nshepperd

13 ms·

91.
by nshepperd 9y ago
Yes. Using diceware (with actual dice) is still the most reliable way for a normal person to create a strong password. Use diceware. Ignore this guy's bad advice.
92.
by nshepperd 9y ago
> Compute an approximate distance between nth powers, interpret this as the probability of an integer being an nth power, integrate this probability over the sum x^n + y^n, see that the probability of this being an nth power is also very
93.
by nshepperd 9y ago
That's not what ykler meant. 1/sqrt(N) is the "probability" that N itself is square. We don't care about that, we want the probability that there is any solution to x^2 = N, which is sum{N=0..∞} (1/sqrt(N)).
94.
by nshepperd 9y ago
Yes, you can treat proof search as a game tree with "proof states" in the nodes and apply game playing heuristics to guide the search, eg. alphago style. From what I've read, these approaches do work, see for instance https:
95.
by nshepperd 9y ago
Not extrapolating isn't really an option in cases like this. You have to give some prediction for earthquakes of magnitude 9. Ultimately you must make a decision on whether to design for such an event. But a sensible thing to do woul
96.
by nshepperd 9y ago
I never really understood the arguments against "non-deterministic" testing. A property based test will check more cases, and therefore detect more bugs, than the corresponding hand-chosen unit tests (in which you probably forgot
97.
by nshepperd 10y ago
Yes, that's the problem.
98.
by nshepperd 10y ago
Because employers can provide group health insurance plans. Without either the individual mandate (which is itself a half-assed approximation to single payer healthcare) or group health insurance (through employers or some other non-health-
99.
by nshepperd 10y ago
Uh, even a signed commit does still rely on the sha1 hash of the actual tree object and any parent commits. It won't stop something bad from happening if you fetch from a sha1 repo.
100.
by nshepperd 10y ago
A non-trump example. Millions of people shared a post saying that the police were using facebook check-ins to "track" protesters at Standing Rock, and encouraging people to check in at that location in order to "help". O
101.
by nshepperd 10y ago
> Serious question, if I submitted a patch for the man page detailing the content of this myths page, is there a chance it might go somewhere and put somewhat of an end to some of this? I would say go for it. It would probably make some
102.
by nshepperd 10y ago
Please don't use arc4random* for cryptographic purposes. RC4 is broken -- there are practical attacks against it. It's fine for non-secure purposes though (eg. monte carlo simulation).
103.
by nshepperd 10y ago
"Does not count leap seconds" has to win some kind of award for misleading terminology. I'd wager it's responsible for a significant portion of leap second bugs due to confusion & misunderstanding about what Unix tim
104.
by nshepperd 10y ago
"00:00:00 on January 1, 2020, local time", if it is to represent a calendar event in the human work day in the future, should be represented as neither a TAI "timestamp" nor a UTC "timestamp", but as a data typ
105.
by nshepperd 10y ago
TAI timestamps can unambiguously refer to times years in the future. You can subtract the TAI timestamp from the current time, set an alarm for that number of seconds and it will actually occur on cue . TAI timestamps don't refer unam
106.
by nshepperd 10y ago
If you want to say "10:00 every Monday" then say "10:00 every Monday" and accept that what you have is not an unambiguous point in time, nor an integer, but a calendar event that may occur at some time in the future depe
107.
by nshepperd 10y ago
Who's conflating energy sources with storage mediums? EROEI is about the viability of fuels as energy sources. I've never heard otherwise. Obviously, charged battery storage has an EROEI < 1, and that's fine because it&#x2
108.
by nshepperd 10y ago
> - Prove you're you. Which is great for incriminating you. Also the proof is only good if your secret key is still secret, which probably isn't the case if you've been arrested. At that point, it's good for convincin
109.
by nshepperd 10y ago
Note that the security level of this by design is no more than the proof-of-work cost of N blocks, if you pay back the loan N blocks before the deadline. Proof: If the required key is X bitcoin blocks with no transaction to lender, and you
110.
by nshepperd 10y ago
That isn't on the list because two of them items on their list are possible explanations for why the visible matter would be directly related to the dark matter. The fact that visible and dark matter are related is not much of a conc
111.
by nshepperd 10y ago
On the greyscale gradient- the other way around: Figure 2 looks more even, being a perceptually linear gradient, ie. calculated "gamma incorrectly". Which is to say it's not what a real light would look like (if a light had
112.
by nshepperd 10y ago
I wonder what the author thinks of "Fast and loose reasoning is morally correct" (Danielsson, Hughes, Jansson, Gibbons. 2006. https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/fast+loo... ).
113.
by nshepperd 10y ago
Eh? RAII works perfectly fine without exceptions. Either - You write a constructor that cannot fail for RAII types that cannot fail, or - return some kind of option type from your BuildRAII() function, and handle the failure case however yo
114.
by nshepperd 10y ago
All of those things are nonsensical extrapolations of things I didn't say. Yes, I understand that nationalities are granted by governments. This is completely and utterly irrelevant to the basic grammar which is involved in parsing &qu
115.
by nshepperd 10y ago
> Which then means that Article 15 that doesn't specify an actor when talking about "right to nationality" calls on anyone to provide that nationality. If a stateless person washes up on shore of America, and if the USA re
116.
by nshepperd 10y ago
> And you are adding extra levels of meaning that are not in the UDHR to suit your argument. If as you say, there are extra levels of actors (religious groups, corporations, etc) besides government in Article 19, it would also means ther
117.
by nshepperd 10y ago
You're confusing levels. That means that the member nations are the people doing the defending of free speech, not that they are (necessarily) the people from whom free speech is defended. > As others have pointed out, the laws ag
118.
by nshepperd 10y ago
No it's not. The first amendment is not free speech, and America isn't the world. Chilling effects can flow from anyone with power, regardless of whether they are "officially" recognised as a "government". If p
119.
by nshepperd 10y ago
It's possible, in case of physical disconnection or power interruption. There is no guarantee that the copied data will be flushed out of buffers into nonvolatile storage before the delete is (unless the program asks for such a flush a
120.
by nshepperd 10y ago
If you're using udev, you can configure it to make /dev/random a symlink to /dev/urandom (eg. [1]). Sadly that doesn't give you the "block until seeded" behaviour though, and I don't know of any

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