Hacker News Reader

_nhyneson YouTube crypto giveaway scams

I was surprised at how few spelling errors the scam had until I got to the transaction hashes and wallet addresses.

_nhyneson All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

Perhaps not the best of the 44th boyes. I'm sure yours ranks highly elsewhere.

_nhyneson The Tinkerbell Griftopia

> “No one knows what it means, but it's provocative. Gets the people going”

This is actually a high quality quote from Blades of Glory, a high quality film. Apt reference either way, though.

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blades_of_Glory_(film)

_nhyneson Bitcoin’s first day as El Salvador’s legal tender

What about algorithmic stable coins like Dai, Terra, Fei, USDN, or cUSD? You still move them using your private key, but at least there's no centralized blocklist.

_nhyneson GitHub Copilot Generated Insecure Code in 40% of Circumstances During Experiment

(Strictly) copying data between protobufs is pretty hard to mess up.

_nhyneson Automatic Extraction of Secrets from the Transistor Jungle Using Laser-Assisted [pdf]

> One might argue that it is not always true that the adversary can program different keys into the NVM on a training device, for instance, when one-time programmable (OTP) memories like e-fuses or ROMs are used. We admit that such keys cannot be extracted using our approach.

The SGX remote attestation key is burnt into the chip during manufacture and isn’t programmable.

_nhyneson TermPair: Terminal sharing with AES-GCM 128 bit end-to-end encryption

It could be made more resistant to birthday attacks by using the session message count as the IV, but I guess it wouldn't matter unless someone kept one of these terminals open for a really long time.

_nhyneson Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

I thought that the parent post was diplomatic and well hedged, given the sensitivity of the subject material: "one facet [...] certain interactions [...] can cause [...]." Furthermore, the thesis that biology affects fitness is well established and is indeed essential to the process of evolution. Nature cannot be discounted, but, as I think you intend to emphasize, it's not the end of the discussion when humans can do so much at the application layer.

> [...] acceptance that genders are different [...]

Males are going to have a hard time being wet nurses.

> [...] races are different [...]

The San and Inuit people have some very useful adaptations for their respective extreme environments.

It's kind of challenging to take sweeping offense to a statement phrased using an existential quantifier.

_nhyneson Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) (2018)

https://github.com/oasisprotocol/oasis-core/tree/master/docs...

This one was my first exposure to ADRs. I liked how they went with something standard instead of doing the blockchain traditional X Improvement Proposal (BIP, EIP).

_nhyneson Evidence for entropy maximisation in human free choice behaviour

Of course. That's why the first two versions of the Matrix failed.

_nhyneson The Babel Routing Protocol

The intro suggests that it’s for “unstable networks.” The protocol is required by the HomeNet project [0, 1], so residential networking (possibly including IoT) seems to be one application.

[0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/homenet/about/

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-homenet-babel-pr...

_nhyneson Is deep learning a new kind of programming?

> What other statistical machine learning algorithm gives you a state machine as an output?

* hidden Markov models

* autoregressive models

* learned LQR

Sure, some of those have finite memory, but RNNs are practically limited–not as easily quantified.

I see what you're saying about the single-step operation appearing unique, but I also think that RNNs can be viewed through a lens such that they look like "normal" programming concepts like generators and folding iterators.

_nhyneson Is deep learning a new kind of programming?

RNNs provided by common frameworks really do give a matrix back (examples [0, 1]). They're about as stateful as any other object or generator function.

[0]: https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.nn.RNN.html

[1]: https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/cudnn/api/index.html#cu...

_nhyneson macOS Big Sur

If you mean like Vimium, there's Vimari [https://github.com/televator-apps/vimari].

_nhyneson Dockerfile Security Best Practices

Relatedly, rust-musl-builder [0] is useful for getting Rust binaries to run on the `static` instead of `cc` base image.

[0] https://github.com/emk/rust-musl-builder

_nhyneson We Can Do Better Than SQL

You mean like an ORM?

_nhyneson Data Stewardship: The Untapped Potential of the Internet

The idea of data stewardship seems especially relevant given the increasing ability of, e.g., adtech companies to construct models of their users with the end goal of having a brain-in-vat-style replica used to optimize ad placement.

The article doesn't go into much detail about the mechanism, but it seems like one would bring together the computation and data in a trusted environment, orchestrated by the blockchain (nb: you'll have to click the CTA link at the bottom to find this information). The environment is trusted hardware in the case of the Oasis Protocol network, but crypto methods would also work, depending on the algorithm.

