Ask HN: Would people be interested in working on tiny projects with stranger(s)? - <AUTHOR>

I know that github and sourceforge has lots of open source projects that needs contribution. However, sometimes I feel they have this barrier to entry for new programmers. Would people be interested in somethings that introduce new programmers to each other to work on something? <comment> d-crane I think that'd be pretty cool, as a fairly new programmer!

<comment><AUTHOR> What kind of project do you want to work on with other people? I am thinking tiny but usable mobile app, desktop apps are great starters. People could even work on the same thing just for practice.

<comment> d-crane I'd be game for pretty much anything, honestly. Mobile or desktop, whatever. As a relative beginner, it's kind of daunting to approach a non-toy programming application, so I just find myself doing classical crypto applications (for example). Doing something actual, even if small and goofy, would be really cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey I made a landing page for the idea, tinykernel.com; check it out!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Programmer's Font [2004] - <AUTHOR> http://www.arcavia.com/kyle/Software/ProgFont/index.html <comment><USER2> This is so awful to look at I can't even comprehend.

Maybe in 2004 screen real estate was at a premium, but a lot of developers I know now have at least two high resolution monitors, if not a single ultra high (2560x1200) resolution monitor. I'd gladly take the standard monospaced fonts any day.

<comment><USER3> It really wasn't. I was running three flat-screen monitors in 2004.

This is a bad solution to a problem that didn't exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm tempted to start using this just for the novelty factor. Anyone glancing over your shoulder will probably assume you're an alien.

<http://imgur.com/xktPl.png>

<comment><USER5> Original emacs manual cover: <http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/its-cover.png>

<comment><USER6> So _that's_ who wrote that finger-crippling macro. It all makes sense now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "We need to re-engineer the alphabet so that it will be clear at extremely small sizes."

No. We don't.

</comment><comment><USER7> One fairly large readability issue is the lack of a "coastline" along the tops of the letters. It's like typing in all caps.

</comment><comment><USER8> Open <http://i.imgur.com/xktPl.png> in your browser and zoom out.

Frankly, I don't see advantage over the common alphabet, even when considering this problem that nobody actually has.

</comment><comment><USER9> Leaving aside the fact that there's no chance of everyone adopting a new alphabet to solve a problem that doesn't really exist, I don't like the filled-in parts of letters (G, W and M). They look too unusual in a string of text and would be too hard to write on paper.

</comment><comment><USER10> Show the font in a very small size.</comment>


In Picasso's Blue Period, Scanners Find Secrets He Painted Over - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/science/picasso-blue-period-scans.html <comment><USER2> Protip: canvases are relatively expensive, so practically all artists recycle their own and others artists' canvases. Painting over someone else's image is also a way to get free inspiration when you're not sure what you want to paint. Newspapers love running this story because there are almost as many hidden paintings as there are famous paintings.</comment>


How Did Cool Become Such a Big Deal? (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/julyaugust/feature/how-did-cool-become-such-big-deal-0 <comment><USER2> Cool is one thing I feel like robots will never understand. It is so hard to capture beyond just the physical vocabulary or syntax or body movements, or even black or white. Because when you see or meet someone, _cool_ , you just know. James Baldwin was a cool af mfer.

> For black people, to be cool was to be "calm, even unimpressed, by what > horror the world might daily propose." Cool was a quietly rebellious > response to the history of slavery and post-Civil War injustices.

Cool is kind of the anti-reactionary, laissez-faire attitude, but it's also using that attitude to create. To use slang in creative, liberating ways. Or music, or art, or drugs, or whatever.

Now give an algorithm that's been trained with all of human history and society. Would it also disregard the past horrors, but use the memory to create? What would it create? Would it be cool, even if you didn't know that it came from a human or a robot?

<comment><USER3> > Cool is one thing I feel like robots will never understand.

They said computers would never be able to beat humans at chess. Then IBM built Deep Blue.

They said computers would never be able to beat humans at go. Then Google built AlphaGo.

They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then Apple built Siri.

It's a matter of when, not if, computers will understand cool. But when they do, they will probably be too cool to care.

<comment><USER4> > They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then > Apple built Siri.

I think it's a stretch to say that Siri understands natural language. You need to form your sentences very specifically to have any luck, dramatically different than talking to a human.

<comment><USER5> And even then, it occasionally "corrects" what it thought it heard to instead be some clearly nonsense sentence. Just the morning I asked Siri to "Remind me to set beers aside for the party" and now I have a reminder to "Set Beer's aside for the pantry." after clearly seeing it have the exact right sentence for a second before adjusting to that.

