Viewing profile — bpolverini

The Government already has a monopoly on force and steals our money under the threat of imprisonment in the form of taxation: Now that money is supposed to be allocated into risky …

Very true and worth evangelizing to others. I have unknowingly violated -fstrict-aliasing in some part of my code only to discover later that it is benign at -O0 and metastasized a…

I buy the premise that Zig is better if you know you will have lots of pointer arithmetic going on. Having written a fair amount of unsafe C interop code in Rust, I feel like these…

Who do the Kachin, Karen, Rakhine, Shan, etc. support at this time? Are they siding with the NDL or the military?

If you're interested in seeing an interesting off broadway twist on the Noise Protocol Spec, libdisco and strobe are really interesting: https://www.discocrypto.com/ https://strobe…

That would be really cool, but I think enforcing that is undecidable. My gut tells me that having that language feature at compile time is the same as the Halting Problem.

What if someone lives in Taiwan or the United States or Singapore or anywhere outside of the PRC? This is exactly the type of sociotechnical pressure the PRC wants to enforce over …

As an Italian-American, this explains why every time I go to a Buca di Beppo, I feel like I'm in some kind of merger between a mediocre Italian restaurant and a minstrel show. To t…

The dueling rhetoric is the same rhetoric that has been around for decades: Some people really feel type systems add value; others, feel it's a ball and chain. So which is it? The …

Why are we down voting this? Of all people in the world, Ray Dalio would want us to ask, "Why." Principle #1: Trust in truth. Whether I'm being facetious is an exercise to the read…

First thing I thought of when I read this was the article by Sam Altman where he calls businesses valued at $100M "really good airplanes." https://blog.ycombinator.com/navigating-m…

The personification of "Silicon Valley" into some giant evil blob-like entity attempting to consume innocent, creative counter-revolutionaries undermines a perfectly awesome, but 1…

That video of the crying manager is what made me quit Bridgewater. The craziest part was that the manager who ended up crying became the one who would teach lessons to new hires on…

I can see Orwell was right already. "Terrorism" (the word) has become, by and large, a tool of nation-states and institutions like RAND to legitimize another horrific term: "extra …

There is absolutely nothing to root for. He's killed (and his cartel continues to kill) a tragic number of innocent people: women, children, and the poor, all across Mexico. He's a…

With an infinite supply of drug money and weapons coming in from the United States, what is PRI or the PAN or the PRD supposed to do? Mexicans are proud, and the notion of immediat…

With or without "use asm", as hackcasual mentioned, we don't have the control we need, like one might have on some platforms in C. Some of the articles we reference in the top sect…

Definitely right about that. The biggest reason was familiarity with the Skein NIST implementation--I've dug through it in the past in research and the like, so I wanted to leverag…

You're right. To be honest, the reason why we don't use it the way it is described in the paper, is entirely out of fear of misconfiguring the Skein context. The NIST reference imp…

Yeah, it is. We use the optimized 64bit version through JNI in our backend.

Skein -- interesting choice. I always liked the ARX construction in skein, and it's cool to see it in Javascript through emscripten.

Partly, but it is primarily to bring those living in rural areas into an urban context as a mechanism for modernizing the economy. Right now, under the hukou system ( https://en.wi…