omra

It is in a similar vein to this: http://andrewphoy.github.io/chess-replayer/. (Which is more full-featured.)

(05/11)

      No changes. Stdcxx continues to be dormant. There was a flurry of emails
      on the stdcxx-dev list suggesting continued interest from the same two
      parties (ARM and Sun) but no new work.

The Attic is where retired Apache projects go.

(02/2012)

      A vote to move stdcxx to the Attic failed. The majority of stdcxx
      contributors voted in favor of continuing to maintain the project.
      Several inactive committers stepped up to help with the project.

I do not think that this was a surprise. Regular status reports stopped completely after February 2012. It's also notable that Chris Bergström was proposed for the new chair position, see http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/stdcxx-dev/201306.m...

(It's like a smart version of cd.)

Cryptography is unforgiving, and when your code could seriously endanger someone else, you have to be constantly vigilant.

[1]: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL15/Caldwell1/cald5.h...

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23150658 [1] http://www.mikebloomberg.com/index.cfm?objectid=A08875E3-C29...

Bitcoin Collapse: If Bitcoins collapse, you now have a bunch of worthless miners. Compare this to a quick sell it and done.

God forbid you gain a significant amount of network control, because you have a problem. Miners will probably begin to reject your transactions for the sanity of the network, because you could double-spend, and virtually create infinite bitcoins.

Also, how is setting up a business like this trivial? I imagine that a huge part of it (initial investment, buying power, and maintaining all these devices) could be problematic, although I could be wrong.

http://cr.yp.to/antiforgery/cachetiming-20050414.pdf

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/06/there-was-a-time-befo...

b) Search up for "BigInt libraries". The problem is the same with the others, its slow. You still have to allocate memory and the operations aren't as fast. However, BigInt libraries are widely used when necessary.

The probability any sequence of length d is found in N digits of pi is 1 - 1/exp(N*0.1^d) (Poisson distribution for approximating the binomial). Then the limit as N approaches infinity is 1 for any finite d.

Then again, ICANN has nothing to lose by encouraging many applicants, they get an awful lot of money from the applications (about 357 million [1]). They may be non-profit, but they still need money to keep running.

  [1] http://www.name.com/blog/general/news-2/2012/06/icann-reveals-the-new-gtlds/

I believe that a better idea is to fix this in Rails. Why is a secret key loaded from the configuration directory? I agree with ajross's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4970347).

This isn't to say that Github should do nothing to control the problem, but more must be done than just that.

Note that not all of those results are necessarily vulnerable, for example, https://github.com/hotsh/rstat.us/blob/master/config/initial... loads the secret key from the environment, and https://github.com/GreenplumChorus/chorus/blob/master/config... loads it from an ignored file (like the article). I would estimate the real number of projects to be somewhere less than 3000, with about 1400 being on Github. This also assumes that these are all actually production keys.

Just to reiterate, I do believe that this is a legitimate problem even now, but I just wanted to note the age of the article and to refute the claim that this is the first mention of the issue.

I feel that the statement that "only 100" mathematicians worked on the classification of finite groups is disingenuous. There is clearly a disparity between contributing a kernel patch and dedicating your entire life to researching a mathematical topic.

As for the Linux kernel, I would like to point out that the original paper [3] states that 7,944 developers have contributed since 2.6.11 (which is more than your estimate, but important regardless). A paragraph later on is a little more telling:

>[D]espite the large number of individual developers, there is still a relatively small number who are doing the majority of the work. In any given development cycle, approximately 1/3 of the developers involved contribute exactly one patch. Over the past 5.5 years, the top 10 individual developers have contributed 9% of the total changes and the top 30 developers have contributed just over 20% of the total.

That is to say, 30 developers have made 20% of Linux. This is not unlike the classification of finite groups, where a small amount of people have done a large majority of the work. It would be insane to say only 100 people have ever looked at finite groups. Indeed, proving something is exponentially harder than learning it. Similarly, you would not say that 7000 people use Linux, because 7000 have hacked on the kernel.

As for your last comment regarding about how you did not choose the topic, I agree. But I think that this entire debate is silly: neither side is more important than the other, more difficult than the other, mutually exclusive, or so on. I do not agree with Dijkstra on this point, and I feel that his fame is no reason to excuse him from it.

[1] http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2001-38-03/S0273-0979-01-00...

[2] A History of Finite Simple Groups, by FCC Doherty.

[3] http://go.linuxfoundation.org/who-writes-linux-2012

However, there are some factual problems with your reply which I want to address. The Classification of Finite Simple Groups was a large endeavor spanning over an entire century. It was not made "by about 100 mathematicians".

The fact that the current was not working is not sufficient enough to conclude that the result was a failure or that pure mathematics is somehow worse than computer science. It would be similar to writing some code, and then suddenly realizing that you have to rewrite it if you want to get acceptable performance or to stop it from becoming spaghetti code. Neither of this sheds bad light on the field of computer science.

The key note errors you refer to are not much different from bugs, which of course are inevitable.

[0] https://help.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-data

    $ string_eval("x*x1")
    "x*x1"

    current_expression = expression.split("-x").join(-i);
    var result = eval(current_expression.split("x").join(i));

    $ expression = string_eval("x*x1");
    "x*x1"
    $ expression.split("x").join(12);
    "12*121"
    $ expression.split("x").join(3);
    "3*31"
    $ expression.split("x").join(0.3);
    "0.3*0.31"
    $ expression.split("x").join(-3);
    "-3*-31"

[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=poverty+fraction

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Afghanistan+poverty+rat...

* Found this on my windshield today. Good people rule. - Mon Jul 2 19:50:42 2012 UTC

* 15 years ago my mom made me take "glamour shots". She sent me this today. - Wed Sep 12 12:18:08 2012 UTC

* Photographer snuck this gem into my cousins wedding album. - Fri Sep 14 00:41:23 2012 UTC

* My friend won't approach cliff edges because he says the risk isn't worth it. This is how he looks over, every time. - Thu Sep 27 00:03:55 2012 UTC

The best times to post are given here: http://blog.reddit.com/2011/07/nerd-talk-tale-of-life-of-lin...