Hacker News Reader

colonelxcon Paradoxes of Probability and Other Statistical Strangeness

I mostly find it interesting in that people could think that the chance is 1/3 (and that it may even be obvious!). After reading the description I can understand what they are getting at, but I think the conditional probability is messed up.

Instead of P(Monday | Heads) = P(Monday | Tails) = P(Tuesday | Tails) it is really P(Monday | Heads&Awake) = P(Monday | Tails&Awake) = P(Tuesday| Tails&Awake) or something like that. But the interviewer isn't asking about that, they are asking for the probability of the coin. The 3 positions are only exhaustive given that you are awake to be interviewed about them, not exhaustive of possible states (it's missing P(Tuesday | Heads&Asleep)). Since you're always awakened at least once, I find the argument that being awake has 'given you information that it is not tuesday AND heads' is pretty weak. While true, both heads and tails expect to be awoken while it is not both tuesday AND heads.

colonelxcon LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves for Third Time

Not an expert, but the evidence is pointing towards continued expansion until a 'big freeze'

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

colonelxcon A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

Apple does have buses.

colonelxcon Wendelstein 7-X stellarator getting ready for the next phase of operation [pdf]

Home page for the project, which provides some higher level details: http://www.ipp.mpg.de/w7x

colonelxcon Cache eviction: when are randomized algorithms better than LRU? (2014)

It is indirectly referenced near the bottom of the page, with a pointer to http://brooker.co.za/blog/2012/01/17/two-random.html, which references http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/handbook20...

colonelxcon USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

I don't think it is helpful because there is no indication that they tried to pass their 'recommendations' to the people behind this site. It reads like an ad for a competing site.

colonelxcon Autodraw – Fast Drawing for Everyone

Android Wear can already do this.

https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/draw-emoji/

colonelxcon Keep the Internet Open

Maybe a better example is paying more for electricity from 'green' sources like solar/wind. This is an option offered by PG&E right now.

Comparing to websites, you can have all the "common" websites that have local caches, peered with your ISP directly, for low rate X. If you want access to a niche video streaming startup that has to go through other peers we haven't optimized for, you pay more.

It's still not a perfect analogy, but it forms a similar comparison "Where do I get (content|electricty) from?"

colonelxcon Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

They didn't "just make" anything. They've had vote fuzzing, shadow banning and more from early days.

As both the techcrunch post and the actual reddit post say, the rules around it were complicated and hard to reason about. They've basically refactored and come up with a simpler set of rules.

colonelxcon Dyn Analysis Summary of Friday October 21 Attack

Much of the complexity is likely in building and managing such a large botnet.

There also isn't a lot of details here on the exact nature of the traffic. They say it was hard to distinguish between legitimate traffic and this malicious traffic. So the botnet is at least rotating their requests through lists of customers hosted with them (though that isn't complex, but it is forward thinking. If the botnet was all making non-stop requests for just a few domains, that would be a strong signal to start filtering traffic, first internally, then pushing ISPs to block it upstream).

colonelxcon The Ethernet PAUSE frame

Looks like it is enabled by default (for at least some NICs) in linux when the receive buffer is too full.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/ixgbe.tx...

I wonder if it is an issue with the kernel not keeping up, or if it is due to some other odd hardware effect (sometimes "gigabit" nics on embedded boards are really connected to a USB2.0 bus, which is slower than gigabit).

colonelxcon Return of incandescent light bulbs as MIT makes them more efficient than LEDs

If you are looking for "natural" indoor lighting (like for a bedroom or living room), you probably want a "warm"er color, on the range of 2400k to 2600k.

http://go/wiki/Color_temperature#Categorizing_different_ligh...

colonelxcon Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

They don't have to if you use Basic or Manual Scaling (Then they can run up to 24 hours).

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/java/modules/#Java_I...

If you run multiple modules at once (some serving the frontend, some for longer tasks w/task queues), you can have the best of both worlds and use different scaling options for each.

(I also work at Google, but also not on App Engine)

colonelxcon Show HN: A playground for in-browser interpreters

Very nice. I really like how it pretty prints python objects. I wish it was a bit more "repl"-y, but the quick auto-evaluation helps make up for that.

