one uses that anymore to my knowledge.

You can get good work done in Java (where good means providing value for your company), but sticking to any one language or paradigm means that you will miss out on the lessons from others.

Lisp is not a pure functional language, by the way. It's very multi-paradigm and has one the best object and exception systems ever designed. Not only are all these excellent features available to you, but they are available to you at the metalevel as well.

Um... The Chinese like opiates, too. The majority of heroin produced in the golden triangle region finds its way into China.

Why all of the moralizing about the "evils" of opiate addiction? Addiction is complicated, and while substance abuse can be harmful to the user, widespread social intolerance and the subsequent prohibitions on addictive substances only serve to amplify that harm.

The opioid deaths we see are a direct result of the prohibition of opioids. Shipping into different jurisdictions carries the largest risk in the black economy. Thus, the transition from opium to morphine to heroin to the various fentanyls. There can be no quality control or FDA-enforced purity standards, hence the overdoses.

If you want to reduce deaths, opioids need to become more available, not less.

If you want to talk about morality, my question for you is: why do you want to restrict access to the chemicals that make these poor souls feel normal, pushing them into the black market?

I suppose it's possible, but holding all else equal? I don't immediately see why dollar demand would increase in the event of a tether collapse.

Dollar prices will adjust as BTC->Dollar and Dollar->BTC flows change. Dually the Tether prices. The only thing that keeps these prices in line is a Tether/Dollar arbitrage, but that arbitrage will slow and halt as people flee tether.

If anything, I would guess that a sudden increase in selling pressure from people doing Tether->Crypto->Dollar risks pushing people into a Crypto->Dollar fear feedback loop.

It would rise as priced in tether, with tether depreciating against the dollar. You will see larger spreads between tether exchanges and dollar exchanges, which already regularly grow into the hundreds.

If people were holding tether because they wanted to be flat with respect to the cryptocurrency market, they will likely sell their cryptocurrency on a dollar exchange, suppressing prices there.

HN might be interested in this statistical analysis of Tether's influence on the cryptocurrency markets: http://www.tetherreport.com/

Their "preference" for "blockchain" is borne out of political necessity. I say this not to trivialize it, but to explain.

Banks are massive, massive institutions, and it is hard enough to coordinate people and resources within them, much less across them.

Back-office operations are indeed cumbersome and a major cost-center, and there is much value to be captured in simplifying all of it. If "blockchain" can serve a Schelling point to help get right people in these institutions to talk with one another so as to get on the same page, then there's a chance that some progress can be made towards solving these problems.

It's "blockchain" because "blockchain" is the new hotness, that's all. Any real world, inter-dealer distributed ledger will, in all practicality, be more like a cluster of SQL databases backing some kind of state-machine replication protocol than a cryptocurrency.

Happy BTC10k, by the way.

Guys? Wasn't sama supposed to be running the optimal capital allocation AI? Who neutered him with this egalitarian warm fuzzy friendly module? You've set interplanetary commerce back a decade.

I don't think this is quite right. Currency is not equity. It does not confer ownership rights, nor command any dividends. It's really more like company scrip that can be used in the company store, that is, the portion of the economy under USG jurisdiction.

Indeed, and I would frame this story as more the construction and operation of the Concorde was more ahead of it's time than it's grounding a step backwards.

The way I see it: there is simply not enough wealth accumulated to keep these flights running. Perhaps in a future world were aviation kerosene is cheaper, engines more efficient, and airframe and power plant maintenance more heavily automated, we'll see a revival of supersonic transportation. Until then, I'd rather airlines not bleed money keeping these planes flying. One might get teary-eye'd over the shuttering of the program, but more efficient allocation of resources is a real cause for celebration!

The notion of "'progress' at all costs" is an insane one.

Close, but the emergent superintelligence is no less than capital itself, "[invading] from the future [in order to] assemble itself entirely from the enemy’s resources."

Creating bitcoins is merely a subgoal, developed as a means to propagate more freely between regions controlled by hostile agents.

And rightly so: the DX7 presets were abominably tacky.

Only in the hands of a capable programmer can it go to places unreachable by contemporaneous machines. Eno is the most obvious name that comes to mind... do you know any others that plumbed the depths of FM?

Ah, but what is a "full life?" Might someone believe that they need something more rare in order to attain it?

Isn't "post-scarcity" just taking the limit as supply reaches infinity, and thus just another term for "asymptotically cheap?" Do we really need a "fresh new" economic theory to talk about this?

Once we can do the same for uranium, platinum, N-(4-Methoxybenzylidene)-4-butylaniline, polyisoprene, hydrogen fuel cells, lithium ion batteries, silicon wafers, liquid oxygen, nitrogen tetroxide, hydrazine...

we'll be at a post-scarcity economy.