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dylanfw

173 karma · joined July 26, 2016

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dylanfw··on Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix
To avoid spoiling a 30 year old movie: ROT13 `Gur Hfhny Fhfcrpgf`
dylanfw··on Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
> his employees (also non-US and under no affirmative obligation to learn the laws of every country in the world just because they run a website)

Employees of financial businesses are absolutely obligated to learn the laws of every country where they provide services.

dylanfw··on GitHub MCP exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP
The "surprise" is not that the agent can respond with private repository details, it's that it can receive and act upon prompts issued by someone other than the person running the agent, hence "prompt _injection_".

Or to come back to the SQL injection analogy, no one is surprised that the web app can query the database for password hashes. The surprise is that it can be instructed to do so when loading the next image in a carousel.

dylanfw··on Python’s Preprocessor
I think OP is commenting more so on the reversal of the developer’s relationship with rules of syntax than their personal capabilities.
dylanfw··on Infinite Proofs: The Effects of Mathematics on David Foster Wallace (2012)
What on earth are you talking about Saul Kripke and modal logic being some kind of cultural studies tool for “unmooring people from the authority of math”? And your lumping of Wagner, Marx, and Nietszche with Hubbard and Osho as “inventors of religions” is baffling.
dylanfw··on NES Tetris AI hits 102M points and level 237
I was curious as well and found this video explanation[1]. The idea is that tapping on the back of the controller pushes it up into the player’s thumb which is resting on the D-pad causing a button press.

[1] https://youtu.be/n-BZ5-Q48lE

dylanfw··on Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency
I think we might be due for an update to Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment:

"Every program attempts to expand until it can process _payments_. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

dylanfw··on Playing chess is a life lesson in concentration
You might enjoy "Chess960" (or Fischer Random Chess): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess

The order of the back-rank pieces is randomized (but identical for both players).

dylanfw··on Fork Bomb
Change that `except Exception:` to just a bare `except:` to catch KeyboardInterrupts as well and prevent Ctrl+C from killing any of them while it expands.
dylanfw··on Would aliens understand lambda calculus? (2018)
This reminds me of a passage in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter discussing the Golden Record[1].

""" [C]onsider a meteorite which, instead of deciphering the outer-space Bach record, punctures it with colossal indifference, and continues in its merry orbit. It has interacted with the record in a way which we feel disregards the record's meaning. Therefore, we might well feel tempted to call the meteorite "stupid". But perhaps we would thereby do the meteorite a disservice. Perhaps it has a "higher intelligence" which we in our Earth chauvinism cannot perceive, and its interaction with the record was a manifestation of that higher intelligence. Perhaps, then, the record has a "higher meaning"-totally different from that which we attribute to it; perhaps its meaning depends on the type of intelligence perceiving it. Perhaps. """

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

dylanfw··on Mathematician Disproves Hedetniemi’s Graph Theory Conjecture
Thank you! That makes complete sense when I consider the 4 color example of a world map. I didn't even consider that most graphs would have "overlapping borders" on such a map.

An extra thank you for apparently creating a new account to assist me. (I think that's what the green username indicates, at least).

dylanfw··on Mathematician Disproves Hedetniemi’s Graph Theory Conjecture
Thank you! That makes complete sense when I consider the 4 color example of a world map. I didn't even consider that most graphs would have "overlapping borders" on such a map.
dylanfw··on Mathematician Disproves Hedetniemi’s Graph Theory Conjecture
Could somebody clear up my confusion with these two statements that appear contradictory?

"Do four colors suffice to color any map? — took more than a century to answer (the answer is yes, in case you were wondering)."

and

"Returning our attention to colorings in which connected nodes are supposed to be different colors, we have no guarantee that the five colors in our palette will be sufficient to color the graph G"

How can it be that 4 colors is sufficient for any graph, but for our hypothetical graph G we can't be sure that 5 colors are sufficient?

dylanfw··on For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose
“[A] lot of these jobs he talks about are what I call "zero-sum jobs" - it sucks that they have to exist, but if any individual firm stopped having them, that firm would be behind.”

This part of it all, in particular, reminds so much of “Meditations on Moloch”[1] . If anyone hasn’t read through this, I highly recommend it. It’s an inspiring look into how human society gets trapped into these games where no one wins, but to stop playing is much worse.

