skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's an input pool and 2 output pools but it's not like Fortuna. This is the most up to date analysis of the Linux entropy system I'm aware of http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/251.pdf
The examples of designers on the site are almost too cool. There's a benefit to edgey designer types, but not everyone is looking for that ultra cool, high-personality type.

I say this as a designer who is going to submit on the site.
Not in a few months: in three weeks: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/tracking/index.html

The plan is to do a return-to-launchpad maneuver -- except that not to the actual launchpad, but to a point offshore -- followed by a controlled "landing" on the ocean. Allows them to test the entire flight profile of a Falcon 9-R (reusable) booster, using an off-the-shelf stage, absent the flight-weight landing gear (which still hasn't been tested). If this is successful, then I imagine that a series of flight-weight landing gear tests will be in order, followed by high-altitude testing at White Sands. At the rate they're going, we might see them reusing boosters on commercial missions within 18 months or so.
Robin Dunbar disagrees with this huge monkeysphere
It's probably been mentioned enough already, but if you enjoy playing with rockets Kerbal Space Program is excellent.
I recently got a new card and remembered the PIN spatially. After a few times of typing it in I realised that, though I was typing the digits of the new PIN, I was subvocalising the digits of my old PIN. It was a really odd sensation.

Having said that, I would recognise both PINs as both a string of digits and as a spatial sequence... so that would probably just be another attack vector.
You mean, take noise that can be readily sampled, by the guys in the black van down the road (or more likely, the guy in the dorm-room next to you) -- and used to reconstruct your random seed?

I'm certainly no radio|crypto expert - but I don't think the "standard" radios on a smart phone are good sources of entropy -- I'm not sure how much raw signal you can actually get out of them (like you can't(?) sample radio noise with your ethernet card, just because it works like a radio).

An AM/FM radio might work (but might still not be a very good idea). There's been some projects using noise from the sound cards in pcs (the idea being sampling electrical noise from the system, not ambient noise, or "actual" sound).
Koana Islands fictional map
Any link? Couldn't find this study.
You forgot the coffee shops in Langley, VA.
This title manipulation is the reason I abandoned my real account on HN. I just don't want that someone else change what I wrote while keeping my name on it.

I won't go as far as accusing HN for impersonation (if that's the name), but please, if you change original title, at least remove original submitter name.
Linear regression can be a quite powerful tool, especially if (maybe counter-intuitively at first) it is used to fit exponentials [1] or polynomials to data.
[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LeastSquaresFittingExponential....
Don't worry, if UK quit the EU, you might see quite a few of those immigrants heading to Germany. That should fix that population growth.
Should be titled "In my tiny world, all companies provide software services over the internet".

I've noticed this attitude across HN, and articles it links to. In particular, "startup" refers to a particular narrow breed of dotcom-bubble style company. I develop for a technology startup that uses custom software to help accomplish its (unique) manufacturing goals. A lot of what I read on HN is relevant to me, so I find it quite irksome when I come across a post that doesn't even acknowledge the existence of a company like mine.
There's a guideline that you're not supposed to editorialise titles. When an editorialised title is detected, it is usually corrected.

I happen to disagree with this policy and I think it's a somewhat overly rigid application of the guidelines. However, this is why it's happening, and it makes some sense from at least one perspective. And, after all, this is entirely pg's call to make.
If you're XOR multiple generators then if an attacker can zero out the other generators (i.e. draining the pool) they can reduce your security to the weakest generators you're using.

If both generators have the same underlying source then they're also likely to share any security vulnerability so XORing them is unlikely to improve the randomness and can introduce potential weaknesses.
I don't seek any excuse.

I don't like cars, but I need to use one. I don't like the effects of our civilization in the nature, but at the end I'm part of it to cover my basic needs. And the same happens with internet and widely known services.

I don't approve unconstitutional surveillance, but I, from Europe, can't change such _facts_

You may think I'm an idiot because I don't have ignorance as an excuse for use certain services. I may think I'm not, because I don't need the media and news to know what is going really.

You may feel superior just by calling people idiot. I respect your though level, it's your life.

