Chronos

9 ms·

31.
by Chronos 16y ago
You occasionally hear "SF" spoken aloud, especially when the city's name is being used as an adjective, but by far more common is "The City".
32.
by Chronos 16y ago
If I see a coin come up heads twenty times in a row, I'm going to use the power of induction to predict that the coin is biased towards heads. Induction tells me that, the more something has happened in the past, it's more likely to contin
33.
by Chronos 16y ago
Hmm, roughly half of those concern either DNSSEC or DDNS... which, in fact, no one uses.
34.
by Chronos 16y ago
http://lesswrong.com/lw/mp/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/ "Zero" is a probability in the same way that "infinity" is an integer, because there's always a non-zero chance that your beliefs are mistaken.
35.
by Chronos 17y ago
How would you propose making IPv6 compatible with IPv4? Recall that every IPv4 application in the history of Berkeley Sockets has 32-bit address buffers hardcoded into the binary.
36.
by Chronos 17y ago
I disagree about the concept being broken: CPAN and Gems work on similar principles, except that the download step is reserved for a human running an explicit installer program. Add a filesystem cache and some digital signatures, i.e. an o
37.
by Chronos 17y ago
Interestingly, there's one difference between sucrose and a 50:50 glucose/fructose mix: the sucrose will have less sweetness per calorie, because it's only one molecule (a disaccharide) and can thus stimulate only half as many sweet recepto
38.
by Chronos 17y ago
Suppose I have a processor that runs at 1GHz, and furthermore suppose that it has a built-in hash primitive that can hash one salt+password in a single clock cycle. Thus, I can try 1 billion passwords per second. That means I can try ever
39.
by Chronos 17y ago
"1) Taking longer is not an indication of strength of the algorithm. Just like banging your head into a wall, multiple times isn't the best way to pass through it." You do realize that this is how all modern "cryptographically secure" has
40.
by Chronos 17y ago
Having even a 4KB salt doesn't help: if the hash is too fast, the attacker has time to dictionary attack each user individually, without precomputing any rainbow tables. Hardware assists (e.g. GPU-based parllel processing) can cut the time
41.
by Chronos 17y ago
Debt is a leading indicator of a temporary and artificial increase in spending and prices: people don't take out loans just because they want to sit on a pile of money, they take out loans because they want to buy goods and services. And w
42.
by Chronos 17y ago
Note that pure Einsteinian General Relativity does not conserve energy -- even without a cosmological constant. Sometimes people fake it using tortuous analogies that only hold if their spacetimes are nearly flat, but it fails to hold in
43.
by Chronos 17y ago
The article is pretty ridiculous. Why would a company like Google run their Perforce servers under Windows?
44.
by Chronos 17y ago
FWIW, the black hole hologram thing is best understood in the context of an idea that has been around for quite a while: the "Anti de Sitter / Conformal Field Theory correspondence". Basically, the world we think we live in feels like a
45.
by Chronos 17y ago
CBC mode and its relatives, one of which is likely the mode you have in your head, is great for an ephemeral stream, but not well suited to permanent storage: it's inappropriate for hard drives because it forbids random access, and it's ina
46.
by Chronos 17y ago
Trying to avoid saying much, as I work at Google. That said... Re: 3a: cough AppEngine cough . Anyone foolish enough to run Oracle on Google's datacenter hardware would stab their own eyes out within a month, tops.
47.
by Chronos 17y ago
This current crisis felt like we came to the brink of hyperinflation, but managed to scramble through it without quite tipping the balance. Nothing is fundamentally fixed, though, so I expect the next big crisis 5 or 10 years down the road
48.
by Chronos 17y ago
One thing to remember: when fork() was invented, shared-memory threads basically didn't exist. Everything that would be done with threads today, had to be done with either fork() or asynchronous event loops, because no mainstream OS had
49.
by Chronos 17y ago
I have a similar point that I like to make: Imagine two wireless devices that want to communicate. You can have them transmit omnidirectionally, but now you have two problems: (a) you transmit radio power in all directions, including usele
50.
by Chronos 17y ago
Actually, it is rather controversial. Normally, when you add heat to a large hydrocarbon molecule, it cracks (breaks down into smaller pieces plus more heat). This is why hydrocarbons can catch fire and burn. Going the other direction --
51.
by Chronos 17y ago
Uh, it's a question with a well-known answer. When uranium and other heavy radioactive elements decay, they often do so via alpha decay. What's an alpha particle? Two neutrons, two protons. Eventually the alpha particle slows down and c
52.
by Chronos 17y ago
shudder We have a business relationship with a financial company based out of Germany, and their system (which sits on top of replicated Oracle) defines "idempotent" to mean "our database already has a cache of the answer we already gave
53.
by Chronos 18y ago
I generally agree or fail to disagree with most of your post, but on the particular topic of progressive taxation, it's not fair to simply dismiss it as "10 wolves and a sheep": marginal utility is at play. With all goods, the more of it yo
54.
by Chronos 18y ago
Complements (either 1's or 2's) are no longer particularly useful patterns with modern HDD codings, which are wrapped in Reed-Solomon and then heavily encoded before hitting the disk. I'm more familiar with CD-ROMs than HDDs, so I'll explai