<comment><USER6> Every year I attend a bluegrass music festival called Wintergrass. Siri knows about Wintergrass, she sees it in my calendar and I've seen her recognize the spoken word before. Even though I live down the road, this year me and some jamming buddies thought it would be nice to have a room to stash instruments, nap, whatever.

"Hey, Siri, remind me to get a room for Wintergrass."

"Okay, I'll remind you to get a room for one in the ass."

One would also think that Siri has figured out my sexual preferences by now. (To be clear, she obviously has not.)

But to the point, the hype of speech recognition over the decades, and the state of the art today, are why I am not convinced I'll live long enough to see true self-driving cars despite the current hype of that tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In jazz the aesthetic emphasis is on the empty space in between the notes. In the 30s you had a bunch of folks mixing weed with heroin in a way that seemingly unlocked the ability to create art out of these interstitial moments.

As a social term cool just means the same thing, referring to things whose positive qualities come from what they lack.

</comment><comment> swingline-747 I would suggest it's not cool, but the meta concept of status, that became the big deal. When essentially everyone became materially-comfortable in Western life circa post-WW2, society got flatter and flatter. In order to break up that flatness, the main driving social-differentiator signals emphasize appearance and attitude.

<comment><USER8> > the main driving social-differentiator signals emphasize appearance and > attitude

Indeed, pushed hard by the advertising industry etc. with the idea that we are defined only by the products we consume.

I see cool as similar to the phenomenon of less well off people spending money on designer labels, i.e. reaction to a position of relative social inferiority. Chavs buy Burberry, whereas Prince Charles patches holes in clothes that he's had for decades.

<comment><USER9> > _Prince Charles patches holes in clothes that he 's had for decades._

Which is also a status-signal ("hey, I've got good tailored clothes which are sentimentally important to me and I am beyond consumerism") from someone with a huge estate...

<comment><USER8> This is probably the first time I've been in the position of being a defender of Prince Charles, but I think your comment is at best ill-informed, at worst cynical:

'I happen to mind deeply about the poisoned legacy we are leaving our children and grandchildren and have been attempting to invest in their futures through reminding people of the urgent need to work in harmony with nature, rather than against her.'

<comment><USER9> > _' I happen to mind deeply about the poisoned legacy we are leaving our > children and grandchildren and have been attempting to invest in their > futures through reminding people of the urgent need to work in harmony with > nature, rather than against her.'_

Yeah, give away your estate you didn't earn but enjoy because of an antiquated bloodline-based institution to help nature causes then.

<comment><USER8> I'll drag us back on topic by saying that I think it's pretty cool that Prince Charles is using his power, such as it is, to help spread ideas that might help us stop ruining the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Far as I know, Lester Young invented cool.

Here he is just before he died[0] with his old friend Billie Holiday (who he nicknamed 'Lady Day' \- he called everyone 'lady'). Before him, what everyone wanted to be was _hot_ , screaming, wailing sax, jumping up on bars, playing a lot of notes, extreme. Then suddenly _less is more_. He came up playing with Count Basie, who was also a _less is more_ kind of guy. To oversimplify, _hot_ was about high energy, _cool_ was about beauty and taste. _Hot_ was macho, competitive, striving to impress; _cool_ was human, content, enlightened.

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKqxG09wlIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKqxG09wlIA)

</comment><comment><USER11> That site is extremely uncool on mobile, and I can't even find a way to contact them about it. Their desperately uncool need for Facebook and Twitter credit, along with their insistence that you read at a font size they've chosen, means I see three to five words per line. Ironically, tapping on 'accessibility' and starting to scroll auto-scrolls instantly to the bottom, then it's 'sticky' until it auto-scrolls all the way to the top!

</comment><comment><USER12> Cool, blood.

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sang- froid&yea...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sang- froid&year_start=1650&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=10&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csang%20-%20froid%3B%2Cc0)

</comment><comment><USER13> Cool.</comment>


TrueCrypt 'decrypted' by FBI to nail doc-stealing sysadmin? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/04/truecrypt_decrypted_by_fbi/?mt=1439013395779 <comment><USER2> Click-bait. The suspect had a plea agreement. I'm not sure why there's a question whether he surrendered his password or not. He obviously did else he wouldn't have an agreement anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most probably a variant of this:

[https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Without blindly claiming TC is backdoored, it does have an horrifically bad RNG which is housed in the application, and uses frantic wiggles of the mouse to generate seed values. Now depending on how much caffeine is in your system at the time, the values generated can differ quite substantially, ranging from super low (unsecure) entropy to 'fair game' entropy. Frankly I don't trust it one bit. If you consider how much room a mouse can potentially move within a typical desktop screen, the seed values are constrained within those params, always and forever.