The separation of consensus from (trusted) execution cleanly divides the concerns of durability+auditibility and confidentiality. However, it might be useful to go one step further and unbundle the two entirely, so to increase the flexibility of the computation (e.g., introducing non-determinism) and reduce the reliance on a particular root of trust. In such a model, the service provider and user would suss out the TEE out of band, and commit only the provenance and (shielded) results to the blockchain. Downstream data consumers would use the latter based on their trust in the former.

_nhyneson nCino S-1

Indeed. A.S. G^2P was meant to chide the current administration for the (clearly very political) travel bans [0], temporary (??) suspension of visas (incl. H1-B) [1], and general racist isolationism.

[0]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/20/881245867/trump-expected-to-s...

_nhyneson FlexBuffers

The codegen for flatbuffers is fairly extensive, but C++ is still the blessed language for gRPC, however [0].

[0] https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/flatbuffers_grpc_guide_...

_nhyneson Generics and Compile-Time in Rust

crate-level inner attribute macros are still unsupported [0], so if you want those, you'll need to do the codegen before the compiler takes a pass or from within the compiler itself (using, say an after_parsing [1] hook). They're really helpful for making a deeply embedded DSL.

[0] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/54726

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/nightly-rustc/rustc_driver...

_nhyneson Sonder: E-Ink Keyboard

That’s an interesting idea, actually. A keyboard that could visually identify state might be useful for education: say a typing or Vim tutor. It’d be kind of nifty if a key started flashing so that you could identify its location (for learning a layout), or had a little icon suggesting “insert” or whatever command it triggers. T’would be an expensive teaching tool, though.

_nhyneson East Australian Humpback whale bounces back from near extinction

I think that aspic might be a better gelatin-based analogy. Otherwise it’s just mastication without chewing.

_nhyneson Why we have so many problems with our teeth

> Raw carrots

Have you tried slathering them in an unhealthy amount of peanut butter (+extra salt, sans palm oil)? It's basically food crack on par with roasted Brussels sprouts. Heck, skip roasting the Brussels and serve those raw with peanut butter, too!

_nhyneson Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

It requires iOS 13. Here's the code that does it:

    var req: SFSpeechRecognitionRequest;
    if #available(iOS 13, *) {
        req.requiresOnDeviceRecognition = true
    }

And the docs link: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech/sfspeechrec...

_nhyneson Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

I'm not sure that I understand this sentiment. Is the worry about COVID specifically (and hence would be abated by a vaccine or herd immunity), or is it about increased awareness of all infectious diseases? My lack of understanding stems from a (perhaps naive) assumption that social distancing will eventually go away along with the threat. I'd be glad to hear others' opinions on the matter.

_nhyneson Satellite Babies

Wouldn't they have had their children raised by their parents?

_nhyneson Show HN: A programmable tooltip on Mac OS

macOS has BSD date and Linux ships with GNU.

_nhyneson How Does Kidz Bop Censor Songs?

I thought the same thing until I was recently introduced to the Wikipedia article [0] that suggests it’s actually for the purpose of family vacation.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_vacation#United_State...

_nhyneson Eat for $1.50 per Day – Layoffs, Coronavirus Quarantine, Food Shortages

To add to this, Textured Vegetable Protein (TVP) is often in stock despite other dry proteins being unavailable due to most people not recognizing it as food. It's incredibly filling (digests for hours), fairly inexpensive (~$3.50/lb), and quite high in micronutrients like potassium [0]. This is what I switched to after not having a kitchen in which to make pseudo soylent [1].

I'd recommend preparing TVP in the following manner:

1. boil some water and add to TVP (add chia seeds, if possible, for fiber and extra fat-soluble vitamins)

2. in a separate bowl, partially microwave diced cheap vegetables (alternating carrots and whatever was on sale was my go-to)

3. add steamed veg to TVP, add spices/condiments, and microwave for a bit longer

4. stir in peanut butter

should take about five minutes total

For breakfast-y TVP, I replaced the vegetables with cocoa powder. Peanut butter can also be subbed with any free food that you might find (e.g., from lab meetings).

[0] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/339371/n...

[1] https://github.com/nhynes/pbean

_nhyneson Mastercard investing in technology to identify commuters by gait, heartbeat

And, more generally, one specific instance is called UnifyID: https://unify.id/