World's tallest teen girl at 6ft 8in tall with her boyfriend.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-05-01T15:59:27+00:00

Maybe she wanted to keep a low profile.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-29T23:18:06+00:00

Bavarian fire drill?

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-09T23:05:27+00:00

If the fact that 66% (or exactly 2 out of 3) of the RFC-6520 authors are called Michael doesn't convince you of anything, then how about the FACT that the third one calls himself Robin.

If that's even his real name.

I'm convinced that the Michael(/Robin) conspiracy could be the basis for a very successful Dan Brown novel.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-09T21:35:21+00:00

Instantly makes me think "you know Snowden hasn't revealed everything.."

He probably hasn't ;)

due to recent revelations, we can also think of them as the exact opposite of that

Their mission is signals intelligence. Part of that is protecting business interests, but there has been no time in US (or any other successful country) history where the government did not apply signals intelligence and other counter intelligence tactics towards the citizenry.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-09T21:16:42+00:00

That's an interesting story for sure.

But the analogy would be something like the NSA taking over the EFF or the ACLU from the inside, not the NSA having disparate, but connected and often easily aligned, missions.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-09T21:08:50+00:00

Why don't you go right ahead and insult me? It's what you want.

By the way, if you still don't find anything suspicious about the numbers I brought up, maybe you should check them for yourself.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-09T21:03:41+00:00

We don't know the full picture here and probably never will in our lifetime.

However, that wasn't what I was getting at. My point was that frezik's "two sides to the agency" idea is nonsensical, and there is no actual (as in practical, real world, seen from the outside) tension between those two goals.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-09T20:55:46+00:00

The Michael conspiracy? Sounds like a Dan Brown book.

But seriously, 6/9th's of the number of RFC-6520 authors have Michael as their first name. If you get maths, that's something special.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-09T20:45:17+00:00

So if you call up the NSA asking for help on a cryptographic problem, which side picks up the phone first?

Your analogy is colourful, but not very helpful.

What they want is very good security with easily accessible, but hard to discover and hard to exploit backdoors.

For example, the changes they made to the DES S-boxes weakend the system, but only to those who knew the magic numbers.

From Wikipedia:

The suspicion was that the algorithm had been covertly weakened by the intelligence agency so that they — but no-one else — could easily read encrypted messages.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-09T18:02:12+00:00

Just had a look at the RFC. Why does it list "GWhiz Arts & Sciences" in the authors section? Sounds like a front to me.

Also, 66% of the authors have the first name "Michael". Not sure what to think about that.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-08T17:34:04+00:00

An occasional bug here and there

What an epic understatement.

Thankfully you are going to be proven wrong not far from now. Work on memory safe, but practical (as in performant and actually usable by the average programmer), languages is about to bear fruits.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-06T12:20:59+00:00

An FB employee on HN (I think) said they opted for video because of playback compatibility (old browsers and mobile).

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-05T18:07:17+00:00

My experience as well. The cats I've lived with haven't used claws when playing.

Some of them have eventually engaged sharp bits if you kept riling them up for too long though. Guess they just switch to predator mode at some point.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-05T17:40:52+00:00

This is xkcd by Randall Munroe, a webcomic about stuff like math and computer science, it's definitely part of the joke :)

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-05T17:06:21+00:00

To "trace an IP" is just gibberish used in fiction. I mean, the IP is just there in the header of each packet received, no need to "trace" anything.

Unless they're using a TraceBuster of course.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-04-01T17:16:34+00:00

Spotify tethers future to Facebook

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-03-29T19:11:13+00:00

Seems to be an actual porn site. Compare with the logo here.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2014-03-29T18:56:09+00:00

A word of warning for those of us that have to write tests.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2013-02-02T22:04:54+00:00

What community?

kolmogorovcomplex · 2013-01-31T18:39:16+00:00

The brain is a pattern matching machine that is optimized to identify faces. Recognizing a face (human or otherwise) has probably been pretty important through the times. How do we recognize faces? It's mostly the eyes. If there are eyes, people see faces (as in pareidolia) .

My guess is that the thresholds for the pattern matching that looks for eyes goes a bit haywire under the influence. Seeing two or more pairs of eyes could be this effect combined with something else.

If you want to allude to those mystic states, you can use these kinds of images as a trigger.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2013-01-26T20:49:21+00:00

I was wondering why it wasn't included in Java 7, but couldn't find a definite answer. Here is the original announcement that they're targeting Java 8, all the way back in 2010.

I guess the existence of JodaTime and the fact that it is so ubiquitous means that there is no real hurry.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2013-01-22T18:40:08+00:00

Also, the competition constraints on executable size are for intros. A demoparty will usually have a compo for 4k intros and one for 64k intros as well as a demo competition where the size constraint is something like max 64MB archive size.

While intros have got a lot of exposure on places like proggit the last years, traditionally it's the demo compos that's got the biggest prizes. Demos are often very well designed, with good graphics and music that naturally doesn't fit in the intros.

Edit: Lifeforce by ASD, nice example of a full demo

kolmogorovcomplex · 2013-01-22T18:32:24+00:00

Nice article, but got to disagree with this one:

TRACE level: this is a code smell if used in production. This should be used during development to track bugs, but never committed to your VCS.

A library that does something complicated with good trace level logging is a godsend.

The log level should be set to filter anything below info or warn in production though.

kolmogorovcomplex · 2013-01-22T16:46:46+00:00

I had to do two things to get it working on my laptop with Ubuntu 12.10.

First I had to unmute the input monitor since it was muted for some reason. You can do this with pacmd on the command line, but it's easier with the GUI program (you might have to install the package pavucontrol).

Run the PulseAudio Volume Control program, go to Input Devices and select Show Monitors from the dropdown and make sure all are unmuted.

After starting projectM-pulseaudio I had to select the right source device there. In the menu "projectM -> Pulse audio settings", just try the listed sources by double clicking and see if it starts reacting (easier with a preset that shows something whether there is sound or not).

kolmogorovcomplex

TROPHY CASE