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The best guided project/intro I've seen for complete beginners is Daniel Holden's "Build Your Own Lisp". It's a free online book that walks you through writing a Lisp interpreter (something worthwhile even for experienced C programmers!):

http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

Agree on the TIS-100 recommendation. What surprised me most was just how open-ended the puzzles are, especially given the limited instruction set. There's a great deal of replay value just in iterating your own solutions to improve performance (i.e. reduce cycle count).

Will have to give the game posted on this thread a try as well!

The TL;DR seems to be: social networks, computer networks, neural networks, and patterns of language all exhibit a “small world” architecture - an organic in-between of randomness and order, the unique mesh structure that lets any two nodes connect in only a few hops (the “six degrees of separation” concept) and retains stability/function as arbitrary nodes are inserted/removed. This universal structure has evolutionary purpose - the interplay between what we are, what we create, and what we experience isn’t coincidental.

The article references several art projects that deal with these topics, especially applications in AI. The website is dedicated to “neuroaesthetics” - which is apparently a field that studies the neurological basis for creating and consuming art.

Intel does support SGX code signing where vendors/developers have to apply (just like getting Windows Kernel drivers signed by Microsoft): https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-sgx-product-...

To the best of my knowledge, all SGX attack research papers disable checks and run unsigned SGX code to demonstrate a proof of concept.

Not saying vendors won't run horrid things in SGX enclaves, just saying malware authors are gonna need to steal a private key first :P

I agree that rowhammer needs a hardware-based defense. While ECC isn't prohibitively expensive and has negligible performance cost, keep in mind it's only a parity check with a proprietary implementation. There's some multiple of bit flips that will pass the parity check and still achieve the attacker's intended result, and the exploit is definitely going to get multiple attempts - if you get pwned the malicious process might be in memory and hammering away for hours, maybe it's even dropped a registry key to make sure it auto runs next boot.

Reference: http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/03/some-notes-on-dram-rowhamm...

At the current state of maturity, offensive program analysis tools (Angr, Manticore, S2E, Miasm, etc) do much better with CTF problems than large programs or more general tasks - so to my knowledge you won't find any tutorials that build from the ground up in the vain of an intro to a programming language or web framework.

Your best bet is likely to try writing scripts that solve CTF problems, maybe starting with one you've done manually, and refer to official example docs as your guide. Map similar scenarios when possible, read the API docs when not.

Example docs: https://github.com/angr/angr-doc/blob/master/docs/examples.m...

While this does support multiple file formats, there already exists a far more robust utility for ELFs, "readelf" in the the GNU binutils: https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/binutils/readelf.html

This 2005 PDF is supplemental material for an old edition of "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective” by Randal E. Bryant and David R. O'Hallaron. The 2015 edition of the book includes an updated version of this x86-64 content in Chapter 3, replacing the IA32 content and no longer a just a supplement. I strongly recommend owning a copy of this book if you have any interest in systems programming or just want to be exploit hardware characteristics for better performance in your userspace applications.

I took the class this book is written for, taught by the authors. They don’t place emphasis on being able to write assembly, since this is not a useful skill for the majority of programmers. Instead, the goal of this material is to get you to understand assembly and compilation well enough to 1) reverse engineer it if you need to for debugging or security reasons, and 2) be able to write compiler-friendly code, meaning code that can be safely translated into efficient assembly instructions (compilers are conservative, they only optimize when it's certain there's no repercussions).

I’ve been in Pittsburgh 6 years now - worked in local tech, currently a grad student at CMU. From my perspective, the “grassroots” community is a massive factor in the region’s success. I’ve gotten more out of the active and inclusive tech community then out of proximity to big-name companies or an influx of investors. I’m not saying those things aren’t important or don’t drive the creation of the community I benefit from, but my touchpoint with the tech scene has been motivated and approachable developers (and aspiring developers!).

Example: there’s a local meetup with 2,200 members (http://www.codeandsupply.co/) and weekly talks ranging from programming 101 to effectively scaling a micro-service architecture. They’re putting on a conference in August where I’ll be able to see Richard Stallman, Larry Wall, and Joe Armstrong speak for a $70 dollar ticket price (student price, regular tickets are still only a fraction of what you’d expect).

You make some good points, especially about the prices possibly being geared toward recent immigrant clientele. Since you focus on the bottom end of the market, I’ll consider the reverse for the sake of argument:

Think of the highest end restaurants in your area, establishments where formal attire and reservations are a requirement. The types of places that win awards and accolades, where people that have the means will go to celebrate major life events.

In my experience, having lived in major cities on the East and West coasts, those restaurants are almost exclusivity western cuisine – specifically French or Italian derivatives. Japanese cuisine, as the article points out, tends to be the one exception to that rule. Thai, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, etc don’t seem to be represented proportionally to their global popularity in the high-end market.

I googled around for “highest ranked restaurants in the United States” and the trend seems, in my opinion, pretty well aligned with this article’s claims. And if you believe that the high-end market indicates what we value as a society, in that it’s what we demonstrate we will pay for and praise handsomely, then there does seem to a eurocentric bias.

What I found though provoking in this article, and a sentiment I largely agree with from my own anecdotal experience, is the idea that there’s a sort of prestige hierarchy for types of cuisine in the US.

The linked list code example wasn't something I expected to see in a TED talk :)

Toward the end he mentioned Wikipedia and open academic journals - never really thought of those things as under the open source umbrella, so that was eye opening for me. A popular Wikipedia page probably touches more lives in a more meaningful, or at least more direct, way then any commit pushed to GitHub.

Here is the same study in an easily consumable form (5 minute animated video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg

I'm not sure I fully buy the idea that addiction is primarily a result of social isolation as opposed to chemical properties. But if incorporating socialization into rehabilitation treatment makes it faster or more effective, then I'm all for it! We too often stigmatize drug users and place all the blame squarely on the individual instead of considering the context in which that addiction developed.

I work at a young startup (redmorph.com) building a similar privacy extension, and we've run into the exact same problem multiple times. While I understand that Google has a large volume of code to review, even an automated analysis tool could split out a line number and filename to reduce the guesswork :P

I have to add my shameless pitch to this thread, and I hope that fellow builders/entrepreneurs/startup-ers will emphasize with the fight to get attention/users:

uBlock is a great tool but it doesn't offer any network-level services, so you're still exposing IP/geo-location and potentially content sent over HTTP (as opposed to HTTPS). My company, RedMorph, will soon offer in-extension encrypted (AES-256) proxy at the first paid tier (we need to charge to cover infrastructure cost, it's still in beta) but you can download our free tracker blocking extension in the meantime. It's designed with usability in mind, so the average user can "plug-and-play". We're especially interested in empowering non-technical parents and children.

I'll be adding uBlock to this comparison soon: https://redmorph.com/articles/proof-in-the-packet.html

Thanks for your time, I appreciate thoughts and feedback!