1: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

dylanfw··on The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season
You can create “Routines” on the Echo (like IFTTT procedures). You could easily create one for “Alexa turn on all lights” that triggers all of your smart home lights regardless of brand.
dylanfw··on How to break a Captcha system in 15 minutes with Machine Learning
If you're not asked anything after checking the box then your browser's fingerprint has already been determined to be a real human by enough partner sites using the Captcha. Try opening a private browsing window and checking the box to see the second verification part.
dylanfw··on It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar
Justin Guitar[1] is a great place to start!

1: https://www.justinguitar.com/

dylanfw··on How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free
> Those guys were writers, not philosophers in the first place.

It's interesting that you begin with a comment like this to seemingly dismiss Satre and Camus as not being real philosophers, and then you proceed to put forward your own terribly unfounded philosophy with no supporting argument.

dylanfw··on Visiting a site that uses Disqus when not logged in sends URL to Facebook
Bruce Schneier's security blog implements something like this, providing an on/off switch for each social network's "Like", "+1", etc.

https://www.schneier.com/

dylanfw··on The XSS Game by Google
Chrome's XSS filter can still be circumvented in quite a few instances. The easiest way I've seen is when the attacker controls at least two variables and can split the XSS across them in such a way that neither half appears malicious but when loaded into the page they create a malicious script.

Example: ?a=<script>void('&b=');alert('XSS')</script>

The value of a is <script>void(' and the value of b is ');alert('XSS')</script>.

dylanfw··on Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build
I don't know for sure about ZSH and can't test it at the moment, but Bash has -- for this purpose. It may work in ZSH as well.
dylanfw··on Before the Flood [video]
I haven't seen this yet, but for anyone that's interested: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (Nine Inch Nails, Social Network, Gone Girl, Girl w/ the Dragon Tattoo, and more) provide the score for this film.
dylanfw··on Why Do Americans Stink at Math?
> Whitehead and Russell famously took several hundred pages in Principia Mathematica to prove the validity of the proposition 1+1=2. What is it that kids are understanding that W&R took much pain over?

W&R proved 1+1=2 in their axiomatic system. It wasn't done to prove once and for all that 1+1 is in fact 2, but to show that their system produced mathematical truths. The truth of 1+1=2 was already assumed and understood since they were kids, and that's why it was necessary that their system also produce it.

Of course PM was obliterated by Godel shortly after.

dylanfw··on Thank HN: From Google form to $1k in revenue in one month
> "Madness."

Blocked by ad blocker.

dylanfw··on Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
Apologies. Throughout my CS undergrad I had only been given the impression and understanding that Big-O measured worst case (lower bound, no worse than), Big-Theta average case, and Big-Omega best case (upper bound, no better than). Looking into it more now, I see that there are some more subtleties I either missed in class or was never taught.

Thanks for correcting me!

dylanfw··on A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web
Seeing "LaTeX" (lay-tech) and "arXiv" together in your sentence made me finally realize that arXiv is pronounced "archive". I've been reading it as "arx-iv" for years.
dylanfw··on Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
> Its average case is O(n log(n)). Its worst case is O(n^2). Which do you call its big-O?

I know this is irrelevant to the larger point of your post, and I'm sure that you know this already, but the worst case is the big-O. This is just another reason why "big-O" is not the most helpful thing to discuss in practice.

dylanfw··on The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations
> No, the companies involved have clout to lobby to change it.

> This used to be how the US operated, how both majorities (women) and minorities got the right to vote, and more.

You might be giving a bit too much credit to company lobbyists and not enough to law-breaking activists. Both examples involved extensive illegal actions to accelerate change.

dylanfw··on 'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real
> They use it to surf the web and check their email. It makes no sense.

There's a scene where we can see Elliot running CentOS on his personal laptop. Not that lends any realism (CentOS is more common on servers, not PCs) but it does show their awareness of Linux beyond Kali.

dylanfw··on Moving Towards a More Secure Web
In what way are you connecting recent password dumps to hackers attacking Certificate Authorities? If someone controlled the CA, they would also need to control the target website and/or the victim's home network in order to MITM the connection and snag the credentials. Also, this would allow them to capture plaintext passwords and as far as I know all of the major password dumps recently have been hashed passwords indicating that the database was breached, not that a CA was compromised and thousands of users were MITMed.
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