Hacker News: spb

How to Store Data on Paper

spb — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 00:25:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.monperrus.net/martin/store-data-paper

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32040661

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by spb in "Hush, a modern shell scripting language"

spb — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 10:38:55 +0000

This looks excellent - I outlined wanting something like a cross between Lua and Bash back in 2016, and at first glance, it would seem that this project by and large fits the bill: https://github.com/stuartpb/lash

New comment by spb in "Changing std:sort at Google’s scale and beyond"

spb — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 08:21:27 +0000

Recent versions of Lua use this trick as well.

New comment by spb in "Moreutils: A collection of Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago"

spb — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 16:03:02 +0000

I tried to prototype my own implementation of `vidir` in Node.JS a while back (not realizing that it existed under this name in moreutils), and I ended up getting derailed after realizing how incomplete Node.JS's support was for getting the group / username corresponding to a G/UID: https://github.com/stuartpb/whomst

New comment by spb in "Insane state of today's advertising part 3"

spb — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 14:16:51 +0000

This is what the Cluetrain Manifesto was saying... in 1999.

http://www.cluetrain.com/

New comment by spb in "Bashfill – art for your terminal"

spb — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 08:05:12 +0000

That's what `vipe` is for: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

New comment by spb in "The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting"

spb — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 20:31:09 +0000

No. See http://www.cluetrain.com/ - paid advertising is inherently unethical on a network where genuine mass interaction is free.

New comment by spb in "Be Careful with UUID or GUID as Primary Keys"

spb — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 06:50:19 +0000

> Other than DNA sequences I can't think of a good person key.

In theory, one could use 3D geoposition at time of birth, time of birth, and sibling order (for twins / triplets / etc delivered surgically), where said order is dictated by the parent(s) or ob/gyn present. Of course, the main problem with this in practice is that not everybody has this information.

I would have said you could do something via retinal imagery, but not everybody has eyes. If we had non-invasive neural imagery, would it maybe be possible to derive a key from a simplification of a person's physical brain topology?

New comment by spb in "Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled"

spb — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 12:22:39 +0000

> But pretty much no one thought CMOS features could be made arbitrarily small.

Pretty much no one qualified, maybe. There are lots of laymen (including many True Believers in The Singularity) who operate under the impression that it's a fixed law of nature.

New comment by spb in "Show HN: NilPass, the only password manager that's truly impenetrable"

spb — Sun, 02 Apr 2017 22:23:19 +0000

While I first wrote an article about the absurdities of information security [in 2011][1], this specific extension is an idea I've had since [June 2015][2] - due to the absurd nature of the idea, I wanted to launch it on April Fools' Day, but that ended up causing it to be [dismissed as a joke out of hand altogether][3], so I figured I'd wait a day before posting it to Hacker News.

While the premise of the extension sounds like a joke, it's legitimately a good idea, and [one others have had independent of this][4]. I explain some of the thoughts and motivations behind NilPass's design here: https://nilpass.com/seriously/

[1]: http://www.cracked.com/article_18962_5-things-we-all-do-that...

[2]: https://github.com/nilpass/nilpass-branding/commit/6090b5cc9...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/62sgrp/presenting_n...

[4]: https://rempel.world/passwordless-method.html

Show HN: NilPass, the only password manager that's truly impenetrable

spb — Sun, 02 Apr 2017 22:09:24 +0000

Article URL: https://nilpass.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14019327

Points: 13

# Comments: 4

New comment by spb in "The Passwordless Method"

spb — Sat, 01 Apr 2017 23:48:46 +0000

I spent all of yesterday making an extension for this, and now HN won't let me post it as an article: https://nilpass.com/

New comment by spb in "Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents"

spb — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 21:08:33 +0000

Though, of course, this still means trusting the compiler: https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...

New comment by spb in "An app that lets you pretend to receive a call when a co-worker distracts you"

spb — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 14:03:03 +0000

I made a similar app to this for Pebble at a hackathon in 2015: https://github.com/phoneyscape

We got an offer from Madrona Ventures for it that I never ended up following up on.

New comment by spb in "Adding a SHA1 collision vulnerability test hoses WebKit's source repository"

spb — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 18:25:24 +0000

He seems to have changed his tune now that he can't behind the "that's only an imaginary possibility" cover: http://marc.info/?l=git&m=148787047422954

> Do we want to migrate to another hash? Yes.

New comment by spb in "List of Sites Affected by Cloudflare's HTTPS Traffic Leak"

spb — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 14:31:37 +0000

Holy crap, really? I've been drawing up [profiles for the user account systems of a bunch of websites for the past few years][1], and I think I've only seen that once before (on a Washington State website, no less).

[1]: https://github.com/opws/domainprofiles

New comment by spb in "Show HN: Alphabinary Encoding"

spb — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 22:38:57 +0000

Precisely - calling it an "encoding" here is more of a tongue-in-cheek nod to how simple the steganographic rule is than an intention to imply that it be used as a straightforward representation.

Also, "steganography" tends to imply that the intent is to hide the underlying message, and that's not necessarily the case here, such as when employing alphabi for mnemonic purposes ("Baywatch hologram lemonade asteroid" being easier to remember than "52.84.24.108").

Furthermore, the purpose of the "encoding" being so flexible (and, consequently, low-density) is that it can be used, then, as a medium of expression - it's not that the "message" is hidden, it's that, well, [the medium is the message][], and per Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights linked there (emphasis mine):

> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

[the medium is the message]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

New comment by spb in "Show HN: Alphabinary Encoding"

spb — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 22:07:42 +0000

So, this is an idea I had a while back, inspired by how ideas like [illegal primes][] are fundamentally irrepressible as free speech, due to the intrinsically fluid nature of abstract data.

It's not just useful on a free-speech axis, though: in terms of just bare usability, it opens the door for a simple way to represent arbitrary numbers (like IP addresses) mnemonically, without having to lug around huge arbitrary dictionaries that might have proprietary restrictions to them, like the one what3words uses to encode geo coordinates.

I'm interested in hearing what uses Hacker News readers could come up with for this, and other thoughts around these kinds of concepts.

[illegal primes]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime

Show HN: Alphabinary Encoding

spb — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 21:59:10 +0000

Article URL: https://alpha.bi/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13495621

Points: 3

# Comments: 3

C – How can I use a macro, in a macro, to transform a macro's arguments?

spb — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 18:48:02 +0000

Article URL: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41395464/how-can-i-use-a-macro-in-a-macro-to-transform-a-macros-arguments/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13286248

Points: 2

# Comments: 0