We think in different ways.
I'm a keen cyclist myself and have been (very thankfully) hit only lightly a couple of times, then had awful words shouted at me and one man getting out of his car to confront me. I always stand my ground in situations like that, but I felt deeply saddened that this man, this 60+ year old man believes he has more priority on the road in his big Merc than I do on my bike. I drive too, I pay my £115 VED yearly and the road is not paid for by the public.

I cycled 150 miles for Cancer Research last year, and thankfully suffered only one scare (thanks to my own mum), even after having to cycle down a dual carriage way (on the pavement).

The whole "I pay road tax" is crap, it needs to be sorted. Public announcement?
Could work for our against them - what if they've all chosen the start of the Fibonacci sequence as their PIN?
San Francisco Startups are moving diggs
A lot of SF startups seem to be moving into new offices, all within a couple of weeks of each other.
Valgrind Finds Thousands Of Potential Issues With Mesa [Phoronix]
Smartphones sales top feature phones
Whatsapp logo will turn blue
What do you mean by "CoffeScript is JS"? CoffeeScript is not JavaScript. CoffeeScript compiles to JavaScript.
/dev/urandom and /dev/random follow the same bit generation routine except that /dev/random blocks when the estimated entropy in the input pool falls too low.

The SoCs on phones often have HWRNG support, they just don't always use it, or someone forgets to actually seed their entropy pool with it because they assumed some other bit of code would, which seems to be what happened here.
Why did the 80's turn so many of us into nerds
Well... even more bad technology was lost with the cancellation of the X-33. It was a horrifically over-complicated design which had everything including the kitchen sink thrown into it, strictly to maximise its potential for congressional pork. I'm serious. I was actually at a Lockheed-Martin briefing prior to the X-33 competition, wherein they presented a slide which looked like this:

TECHNICAL FEATURES
* Linear aerospike engine [first ever tried]
* Conformal composite LH2 tank [first ever tried]
* Integrated advanced metallic thermal protection [first ever tried]
* Subcontractors in 38 states and 122 congressional districts

The level of complexity in the Venturestar design meant that it could never have achieved the lightweight mass fractions needed for an SSTO. If there is ever to be an SSTO, it will be simple and elegant. But "simple" and "infinitely divisible into a large number of congressional districts" are mutually incompatible, which is why the US government chose the Lockheed Martin design over the vastly more realistic Macdonald Douglas DC-Y: http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/dcy.htm
You can make some very small changes to titles. Thus, if you had used

Vulnerability in {windows} ICMPv6 could allow Denial of Service (microsoft.com) 15 points by vog 7 hours ago | 11 comments

You'd have stuck with the original title, and provided the needed extra information.

I agree that it's a problem when the original title is lousy. Or when the original title is both lousy and longer than 80 chars.

> Result: I have never entered that crappy title, but receive the complaints!

It's frustrating that so many people made those comments - it's pretty obvious that an article from MS is going to be talking about how MS does stuff. If it helps I don't think the complaints are about you, but about MS. Because, you know, there are some companies which provoke that kind of reaction.

I agree that sometimes titles are changed to things that make no sense. That seems to be the rule, and it's consistently applied. That means that people do make comments about the title. This seems to work against PG's desire to avoid the "middlebrow dismissal".

As an aside: I'd love a plugin that helped with the text box. Something that highlighted 80 chars.
You can send a key for a pseudo random number generator in the start of the message, use the key to seed it, the then use the output of the pseudo random number generator and xor it with each byte of the message. that would be some kind of 'salt' that would make the message more redundant.
This question gets asked every few weeks.

The mods change titles. This is mostly to try to normalize posts, so things with super linkbait titles don't always do well, and things with terrible titles don't always do poorly.

You are copying and pasting a link into a box and writing a few words. You are not doing real work. How the post does should be relevant to its content, not the few words you typed into the box.
This is how it will go down. First, the government is going to own these companies. Then they are going to declare the technology illegal to use in private hands. Third, they will train operatives that can only be certified by government agencies to use these devices.
> it's pretty obvious that an article from MS is going to be talking about how MS does stuff

No it isn't. To quote one of the complaining comments:

| Sure it links to a Microsoft.com domain, but there are plenty of research projects hosted by Microsoft that are not necessarily on Windows

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6215884
Coming out of the closet, but jumping the fence #auspol
Hello, fellow HNers.

So you love rockets and have plenty of time on your hands?

