yoha

You are thinking of hashes. Look up cryptographic signatures.

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

Well, just do it:

    < unformatted.json python -mjson.tool | vim -

This is effectively wishful thinking.

If a bug causes an unexpected undefined value, it will lead your code to an undefined behavior. It might work well 999 times and wipe everything on the 1000th execution. Thankfully, Javascript is mostly limited to web browsers.

Exceptions make it so that nothing unexpected happen. This is especially useful when you do not know the whole codebase. Of course, there are many cases when you can just ignore the errors. Exceptions allow you to fine tune this.

Rubik's Cube. Try solving it yourself for a while (a few months/years). You will probably not completely solve it, but even solving one face, trying to solve a second one, trying to complete rings instead, etc, should get you to experiment and use new thinking models.

I mostly agree, but I'd argue that epicycles actually made useful and testable predictions, although we found a simpler description later on. The article underlines a lack of refutable theories. Thus, I think [1] is a better analogy.

[1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Dragon_in_My_Garage

I think the point is that this kind of article tends to present it as uniformly better, rather than contrasting the good and the bad.

I feel this is an instance of Flanderization [1]. There are definitely some differences between France and the US, but they get blown out of proportion. And this is not specific to France, other articles take northern countries as the golden examples, or Japan, or China, by focusing on one particular aspect.

On the other hand, it can be good to keep in mind that other models of society can exist, even though they may not be exactly realistic.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization

Most common elements in the universe [1]: Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon, Neon, Iron, Nitrogen

Most common elements in the human body [2]: Hydrogen, Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen

I agree that we can skip helium and neon since those are noble gases, but I do find the lack of iron interesting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body#... (look for table, sort per atomic percent)

A signature is not a hash. As long as you know the right public key (which only needs to be transferred once), you can verify the legitimacy of the signature regardless of how it was transmitted.

I agree that password managers are great. They let you use completely different passwords for each service, efficiently mitigating any compromise. Also, they tend to encourage you to use actually random passwords (using a generator).

However, most users will not bother, and getting them to use at least decent passwords would be a great step forward. Additionally, you still need a master password for your password manager.

However, such an approach corresponds to a few dozens bits of entropy at best (some for the approach, some for the length of text used, and a few for the numeral depending on whence it comes).

As stated by zamalek, the trick to not memorizing many passwords is to use a password manager.

The worst bias is letting the users choose their passwords. They should use a generator such as [1]. The reason is that the "entropy" is not a characteristic of a password but of the way it is generated. Computers are much better at entropy than humans.

[1] http://passwordcreator.org/

Offtopic:

> ding ding ding ding! We have a winner.

I cannot speak for others, but, at least to me, this reads as extremely condescending: it makes it sound like other commenters are basically picking arguments at random and you are the only one to know the truth.

From my experience, a self-hosted web aggregator is the most convenient option. I initially wrote my own (very clunky) in PHP when I realized Thunderbird would not do.

I am currently using FreshRSS [1]. MiniFlux [2] and TinyTinyRSS [3] are pretty good to.

[1] FreshRSS http://freshrss.org/

[2] MiniFlux https://miniflux.net/

[3] TinyTinyRSS https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home

You are confusing two things. Here are plausible definitions:

* market: system for trading assets between willing participants

* economics: modeling the behavior of markets assuming rational behavior of participants

The definition of markets has nothing to do with rationality.

I browse with Javascript disabled by default (NoScript), and it makes it much less painful.

Although there is the odd case of a completely broken design that even Firefox Reader cannot detect, it does save me many other issues, and makes everything load much faster!

Very good point! Since some websites still require PIN codes (passwords made of digits), you would have to restrict yourself to something like 8 digit long password, which is not very secure, even with a slow hash (scrypt iteration).

My main gripe is with:

> Nothing is stored so there’s nothing to steal.

Nothing is stored, but it's public knowledge. In a traditional password store, there are two levels of security: limited access to the encrypted passwords, and encryption itself. With their approach, there is only one level: encryption.

The counterpoint would be this:

> There are thousands of iterations of Scrypt, making brute-forcing infeasible.

But this is trivial to do with a conventional password store.

As you said, password expiration is in contradiction with the last point:

> No need to sync data, as there’s nothing to sync! You can use this script or our API (coming soon) from anywhere in the world, and from any device, to generate your passwords.

