Hacker News: mbq

New comment by mbq in "Autoencoding Blade Runner: reconstructing films with artificial neural networks"

mbq — Wed, 25 May 2016 12:27:56 +0000

Um, are you sure we are there yet? For me it seems that the only atoms it has learned are the long-lasting static scenes, rather than eyes or mouths. Maybe it is just a matter of scoring and can be improved, but still...

New comment by mbq in "Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack"

mbq — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 14:55:44 +0000

If it runs, it has to be decrypted (at a current level of cryptography); at most it is obfuscated and the access is blocked by some hardware tricks which may be costly to circumvent, but there is nothing fundamental stopping you.

New comment by mbq in "Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack"

mbq — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 12:01:21 +0000

Binaries can be converted back to assembly and quite often even back to equivalent C; bugs are most often found by fuzzing (intentional or not) which does not require source code. The difference between open and closed source is that open is more often analysed by white hats who rather publish vulnerabilities and help fixing them, while closed by black hats who rather sell or exploit them in secret.

New comment by mbq in "Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack"

mbq — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 11:30:41 +0000

C is not a problem -- you can make a bug in every language. Even with memory safety and a perfect compiler, bug may direct the flow in bad direction (bypassing auth for instance) or leak information via side-channel.

New comment by mbq in "Statistical model of IQ test beats humans at the same IQ test"

mbq — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 14:57:06 +0000

This is only for certain, verbal questions like antonym of, synonym of, X is to Y as Z to what; for each of them a separate, specific model was built (not that the AI read the question and printed relevant answer).

To sum up, the paper should be titled "Dictionary is better than MechTurk users on look-in-dictionary tasks."

Link to the original paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.07909v1.pdf

New comment by mbq in "Shielding your files with Reed-Solomon codes (2008)"

mbq — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 13:07:44 +0000

About hard as setting up any UNIX daemon on a few computers. Reliability is a complex topic, depends on what you need -- for an anecdotal evidence I maintain a microscopic (10-20TB/4-6 desktop hosts) Moose deployment for a distributed home dir use-case over 5 years without any data loss despite two full computer losses, one disk malfunction and numerous network and power outages (it never detected a bit-rot event though). There are many serious success and horror stories one Google query away.

New comment by mbq in "Shielding your files with Reed-Solomon codes (2008)"

mbq — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 15:16:20 +0000

There are also distributed file systems (MooseFS, Gluster, Ceph) which can duplicate data across physical locations, protect it with checksums, scrub in a distributed manner and auto-heal, all of that transparently.

New comment by mbq in "Neural Programmer: Inducing Latent Programs with Gradient Descent [pdf]"

mbq — Wed, 18 Nov 2015 20:10:40 +0000

We do know what goes on in them. They are just trying (more-less, but it is only a matter of speed) random solutions till good enough, where the human operator decides what is "good". Which is fundamental, because when you have a function f you know nothing about, the _only_ thing you can do optimise it is to sample randomly, keep current best solution and hope it is good enough. Anything smarter would require some knowledge or assumptions, so is impossible to apply.

In the even more meta direction, the question is though whether human intelligence is some mystical emergent magic, or just try-till-good-enough massive optimisation of physiological needs plus some bonus for social behaviour sponsored by evolution plus some random noise, hidden behind a self-illusion of being a real thing, similar to consciousness. This idea is obviously somewhat disturbing; it shows that success is only a matter of luck, resourcefulness depends on environment, motives are never really noble, apes are only less successful than us because they can't (yet?) efficiently store and share information and art is a matter of an accidental conflux of random biases. On the other hand it suggests that singularity is nonsense, even more, that AGIs will become self-crippled with similar flaws that we observe within ourselves.

New comment by mbq in "Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites"

mbq — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 12:19:30 +0000

This can be solved by containers.

New comment by mbq in "HTTP/2 technology demo"

mbq — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 14:41:09 +0000

And Akamai's is inspired by http://http2.golang.org/gophertiles (which they acknowledge).