Here is Kerbal Space Program, enjoy!

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/demo.php
So, it's not actually JS in silicon (would that add much performance anyway, since JS is so dynamic? at best it would be asm.js-like, I'd guess...), but a supported language for an embedded device. I had a ghastly bizarro moment there: JS strikes me as bash + C syntax (not tsch)... in silicon...
Send a letter without leaving your chair - £1 per page
The "car tax" name isn't much better, not least because motorbikes and lorries pay it too, and a good number of cars don't. "Road tax" is the better name in that sense; it's just many people get exempted to some degree.

Based on carbon emissions, which is the main escalator, if bikes were included they would be fully exempt from the tax. Maybe cyclists (and other exempt users) should be allowed to get a special green disc for free to show they're part of the system and to shut these luddites up.
It's about verifiability, you can verify if a CPU is adding incorrectly, there's no way of verifying if the random source is generating randomness correctly.

Integers form a closed group (in the group theory sense) under multiplication and addition, so if you were concerned about specific calculations being compromised you could verify the answer via alternative calculations and testing for consistency.

Faking consistency is likely impossible without causing a huge amount other calculations (which the CPU will do as part of day-to-day operations) to fail. Making the CPU alter calculations only under very specific circumstances and in an undetectable way would require a huge amount of complexity.

On the other hand we know several fairly trivial ways of faking reversable randomness using standard crypto algos that would be statistically undetectable without taking the hardware apart.
My submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6204638) had the title "Valve interested in getting Blender on Steam" which used a powerful technique of "more words, less terseness" to attempt to maximize clarity. :)

I should perhaps have added "3D" somewhere to make it more clear, but at least there are words to make it sound software-related.

Too bad the submission sank.
I believe what they've put up is designed to be bare bones, and my guess is that they're building something much better if they were able to raise millions more.
> it's pretty obvious that an article from MS is going to be talking about how MS does stuff

Ever heard of research.microsoft.com?
Should it ask?

You typed it!

UNIX is unforgiving by default. Think before you type.
Sensationalist title designed to gain unjustified views. Accurate title would be "$200-$300 buys you an off the shelf polygraph test". Same principles, this has been known as a "lie detector" test for years.. and it's defeatable..
After staring at convoluted Java code and OpenSSL's code for three hours, I need a stiff drink...
tl;dr Japanese stock market was way overvalued so it had to crash but industries have grown since then. Japanese officials were complicit in spreading the story that they are in a bad shape so that trade barriers on import don't have to be lifted. Per capita, they are doing just fine.
Then I'd ask you, Would it be better for him to go up on stage and say, "It's not worth trying. I got to where I am purely through luck"?

Aside from that simply not being true — luck is never that powerful — it doesn't achieve anything. He's encouraging his young fans to work hard and value things not often valued in the media. I don't see what's wrong with that.
10,000 Hours is Not Enough
I think my favourite coincidence, are Saturn's moons Epimetheus and Janus.

One of them orbits just below the other and they happen to be in such a position, that as they approach each other, the lower one gains momentum from the mutual gravitational attraction, while the higher one loses momentum. So every four (earth) years, they swap orbits!

When I first heard about that, I just thought it was awesome :-D
Yes, a negative one for this benchmark :)
As an added fun bonus, it looks like the NativeCrypto Java wrapper around OpenSSL wrongly assumes that RAND_bytes() returns 0 on failure and not-zero on success. In reality, it returns 1 on success, 0 on failure, and -1 on super ultra mega failure.
@drivebyacct2:
I'm hoping what you read wasn't what I meant. I meant that, I can't agree with the view that people should have the right to decide what they put in their bodies, because it is based on the idea they are making a rational decision. As addictive substances is a situation where people repeatably make irrational, bad choices, then that can't hold.

Like a lot of startupers know most new companies crash, but believe they are different, I believe that I will quite smoking one day (just never today). So I don't need protection. Obviously. But other people do. Hopefully I'm someone elses other people.
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While valgrind finds issues, it's totally unclear if these issues are serious. The explanation of the Mesa developer that responded sounds reasonable (valgrind cannot track past ioctl).

