Hacker News Reader

nxon How to Do What You Love (2006)

He also implies nobody would write a foreword if it wasn't for the prestige. I would be honored to write a foreword for people I admire, I'd do it even if my name wasn't on the book.

nxon Gauging Your Distraction

What gray lady?

nxon Brainfuck compiler in brainfuck

Awib is an optimizing compiler:

o) Sequences of '-','<','>' and '+' are contracted into single instructions. E.g. "----" is replaced with a single ADD(4).

SUB(4)?

nxon Here's my 4 hr experiment into making a viral twitter app

Lasted about 2 hours.

nxon Triangular buttons key to touchscreen typing success

Baker told Register Hardware today that each triangular key has significantly more dead space around it than you’d find on a standard Qwerty layout. Consequently, users are more likely to press the correct key each time they tap.

Or less likely to press any key at all?

nxon Wolfram Alpha: The Wikipedia Killer

I really want to believe that, but we'll have to check later on. I'd like to see the OS community triumphing over commercial solutions.

nxon Poll: What kind of cell phone do you have?

Nokia 1100.

nxon [dead]

Because it was THAT hard to Google it, right? http://www.google.com/search?q=google+ocean

nxon Logicly: a logic gate simulator

Would be really cool if one could define "new gates" in terms of gates, e.g. a half-adder, a full-adder.

nxon Coding Horror: Has The Virtualization Future Arrived?

I hate Jeff, but this post makes sense: instead of being constrained by the backwards compatibility requirement, one can just pack every past version of the software on each release, just like HTTP clients and servers do when they ask for the protocol version.

nxon Ask HN: What other HN-like sites do you read?

Why the name change? Have I missed something?

nxon Tweenbots - A social experiment of cute autonomous robots and crowdsourced help

It would've been twice as cool if it could take voice instructions.

nxon Ask HN: Are you an active or reactive leaner?

I usually can understand abstract concepts, but also need, or prefer, to work all the way from the bottom up, just to make sure it works like I think it does. I can't just believe something the teacher tells me, I have to prove it works that way, based on past knowledge. But it is necessary to be able to function in higher levels of abstraction, I understand matrix multiplication as a bunch of dot-products, not as sums of products of numbers, for example, and from that easily derives the need for equal number of columns/rows.

nxon What Stack Overflow Can Teach You

I'm not a native speaker of English, I've studied the language for seven or eight years, and a couple of months ago I signed up on Hacker News and Reddit. I've learned a lot about establishing strong and rich discussions by reading and writing comments and messages. Generalizing, this idea could be boiled down simply to "practice is good." Of course, all the years I took formal English classes were very useful, but we must not underestimate the power of putting our knowledge to use. Theory without practice is meaningless, knowledge without use is, well, useless.

nxon Ask HN: MAC vs PC for a developer?

Exactly, that's why I assume everyone who is on Hacker News is aware of the Linux branch of operating systems, and at least isn't naive enough not to consider them in this kind of choice.

nxon Ask HN: MAC vs PC for a developer?

That's my point: "Mac PCs or non-Mac PCs".

nxon Ask HN: MAC vs PC for a developer?

I'd argue that "PC" has two meanings then. I'm going for "non-Mac PC", since that's what the title implies by separating Macs from the rest of PCs, and because I don't feel sensitive to exclude a huge set of possibilities.

nxon Ask HN: MAC vs PC for a developer?

It's not the same. If you say "Mac or PC", it is understood that you mean "Apple computers, or other type of general-purpose personal computers, i.e., non-Mac PCs". But if we interpret "PC" only as "Windows computer", then there's this huge number of OSes we're not taking into account, since we're just considering OS X and Windows.

nxon Ask HN: MAC vs PC for a developer?

Excuse me, "PC" does not mean "Windows computer", so I'd pick a PC and install some Linux distro.

nxon [dead]

I want to be a dead programmer.

No, that doesn't sound as cool as I expected.

nxon Ask HN: What are your HNs for other domains?

Thanks for submitting the link, the content there is very interesting.

nxon Haddock: Built because I want web apps to make passwords fun

25 or 100?

First attempt: quick typing, conscious mistake.

Second attempt: quick typing, wrong password again.

Third attempt: okay, I'll type it in carefully now. Wrong password.

Fourth attempt: oh, yes, that was my Yahoo! password. Remembers password and enters it cautiously, because he/she knows that he has a maximum of 5 login attempts.

Five are enough for me. Or at most 10. 100 seem ridiculous. How often does it happen that you mistype your password 99 times and get it right on the one-hundredth, before you're tired of being shown the "wrong password" message and click the "forgot password" link?

nxon Haddock: Built because I want web apps to make passwords fun

Yes, that's the best way to prevent account hijacking, in my opinion. Or block the IP for 30 minutes after 5 failed logins, that renders any dictionary attack terribly inefficient.

nxon Haddock: Built because I want web apps to make passwords fun

It is reducing the search space drastically: Word (about 30% of the total length, and might be capitalized) + number (15%) + symbol (1 character) + word (50%).

The search space for a length n is: 2 x 26^(n/3) x 10^(n/6) x 30 x 26^(n/2) = 60 x 26^(5/6 x n) x 10^(n/6) = 60 x 10^(5/6 x n x log10(26)) x 10^(n/6) =~ 6 x 10^(1.17914n) x 10^(0.16666n) = 6 x 10^(1.34581n)

So that's about a 6 followed by 1.5n zeroes of search space for length n, approximately. Using only 100 characters of the ASCII code tables, you have a search space of 10^(2n) possible passwords, which is about n/2 orders of magnitude larger than Haddock's search space.

Disclaimer: I'm a HS student, no crypto folk, so the above might be wrong, but it's basic combinatorial stuff. And that's just theory, in practice, with just "password1", "letmein" and "123456" for a dictionary attack, you can hack into like 3% of the accounts of a site that doesn't use Haddock.

Edit: Oh, I didn't even think of this: THE WORDS ARE ALL VALID ENGLISH WORDS! That makes hacking in a lot easier.

nxon Ask HN: What are your HNs for other domains?

Academic Hacker News: it's like reddit.com/r/compsci

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ad/news/

nxon Parsing Roman Numbers - Beautifully

It's a great programming quote I'd never heard.

nxon Ask PG: Unique visitors by country

Argentina - 1? That's me!

nxon Contextual User Interfaces

Emailing the password? Ha.

nxon Wikiid: Can Wikipedia make a Wikipedia page notable enough to avoid deletion?

You mean it's interesting how irregular natural languages are, but those are the ones we use instead of well-defined ones? Yeah, I guess it is interesting. But then again, nature comes before science, right? (Well, not if you asked a string theorist.) We're trying to impose logical systems where they do not exist, like reliable computers built on top of unreliable transistors (or relays, or vacuum tubes, for that matter). Heck, we even mix countable and uncountable, continuity and discreteness. We count two rocks and therefore we think we can have exactly two meters of something.

Why can't we just be well-defined formal systems? :/

nxon Ask HN: Has Hacker News been hacked/cracked?

Okay, trust doesn't work as well as correct security measures. That's sad, but true.