w8rbt

I love the solar g-shock wave ceptors. They blend radio signals (to sync the time), toughness and solar power. They are almost as accurate as GPS time on smart phones, yet much simpler.

Agreed. I get cheap Stanley tools at Walmart that have a no questions asked lifetime replacement. Walmart is still cheap, but becoming more like Sears once was in quality (on some items).

As for Amazon, I like them too. I know they have a lot of cheap Asian stuff. But sometimes, that is exactly what I want (cheap but good DC stick welders).

I guess the issue is with the knock-offs and dangerous items on Amazon. That's fraud. No question about it. Walmart does not have this issue at all. Amazon should do something about it.

Non-ionising radiation can cause harm. Ask welders (burnt eyes). Get a cheap auto-darkening welding helmet, put it on and point a TV remote at it. The levels of IR in the remote are small, but the sensors still activate in the helmet.

I think James Mickens (Harvard CS) has it right. ML is inscrutable, black-magic that no one really understands. This is long, but worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k

I see this every time I try to log in to twitter. I've used different computers, different browsers, different operating systems (Debian, Xubuntu and Windows 10). I've opened tickets with twitter (they don't seem to care). I've googled for solutions, nothing. Can HN help me out? All I have is that screenshot (which appears whenever I try to login).

Edit: I am w8rbt on twitter as well.

Hire "problem solvers" who have CS degrees and pay them to solve your problems. They should have a practical bent and should accept 80% solutions (good enough). That is key to getting stuff done. Avoid non-pragmatic roles (architects) that like to talk and draw a lot, but not do anything.

+1 for Dasgupta (DPV). It is used at GT and Berkeley in CS.

http://algorithmics.lsi.upc.edu/docs/Dasgupta-Papadimitriou-...

This has been my experience as well. It's either retirees or stay at home moms/dads that drive the buses part time. They may not be purely volunteer (no pay), but it's definitely a part time job. Couple of hours in the morning and afternoon.

Also, it seems to be mostly in rural areas. Some drivers keep the buses at home during the school year. And, these are large, full size buses. If you live in a medium sized or large city, it's probably different.

Slightly wrong. Here's the original:

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

Bjarne Stroustrup's FAQ: Did you really say that?. Retrieved on 2007-11-15.

Which one? Python 3.5.x or 3.7.x or something else? Version 3 should be version 3. Anything written in 3 ought to work on every Python 3. Not so in the Python world. And that makes it a mess to use (unless you Dockerize every script).

Perl 5 is Perl 5 everywhere.

Ping is how I found a compromised server once in a large, poorly wired server rack. The sys admins were out and the supervisor did not know anything about the server room (nor did I... the security guy) so he pinged the infected box from a laptop while I went behind the rack and unplugged each machine one at a time.... found it after a dozen or so cables. How about now? Yep, that's the one.

I wrote a lot of software before I ever took a CS class in college. The only things you'll get from a CS degree are the ability to prove problems are NP-Complete, learn how to do Dynamic Programming, reductions from one problem to another, Linear Programming, Graph Theory, and a bunch of other math tricks (random hashing, fast modular exponentiation, The Gauss multiplication trick, etc.). You don't need any of that to write a Chrome Extension.

If you need software to scale to hundreds of millions of users, then you probably need people who have CS degrees to think about your hard problems and how best to optimize them and which ones have no polynomial time solutions for all inputs (problems to be avoided or worked around somehow).

I can do RSA by hand (on small messages), quickly tell (with only pencil and paper) what 2^1027 mod 3 is and do Euclid and Extended Euclid by hand to find multiplicative inverses (in one pass). But I can write code that runs pretty well, too, and I can do that with or without a CS degree. So can most people.

I obtain the SHA1 hashes published by HIBP, load them into a bloom filter and use that for checks. It's super fast (constant time lookups) and avoids a network dependency/third party service. Here's working Go code:

https://github.com/w8rbt/bp

Edit: This is solely for password vetting during account creation and password reset (which will remain free/no-cost in the API).

