Hacker News: lotsoflumens

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Running Bitcoin uses a small city’s worth of electricity"

lotsoflumens — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 04:31:08 +0000

I used to worry about this. Now I realise that my worry came from a scarcity mindset.

There is no reason at all to believe that electricity production will always be difficult or expensive. These problems will be solved.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "LoRa Backscatter [pdf]"

lotsoflumens — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 22:02:21 +0000

>>> That is, you could recover the unencrypted data if you recorded a copy of the pilot by mixing.

Yes, thanks for the response!

New comment by lotsoflumens in "LoRa Backscatter [pdf]"

lotsoflumens — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:00:09 +0000

Since backscatter systems depend on on an RF source, I wonder if work has been done on encrypting the source signal (pseudorandom bit pattern for example), then modulating the random stream at the device and decoding the backscattered signal at the receiver - essentially a streaming XOR cypher.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Daniel Kahneman “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”"

lotsoflumens — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 23:31:07 +0000

I think it's just very subtle sarcasm that these are dangerous thoughts in a world where thought-crime is real.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Daniel Kahneman “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”"

lotsoflumens — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 23:24:13 +0000

I just love it that everyone is saying things like:

"And yes, it is my opinion that climate change is absolutely happening" .

The level of fear in stating simple opinions has gone to 11.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says Bitcoin is a fraud that will eventually blow up"

lotsoflumens — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 23:04:59 +0000

You should review the concept of "fractional reserve banking".

New comment by lotsoflumens in "2017 CUFP Keynote – Are We There Yet?"

lotsoflumens — Sat, 09 Sep 2017 21:26:29 +0000

Still relevant but apparently unknown to the trendy conference speakers and FP ranters:

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hehner/aPToP/

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Ask HN: Is AI threat overblown?"

lotsoflumens — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 03:45:39 +0000

You're missing the entire fields of robotics and automatic control, which are not new fields and have never made claims of human level intelligence. These are the fields that have been making steady progress for over 50 years.

The result has been increasingly effective weapons technology that is now being outfitted with even more effective software.

It doesn't take a "rocket scientist" to see the endgame.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Critical security updates for Git, Subversion and Mercurial"

lotsoflumens — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 21:56:18 +0000

Well then, I guess with that line of reasoning we should just turn off the computers and go live in the woods. There's obviously too much risk in doing anything.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O"

lotsoflumens — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 17:12:20 +0000

In most large companies today, the shareholders outside of the top 3 management levels are irrelevant and usually just a tedious burden.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Critical security updates for Git, Subversion and Mercurial"

lotsoflumens — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 16:00:18 +0000

Thanks, but that means I'm doing the testing. I wish I could do that - maybe someday.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Critical security updates for Git, Subversion and Mercurial"

lotsoflumens — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 14:15:36 +0000

It's important for package developers to be aware of other software that depends on their interfaces or functionality.

Some cases will slip through sometimes, but over a couple of releases these should be gone.

>> Where do new bugs and vulnerabilities come from? When the main developers add features or make changes to existing features that go beyond fixing bugs.

Do you have stats for that?

Semantic versioning was supposed to be the fix for that, but as Rich Hickey has pointed out, that is also broken.

Everyone is their own server admin these days. We all want "a stable, solid version that has all the latest security fixes" but it's difficult accept that that might be impossible.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Critical security updates for Git, Subversion and Mercurial"

lotsoflumens — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 13:58:55 +0000

I've seen that bug!

And, I'm not too surprised, KDE has a broken development and maintenance process. I'm sure they think they're doing a great job - but that's because they don't even see or receive most bug reports.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Critical security updates for Git, Subversion and Mercurial"

lotsoflumens — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 13:40:32 +0000

I agree, this is a problem, but it's not being solved by this practice.

The example you gave is specifically about a client application of git that wasn't updated to work with the current version of git - probably because of some twisted logic that they didn't have to worry about it until some future date.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Critical security updates for Git, Subversion and Mercurial"

lotsoflumens — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 13:25:38 +0000

Yes, it makes a lot of sense to ignore the real world and pretend that software will always be stable.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Critical security updates for Git, Subversion and Mercurial"

lotsoflumens — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 13:16:20 +0000

This practice is seriously bad.

It means that one group of developers is busy improving and fixing packages, and another different group is cherry-picking commits in order to maintain the illusion of stability (as mentioned above).

That second group has to duplicate all the testing work done by the first group, and additionally ensure that there are no new problems introduced.

It's very vulnerable to human error and adds a lot of unnecessary work.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Critical security updates for Git, Subversion and Mercurial"

lotsoflumens — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 12:58:23 +0000

Thanks so much for pointing to this.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Critical security updates for Git, Subversion and Mercurial"

lotsoflumens — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 12:53:45 +0000

Thanks for the info!

I've added the git-core PPA now which installs 2.14.1 .

I just don't understand this screwing with version numbers and not being on the latest code.

New comment by lotsoflumens in "Critical security updates for Git, Subversion and Mercurial"

lotsoflumens — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 12:34:17 +0000

Does anybody understand Ubuntu releases?

The update this morning for Ubuntu 17.04 installs git 2.11.0

.. NOT the patched 2.11.3 NOR the latest 2.14.1

Why isn't Ubuntu fully up to date?

New comment by lotsoflumens in "The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google"

lotsoflumens — Sun, 06 Aug 2017 03:15:50 +0000

I assume they are .. however, they take no risks with their shaming.