> Though, fwiw, once you got off that page it looks more like a regular site and there aren't as many dinos.

IMHO, I feel like you are doing it the wrong way around. When I open a website for the first time, I usually only have a very general idea of its purpose. When I see the home page of Imzy, I do not think “Oh this is ridiculous, no serious general purpose forum for good conversation should look like this”, but rather “Oh, I guess it's more targeted at children-specific topics, like simple games, learning a first language, and basic maths, at most. Probably not for me, I'll go look elsewhere.”.

OTOH, if you have a less ambivalent home page, I do not really care what the actual website looks like, as long as it is usable (design is first about usability). So, sure, dinos all the way!

I see you have put a few screnshots that illustrate the kinds of topics that should interest the Imzy's community. However, most users won't ever bother to scroll, and those who will, won't scroll that far. Putting the examples so that they are visible with no scrolling (and maybe including discussions in addition to article/self-text) would go a long way

Also, your <noscript> elements (that you use for storing sending static data to the client) are visible when Javascript is disabled. I see you have a CSS rule to hide them and it seems to work well in Chromium 49.0.2623.108, but not in Mozilla Firefox 45.0.2

Of course, some have. See Stuxnet (actually somewhat serious). The point is that this intersection is fairly small and only a fraction of compromised systems will actually get things messed up.

> if there are so many hydropower plans et al vulnerable for VNC, how come we didn't have some major catastrophe?

> And there is no shortage of people out there who would not think twice to blow things up.

From my observation, those people tend to be those that care more about doing "flashy" things (i.e. be seen), rather than solving problems and bypassing protections. People that get access to important systems or acquire the skills to mess things up tend to be satisfied by having solved a puzzle and being able to mess things up.

This is a sensible argument, but here is my counterpoint.

Such situation rely on mutual trust, and only work on small scales (village, loose neighborhood). On the Internet, there are billions of people that live close by.

I think the main discrepancy is that people really do not understand either that the Internet connect them to everyone or how vast the world really is.

Compound interest is only a magical force on long term investing with decent interest (2% is fairly low for real investing). With a somewhat realistic 7% (usual growth of the S&P500) yield over 40 years, this is actually visible:

    >>> 1.07**40
    14.974457839206984

For comparison, linear interest would only be:

    >>> 1 + .07*40
    3.8000000000000003

In the comic, the magic fails to work:

    >>> 1.02**10
    1.2189944199947573
    >>> 1 + .02*10
    1.2

Finally, do note that compound interest is a step up from linear interest, which itself would already be better than "no savings".

Use RES keyboard navigation to navigate to top comment, fold it, and then go to next. With my settings, I just have to type OMJ.

Agreed for the ability to change vote. This is most likely due to the way the buttons work (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11307758), so as to keep the code as tight as possible.

It really needs some polishing, but I am using a handcrafted UserScript [1] that lets me navigate comments with the keyboard (j/k as well as p/g/J/K), fold/unfold (m) and vote (a/z). Also some styling to ease reading (larger font, indentation marker). However, the "reply" (r) feature is not complete (i.e. broken), "last" (G) shortcut fails for some reason and flagged comments break the navigation.

If you look in the relevant folder, you may notice it was initially designed for Word Press (WP.user.js), more precisely SlateStarCodex, and seems to work for most such blogs. SSC.user.js is just meant to improve the styling of SlateStarCodex.

[1] http://sinon.org/userscripts/HN.user.js

> only elements we know about exist

The interesting thing with elements is that they describe almost all conventional matter in a very predictable pattern and we can pretty much enumerate them. Some scientists are even trying to make the next elements (Ununennium for instance), even though there are incredibly unlikely to occur in nature.

Granted, elements only describe a fraction of all matter, but we do not really expect anything complex to last long as plasma (stars), and we do not know much of dark matter anyway.

> no matter what conditions might be carbon is an absolute must for life

GP was answering this exact point. In short, it's just that the other elements do not look as promising as carbon for building complex molecules (whether we know them or not).

There is no support for that.

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

Nitpick: s/1m^2/1m^3

> I think it'd float to the top though. It'll need some kind of weight...

A simple way of thinking about it is that boats float because they contain air (rather than water). The fact that they are upside down or the right way up changes little.

Since the rowboat can support two people, it should definitely float to the surface, dragging them along with it.

My bad. I was confused by the two green nicknames and did not notice they were different. Glad it is useful!