<comment><USER5> This really doesn't matter, the FBI nor anyone else will be dealing with decryption by building probabilistic modules on RNG generation using various given states and the average use of some one's mouse.

TrueCrypt like many other FDE's has 2 keys, your Data Encryption Key which is generated by the software using random values, and your Key Encryption Key which is generated from a pass phrase and no random data since it has to be generated every time.

The KEK is generated using a key derivation function most commonly PBKDF2, this is by far the easiest vector to attack because this vector is vulnerable to 2 fairly easy attacks.

Brute force against the KDF which generated the KEK and brute force against the user which generated the pass phrase.

Bad entropy or not the FBI will not be breaking AES anytime soon heck if AES can be broken atm with entropy as bad as some rolling a D20 the US government won't use it because you can be sure that some implementations of it in use by the USG have probably even shittier pseudo random number generators than that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I kinda suppose they just obtained the key from somewhere. Could be a lot of places - in memory attack, some form of forensics, backup flash drive hidden somewhere or just deal with the prosecutors.

Why no one is wrapping their sensitive hardware in termite or booby trapping them, I cannot understand.

<comment><USER5> Or it can be more likely a plea that he decrypts the drive on the condition it will not be used to press new charges against him?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ahh, my favorite type of thread. Baseless speculation time!

There are really only three angles to explore here:

* The guy flipped. Open and shut case. This implies the world is boring. It's more fun to assume this isn't the case.

* Truecrypt has some fundamental state-planted problem. Though the post-closing audits found nothing particularly damning [1]. We really need a non-technical audit of Truecrypt though. Certainly _something_ happened there with a three letter agency. They wouldn't just shut down without any actual reason. Who is a tech-journalist I can send an email to? I'd like to reach out and ask them to try to get in contact with all of the Truecrypt top contributors. At least some of them have to be outside US jurisdiction. I feel like someone has to have already explored this angle, though. Can someone kindly link me to a full history of their VCM? A 5 minute google turned up short for me-- I could find a lot of mirrors of the latest source and binaries but none with the full history. Perhaps we're looking at the wrong place. Another angle is that Truecrypt itself was cryptographically sound (and thus an audit wouldn't find anything) but instead the developers found evidence that Windows itself was undermining encryption done through it. They privately reached out and got gagged.

* We collectively have underestimated the cracking abilities of the FBI/NSA. They hire amazing cryptographers. I'm too lazy to look up anything to back this up, but I would wager they even employ the majority of people in the US working on quantum computing (and thus quantum-crackers). Excluding universities this is almost certainly true. I was asking on ##crypto a few months ago about what was going on with bleeding-edge quantum computing and the people in the channel seemed to think that we weren't even close to 1024 qubbit quantum computers. But given that so much of the talent is under security clearances, I can't imagine we have a great idea of what's really going on in that field. Perhaps they can crack everything we currently do. An interesting project idea is for someone to implement some of the post-quantum algorithms [2]. Even if your implementation is faulty or the theory is incorrect, it would not hurt to use these and encrypt on top of what we're already doing. They probably won't make sense for day-to-day encryption for boring folk, but performance concerns are secondary for our journalists and whistleblowers.

My real guess on what happened here? A mix of the three. I would guess our sysadmin messed up somewhere and left incomplete evidence of his keys, or that truecrypt itself did this. I would guess FBI/NSA was able to use this and their supercomputers to put the pieces together.

I want to read more about what is physically impossible with regards to cryptography. When I took my discrete mathematics class a few years ago we got into this, but I've honestly forgotten a lot of the details. Eg: If every atom in the universe could hold 1tb and we had boundless computational power, could we generate rainbow tables to defeat our current cryptography. Etc.

[1]: [http://istruecryptauditedyet.com/](http://istruecryptauditedyet.com/)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- quantum_cryptography#Algo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- quantum_cryptography#Algorithms)

<comment><USER8> Interesting.

I always wonder about this: in order to decrypt a file/volume encrypted by TrueCrypt, user just need to type their NOT-SO-LONG password. With today's capability such as EC2 or quantum computing as you mentioned, isn't that just minutes away to crack a 12 digi password?

<comment><USER7> Number of passwords ("126-31" coming from [http://www.asciitable.com/](http://www.asciitable.com/)):

        >>> (126-31)**12
        540360087662636962890625

How many years would this take if you could test each password in .0000000000001s?

        >>> (((126-31)**12)*.0000000000001)/60/60/24/7/365
        244.78151394444308</comment></comment></comment>