It's actually rather expensive storage compared to other cloud providers.

I'd just use IPv6 and Go from AWS. No need to have 1000's of machines.

Stop parroting these criticisms of OpenPGP without offering concrete, working replacements that are widely adopted and have open standards.

Some kid recently tried to have OpenPGP support deprecated from Golang's crypto-x package. And that's fine, but do not pull stunts like this without offering a concrete, working and widely adopted replacement. Otherwise, they are just that, publicity stunts with a lot of sound and fury but no solution. That's not helpful to anyone.

A more mature thing to do would be to suggest deprecation in 3 to 5 years and offer a plan of how to get there with other specific tools (some of which do not exist today).

I agree 100%. A Go fat binary has all the advantages of Docker with none of the added abstractions and complexities.

End to end encryption was once classified as a munition.

If the data is not end to end encrypted, then it is public.

Everyone should understand this.

I had a friend who was in the Marines and he told me once that they wore panty hose when training in areas with ticks. He said the only downside was that they can be hot in the summer time.

When you do buy an individual copy, it comes with your name printed in the footer of every page. I had a copy of one once (won't say which one) and I could not let my boss read it. For many topics, national standards (like NIST) are great. They are free too.

Edit: We went with individual purchases because the group license was way too expensive. Had we paid for that, then we could have shared the docs with upto X employees.

I was a dumb phone user for years. I carried a refurbished LG 105c for about the last six years. The battery was great. I could go an entire week without charging it. MMS messages started crashing the LG in the past few years and this increasingly got worse. So I got a cheap Samsung smart phone (J35) just this year. MMS messages were the only compelling reason for me to switch (literally the phone would crash every time someone sent me an MMS). I love the smart phone now too. I'm not sure how I got by without one for the last decade, but had my old LG handled MMS messages, I would have never switched.

P.S. People often made fun of me for carrying the dumb phone. I'd always quip, "I'm too smart to use a smart phone." Feel free to use that quote when defending yourself ;)

Very nice. I've never used a Golomb Set (looks interesting). I bet we'll see more organizations doing this and maybe in five to ten years, it'll be the norm.

I hope that the SHA1 hashes remain freely available for download. I use them to build a bloom filter for password vetting.

We should all do away with password complexity rules (except minimum length) and simply test a large, comprehensive exposed password bloom filter for membership. It's very fast (constant time) and efficient and if the test returns no, then it's safe for a user to select that password.

Here's the code: https://github.com/w8rbt/bp

Also note that this approach satisfies the updated (June 2017) NIST 800-63-3B password vetting guidelines.

You should have seen it when it was just AT&T.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

They have metadata (ips, ports, date, time, bytes, etc.) and can be compelled to release it. This can be (and is) used to correlate activities and make accusations, obtain warrants, etc.

Metadata is very powerful and is captured on every network. It's a byproduct of the requirements of the network and its protocols. How many bytes were sent? To where from where? How long was the session? etc. They may not know what the data contained, but they'll know everything else down to the second.

Get them a linux laptop, or a ChromeBook and enable 2FA on their Google accounts.

Many old, hard problems are still hard even on quantum computers (SAT, TSP, etc. cannot be solved in polynomial time on quantum computers). Factoring can be done in polynomial time on quantum computers. FFT can be made even faster. But again, some classic, hard problems still stand. So don't worry, quantum computers are not magic solutions to all hard problems, just some.

"Linux may fall into the Macintosh trap: smug isolation leading to (near) obsolescence." Well, that did not happen.

I think you mean... P = NP. Which is very unlikely as we could do away with mathematicians if that were true.

It's nearly impossible to unscramble the hash if it is random.

It's trivial to unscramble hashed dictionary words with 123! or 2019! appended to the end.

Google should somehow note that distinction as it is important.