New comment by mbq in "Firefox exploit found in the wild"

mbq — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 14:42:13 +0000

I don't know the details, but this is rather due to fact how docker operates -- there is a daemon that runs with root privs (which are esential to create a container) controlled by a client with a protocol that has no concept of fine-graind access lists. Consequently, user A can do anything with user B's containers because docker doesn't even have such thing as container ownership. Also docker protocol involves something which is basically opening shell as root, thus users with docker access have also a passwordless sudo. All those choices are basically ok for docker because it is designed for single-user systems like developer laptops or application servers.

Currently, for multi-user systems the only safe option for containers is sadly virtualisation or emulation; nice implementation of rootless chroot is proot, http://proot.me/

New comment by mbq in "Firefox exploit found in the wild"

mbq — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 11:39:58 +0000

Why, docker-initiated chroot would prevent FF from acessing any not-FF+libs files, including which this malware steals; on Qubes it would have access to everything user-readable in the AppVM, which may include some secrets as Qubes workflow involves user-supervised copying files across VMs.

Obviously docker, as opposed to Qubes, won't stop more complex malware that exploits the kernel.

Should parsimony really still be the gold standard in modelling?

mbq — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 19:47:09 +0000

Article URL: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/163561/should-parsimony-really-still-be-the-gold-standard

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9964051

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by mbq in "The Icy Mountains of Pluto"

mbq — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 22:51:25 +0000

Honestly speaking, "colour" cameras we use every day are also false colour; they shoot 3 monochrome images in red, blue and green chunks of spectrum and mix the whole thing using plethora of parameters like white balance, or gamma. All this is heavily tuned towards human vision specifics to enable either monitor or print to induce a similar sensation in the viewer's brain that the photographed object would, despite the fact that the whole process retains only a negligible fraction of the information carried into the camera by the original photons. Quite a lot of animals perceive the hue of human-made photos and videos as totally odd, misexposed or desaturated, just because of having vision adapted to wavelengths or other properties of light which our processing mostly removes as redundant. Even more, one day humans may start to enrich their vision by technological or biological modifications, consequently beginning to perceive today photos as as dull as we see those old, monochrome ones.

New comment by mbq in "Hacking Team Uses UEFI BiOS Rootkit to Keep RCS 9 Agent in Target Systems"

mbq — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 15:05:39 +0000

Isn't it actually written to the EFI system partition on disk rather than flashed into the MB?

New comment by mbq in "The Call to Kill Adobe’s Flash in Favor of HTML5 Is Rising"

mbq — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 14:24:04 +0000

As with Java, the problem is not Flash per se but the browser plugin implementing SWF runtime. Flash can and probably will live long and prosper as the Flash "creator" app will switch to generating JavaScript+HTML5 istead of SWF.

New comment by mbq in "China's Market Crash and the Man Who Saw It Coming"

mbq — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 08:30:41 +0000

Still, I would read something titled "China's Market Crash and the Man Who Earned >10M$ Having Precisely Predicted It".

New comment by mbq in "Denmark’s wind farms generated 140% of the country’s electricity needs yesterday"

mbq — Sat, 11 Jul 2015 17:02:49 +0000

It shouldn't be significant because GW is all about how bad Earth is in dissipating energy into space (in comparison to black body), rather than how much energy flows through. Nevertheless, let's count: according to Wiki, 2012 World energy consumption is 5.6*10^20J; this means we were producing at an average rate of this/seconds in year/area of Earth, which is 0.034W/m^2. Solar input (and thermal radiation output, since Earth is roughly in an equilibrium) is 340W/m^2, making our input 0.1%, about the same as variations due to solar cycles.

New comment by mbq in "Things to Know When Making a Web Application in 2015"

mbq — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 20:27:01 +0000

Also pulling anything from CDN basically means that CDN operator (or anyone that will manage to hack it) can spy on or alter communication between your users and your server.

New comment by mbq in "New Letters Added to the Genetic Alphabet"

mbq — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 20:00:44 +0000

Even with PZ DNA would have major and minor groove rather than being a symmetrical double helix beloved by virtually all illustrators, sadly also those of pop sci articles...