I'm wondering, if this article is more about valgrind than about Mesa: what does it help if only a fraction of the reported issues is an actual issue?
Nth-child explained
The :nth-child CSS pseudo-class is one of the most powerful and useful pseudo classes. Understanding and using :nth-child to its full potential will add a valuable tool to your responsive CSS arsenal.
Are you basing your dislike on the roles he plays on TV?
Are you thinking of Iain Banks' Transition? (Not a short story though).
You continue to be looking at this from the perspective of a developer: the user was given a binary and wants to be able to edit the binary; the practical way to edit the binary is to get the source code for it, modify it, recompile it, and replace the binary... the BSD license model does not guarantee that this is possible, so the user does not have the freedom to modify the actual program they are using: sure they might have the source code (and I think, for sake of this argument, it is most interesting to assume a totally benevolent developer who does provide all of the source code for every open source project they work with, as that neatly and totally destroys any attempt to argue about source code), but it is now likely statically linked with a bunch of stuff that they don't have the code for (or worse, is running on a hardware device with cryptographic signatures) and so their modified build is useless.

To the user of this binary, your arguments about potential benefits to an upstream open source project are thereby off-topic (especially if the source code is fully available and no one is hiding any modifications) and your discussion of "forks" is downright nonsensical: given 100% of the source code of the software running on a TiVo, you still have no freedom at all to actually modify that software. The system is "open" in some weird, mostly academic fashion, in that you can easily find out how it works, and maybe you could even build a TiVo competitor based on it, but to the owner of a TiVo--an actual user of the distributed binaries--the source code is worthless. The GPL's purpose is to guarantee that a user of a binary will always have the freedom to change the functionality of that binary in the context of their use.

This is a fundamental freedom of the user that requires the developer to give up some freedoms with regards to how they deploy their binaries and has nothing to do with projects and forks or even source code in any direct way. This is a trade off related to a subjective understanding of "freedom" as it applies to different actors in the system, and so to understand why the GPL is interesting you have to be willing to temporarily take off the hat of a project maintainer and put on the hat of a user, as the GPL's purpose (and yes, this is somewhat sadly ironic) is to protect the rights of a different player in the ecosystem than the maintainer whose job it is to choose a license for their project.
"Japan’s seeming underperformance is an illusion that stems not from economics at all but from demographics"

Guess what, people in Japan don't care about how their economic perform once it is decoupled from their well-being.

And that's what he is suggesting: output grows, all that matters.
That was an interesting read!
Ask HN: what can I do with 3 recycled laptops?
Hello,

After get rid of my old home networks (now I'm living in other country), I still have 3 old laptops I repaired.

Currently I use to make my research for new technologies on virtual machines, but I still have 3 laptops I think I could take with me after vacations to my work-country.

The question:

What are cool projects, or technologies, to explore today, given 3 laptops and a network switch ?

I'm seeking more for personal, home-time projects.

The electricity bill is included on my rent price.

Are Intel Centrino with +/- 1 or 2 G of ram suitable for bitcoin ?
While I appreciate Boris'Superhighway, I think driving during rush hours with dozen of cyclists coming from every way, driving in the middle of the road is just insane.

I am a very careful driver, I respect cyclists but some of them really think the road only belongs to them. I sometimes feel I am in a middle of a flock of birds and that is dangerous.
I hear this often in Norway as well. But I also own a car and pay the same tax/fees each year as they do, I just choose the bike to and from work. And still, even if I hadn't the car has no priority.

But while they are arguing, honking and standing in line with their high blood pressure, I am cruising past them.
The problem is not that titles are edited, but that such edits are not indicated in any way, effectively putting someone else's words in submitter's mouth.

It is simply unacceptable.
That's not neccessary true. Take for example, in the case where the proof shows that resulting ciphertext would be indistinguishable from a random function, so the adversary would have 1/2^n (with n = key length, 128/192/256 etc, ) chance to decipher the text by guessing the key uniformly random. And he also has another 1/2^n chance to break the system, by us picking the null key (randomly). That would result in the chance of 1/2^(n-1)

On the other hand, the proof shows that leaving the null key out of sample space means the adversary would have 1/2^48 (arbitrary number) to distinguish the ciphertext from a random function, which means that it's "insecure" in the context of the proof.

It seems to me that this notion of secure would still be stronger than our common sense idea of "secure".