I currently use https://repl.it/ for an in browser interpreter/repl.

colonelxcon Amazon, Google race to get human DNA into the cloud

First google hit for "face generation from dna"

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/building-face-and-...

You're right of course, there is a lot more to appearance than genetics, but these approximations do exist now, and will get better. jakeogh's litter example is closer to reality than he probably intended, which just shows how fast this technology is coming along.

> Nonetheless, the police in Columbia, S.C., last month released a sketch of a possible suspect. Rather than an artist’s rendering based on witness descriptions, the face was generated by a computer relying solely on DNA found at the scene of the crime.

colonelxcon Early exposure 'cuts peanut allergy' by over 80%

They aren't a cure, but they are an improvement. I started taking allergy shots 2 years ago (now just getting them once a month).

I used to suffer badly in the spring, even having to go home early from work on occasion (despite taking claratin or zyrtec). I still take a daily allergy pill, but that is now sufficient to curb my allergies.

The downsides are the time and the cost over the course of years. The first 6 months or so, I was getting allergy shots 3 times a week (which also requires waiting in the waiting area for 30 mins). I got a lot of reading done, but it is still a lot of time. It's also pretty expensive (or at least mine is, may have to do with the antigen being custom made for my allergies, I've heard some places have generic "grass" or "tree" vials).

colonelxcon Winnowing: Local Algorithms for Document Fingerprinting (2003) [pdf]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinHash

I'm definitely not an expert in this area, but I know coworkers have used MinHash for similarity detection.

colonelxcon 2+2=What? Parents rail against Common Core math

This is an April fool's day post.

colonelxcon Realistic terrain in 130 lines of JavaScript

Reminded me of "Polygonal Map Generation For Games": http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...

past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3868893

colonelxcon Ask HN: I'm visiting SF for 3 days, what do I do?

http://makerfaire.com/bay-area-2014/

This saturday and sunday

colonelxcon LastPass Now Checks If Your Sites Are Affected by Heartbleed

Take a look a scans.io. They have internet wide https scans every couple weeks.

colonelxcon Infectious disease doesn't care why you're unvaccinated

Here is an in-browser demonstration of herd immunity[1], which I think shows the importance pretty well. It was posted on HN before[2].

[1] http://op12no2.me/toys/herd/index.php?scenario=intro

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5190234

colonelxcon ZMap: Internet scanner maps all of IPv4 in 45 minutes

I'm somewhat surprised there is no reference to scanrand[1][2], a fast stateless syn scanner by Dan Kaminsky in 2002. It wasn't directly geared towards scanning the entire Internet, but instead scanning large subnets (like for a pen test of a /16 network... takes a long time to scan).

It is a bit obscure, but it did do tricks like encoding encrypted data in extra mutable fields (just the sequence number for scanrand) for validation purposes. Actually, scanrand 2.0 can apparently measure latency (without state!) by encoding timing information in the source port field, which zmap doesn't currently do.

I think this research is great, but I just hate to see interesting old projects get forgotten.

[1] http://dankaminsky.com/2002/11/18/77/ [2] http://www.sans.org/security-resources/idfaq/scanrand.php [3] http://s3.amazonaws.com/dmk/SBO_Hiver.ppt

colonelxcon Carberp Source Code Leaked

See this thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/1h1lcs/carberp_sourc...

colonelxcon Microsoft Said To Give Zero Day Exploits To US Government Before It Patches Them

This article is just a regurgitation of a part of a bloomberg article[0] that is already on the front page[1].

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-t...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5878365

colonelxcon Bulletproof demos using Chrome's playback mode

You can just run the executable, you don't need to call start.

"C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --record-mode

colonelxcon TDD, BDD, and the tea tasting lady

This is called mutation testing. Here is an article I read recently that I thought was a good introduction to the idea:

http://dev.theladders.com/2013/02/mutation-testing-with-pit-...

colonelxcon To prevent hacking, disable Universal Plug and Play now

https://community.rapid7.com/community/infosec/blog/2013/01/...

colonelxcon My Father's "Eviscerated" work - Son of J.R.R. Tolkien finally speaks out

IvyMike wasn't asking how it was done, but why people still seem to get screwed by it. Why didn't Jackson's lawyers know better? Asking for something like a percentage of the box office sales, or similar should be standard practice.