Hacker News: technoguyrob

New comment by technoguyrob in "And "e" Appears from Nowhere: Quick Numerical Experiment with Clojure"

technoguyrob — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 21:57:53 +0000

Could be an easy Putnam problem.

New comment by technoguyrob in "Procrastinating Again? How to Kick the Habit."

technoguyrob — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:48:54 +0000

Bookmarked this HN page for later so I can make the obvious joke about this article.

New comment by technoguyrob in "Yehuda Yudkowsky, 1985-2004"

technoguyrob — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:38:09 +0000

I'd like to live for a time, sure, but even five hundred years might be too long. I'd either get driven insane by the constant bow-shocks of ever advancing culture, or I'd lapse into some kind of boredom-induced stupor.

It's not wrong either for the rest of us to be curious.

New comment by technoguyrob in "Announcing my free book on Vim"

technoguyrob — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:21:55 +0000

..............

........................

I thought David was kidding. Jesus.

New comment by technoguyrob in "Do Passwords Scale?"

technoguyrob — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:56:03 +0000

Centralization. (OpenID)

New comment by technoguyrob in "DNS Drama Exposed (Dramatically)"

technoguyrob — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 03:18:27 +0000

Indeed. The title should have appended: "...dramatically."

New comment by technoguyrob in "A solution for the "send email to relatives when I die" problem"

technoguyrob — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:22:28 +0000

What if your business partner dies? I thought everyone needs to confirm you are dead? What if they are dead?

New comment by technoguyrob in "A Proof of the Halting Problem's Undecidability in Verse"

technoguyrob — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 23:24:24 +0000

Sing this out loud in a low voice...awesome.

New comment by technoguyrob in "Is Gmail Safe? How do you protect yourself from these kind of attacks? "

technoguyrob — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:23:03 +0000

The same key can be used for each session...when the Gmail page is being generated, I am saying this embedded in-line key can be associated TO the user's cookie, so that there is a one-to-one correspondence between this "Javascript cookie/session variable" and the user's actual cookie. There is no problem whatsoever. The only thing to be done is the exact same authentication that Google has to do to determine from which authenticated user chat requests are coming from (or any other AJAX request sent to Gmail).

EDIT: To answer your question of "are they doing some kind of lookup for each AJAX request?" Well of course, since they already have to look up a user's ID, account information, etc. based on the cookie they send.

New comment by technoguyrob in "Is Gmail Safe? How do you protect yourself from these kind of attacks? "

technoguyrob — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:23:36 +0000

And the Gmail engineers should add an opt-out "high security" mode that checks the referer to make sure the form submission is coming from Gmail itself and not some outside website. This way people who like to use custom/blank referers can ignore this security concern if they want, and all the rest of us can prevent the risk of this problem.

EDIT: Or how about just adding an in-line Javascript variable? Say, on all Gmail pages, you could embed this in the page:

And then when sending AJAX or form requests in the background, make sure to include that as a request parameter. That way, even if the user has the right authentication cookies, external websites won't be able to fool Gmail into thinking they are Gmail.

Really, this doesn't seem like a very hard problem to solve...couple lines of code...

New comment by technoguyrob in "Sounds Like Bach"

technoguyrob — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:18:30 +0000

Reading that article made me expect a future in which a musician will not be known for a particular composition, but for the algorithm he devised for creating music of a particular flavor.

This only goes to show that eventually, all fields of knowledge will be nothing except mathematics!

New comment by technoguyrob in "My Public Apology"

technoguyrob — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:14:06 +0000

Hahahaha, I like the profile update.

New comment by technoguyrob in "Sounds Like Bach"

technoguyrob — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:47:48 +0000

The Reddit discussion on this is really good:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7eoth/sounds_li...

New comment by technoguyrob in "My Public Apology"

technoguyrob — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:46:28 +0000

Sweet, I can now say I've been told "fuck you[r downvotes]" by a professor from Cornell.

New comment by technoguyrob in "JQuery magicpreview plug-in"

technoguyrob — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:53:16 +0000

XSS detection is not just as simple as that. For example, in IE, entering the following produces a pop-up:

Hi

However, read debt's comment below. XSS is irrelevant here since "XSS" means cross-site scripting, i.e., ,managing to embed Javascript into pages someone ELSE sees. Only the client sees this, it doesn't get reproduced for anyone else.

New comment by technoguyrob in "Michael Crichton on talent: "I just work hard""

technoguyrob — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:13:41 +0000

I think mediocrity is sort of the complement to laziness, in that respect. For example, settling for a cubicle job that drains you because you don't think you can do anything better or don't want to--that's still "laziness" in the way you're describing.

New comment by technoguyrob in "Stop Me If You've Seen This Word Before"

technoguyrob — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:21:13 +0000

http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=lang%3A...

New comment by technoguyrob in "Stop Me If You've Seen This Word Before"

technoguyrob — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:19:38 +0000

http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=lang%3A...

New comment by technoguyrob in "500 Exabytes per Raindrop"

technoguyrob — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:27:01 +0000

This is John Baez. I am pretty sure he has read GEB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baez

New comment by technoguyrob in "How people really use the iPhone"

technoguyrob — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:11:38 +0000

Some people read that presentation in NOT full screen?

Maybe someone should write a "How People Really Use Slideshare" post...