HN user

klhugo

427 karma
Posts9
Comments52
View on HN

Hey @VitalikButerin, instead of doing proof of work with useless puzzles, why don't we use that massive GPU compute power to help science with numerical computation? We could wrap the problem using @HomomorphicEnc techniques. Efficiency would improve overtime. ASICs are welcome.

What's your opinion?

I hope somebody at Microsoft read this. It goes far beyond security vulnerabilities. The Teams Linux client is barely usable. Chromebooks don't even have a client.

Could Microsoft expose an API and allow third party clients to be developed?

If your .vimrc is minimal, you will have a pretty good time using systems that implement "vim like" text editing. Take Overleaf for example, no vimrc is available, but I'm quite happy with what I got, and sometimes I even forget I'm in the browser.

I'm in the middle of a PhD myself, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

I actually agree with the author, certain fields are just very complex to develop a solid understand without proper mentoring and support you would get as a grad student.

That said, maybe the real issue is not the fact we need two PhDs each, but the question I want to raise, do PhDs need to take 4/5/6 years? (I'm not even considering the cases where people, like myself, do a 2 year master program before the PhD...). Honestly, in my humble opinion, it is not necessary.

Maybe universities could develop "industry focused dual PhD programs" to target specifically crazy folks like us :)

This might be something worth to fight for.

Quick comment, not an expert, but environ vars keep their state after the program is called. From a functional programming perspective, or just for my own sanity, wouldn’t it be more interesting to keep the states into minimum?

Design is not all. There is a reason IC design houses are vanishing, it is too expensive to design custom chips. Only large companies can afford the tapeouts, testing, Packaging, and large volume production.

During a CC certification, the design-house, mask shop, and fab are certified to reduce the chances of the chip being tampered. The certification ensures that all those places have decent security practices and protocols. It helps but is quite far from completely mitigating it.

I don't have any reference of a mask being modified to give to you, but it is so easy to do it that we don't actually need evidences to be worried.

If you think about it, just by changing implantation parameters on the transistors that form a ring oscillator for generating random numbers can bias it (this does not require not even modifying the mask).

It was just a simple example. There are counter-measures WAY more complex than a simple two lead sensor. I was part of a CC certified chip design, and I can tell you we must implement tests for every single countermeasure in the chip. But still you have no means to check whether your sensor/countermeasure hasn't been tampered all together in the supply chain.

Excellent work. I completely agree that today the easiest option to develop safe hardware is using FPGAs.

Two things to look forward:

   1. Usage of open source FPGA synthesis and implementation tools
   2. Usage of open source FPGA chips :)
I've already seen some traction happening for open source FPGA tools, but open source FPGA chips are only in my head (as far as I know).

I'm a chip designer myself, and for years I have been thinking on kickstarting something to pay for a tapeout of an open source FPGA. If anyone is interested let me know, I live in Ontario/Canada.

I have to agree with you.

What impresses me even more is that they are selling it already, and marketing as “open-source”. I would leave a note here that if anybody is interested in doing something similar, please get some feedback from community before starting commercialization.

This article would be better represented with the title “Open Source Logic”, since it basically refers to the adoption of FPGAs on the cloud. IMHO Open Source Silicon refers to the physical design and process information for actual manufacturing of a chip.

That said, I do believe significant improvements are being achieved to lower the barrier for HW development. One thing that is not often mentioned is that even for experienced hardware developers (like myself) it is very hard/time consuming to fully implement the full stack of technologies required to accelerate computation on a PCI express connected FPGA board.

I haven’t followed recent trend of HLS, thus I can certainly say that with the traditional approach verilog/SV, it would be only a handful of people that could actually make use of those FPGAs.

Hi, thanks for having a look at the code! I did not put lots of effort in developing the trading strategy itself. So you need to make sure you provide a `proft` param to the function `bd_insert_buy` which is large enough so you don't loose money. Currently, the `maestro` function sets the `DTHR` variable which is used both as dip threshold for buying, and as profit value.

The Money Maker Machine - Monker

This was a hobby project of myself to create the simplest Cryptocurrency bot possible. It was written in Python, operates on Binance, and stores all logging and trading information into a MongoDB database. The trading strategy is extremely simple:

- Assume that crypto prices will fluctuate, but eventually be restored to its original quote - Buy small quantities every time the price falls below a threshold, keeping track of the amount purchased and the price payed - Sell those exact quantities when the price is above what was payed for it

It was a lot of fun developing it, and I guess I made something around 3 dollars before shutting it down. It is my first contribution to opensource world, and I hope others can benefit from it :)