Top all-time · #3572
Dave's Data
Personal blog · da-data.blogspot.comprogrammingsystemssecurity
Dave's Data is a personal blog at da-data.blogspot.com about programming, systems and security. Since 2013, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 63 times, most often “Minting Money with Monero and CPU vector intrinsics (2014)”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Comments link Dave's Data for posts on cryptocurrency mining hardware, a Monero miner-code dispute, and zero-knowledge SNARK setup. Commenters cite the posts without judging their writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog about computer science, systems, technology, and sometimes vegan cooking.
Most-linked posts?
- Minting Money with Monero and CPU vector intrinsics (2014)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-02-14
- Teaching Distributed Systems in Go3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-02-12
- Finances for Recent CS Ph.D.s Headed to Academia2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-12-28
- Finding Bugs in TensorFlow with LibFuzzer2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-01-11
- Moving from C++ to Go to improve Pi searching speed2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-05-15
- Integer Log10 in Rust and C2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-02-10
- Why my car cost more than taking Uber everywhere2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-07-05
- Moving the Pi Searcher from Go to Rust2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-18
- Cleaning the ImageNet dataset2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-07
- Minting Money with Monero and CPU Vector Intrinsics2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-08-28
What Hacker News says?
Yes. It's basically an MVNO that resells on Sprint, TMO, and US Cellular, while trying hard to keep calls and data going over WiFi. As a consequence of that, it only works on newer phones that can do fast handoff between WiFi and cell. I use it. It works pretty well. My wife is still on Cricket and she got better coverage in the mountains of Colorado this summer, but I've been happy everywhere else. The pricing is v…
Comment linking /2015/10/comparing-prepaid-cell-plans-public.html
on “US telcos appear to be selling non-anonymized access to consumer telephone data”Submitted C++ still isn't cutting it as a story · 190 points
HN discussionThere is - Go is a terribly fun language in the domains that it's good at. Like some other fun languages, if you take the time to get into 'the go way' of doing things, you'll get a new perspective on some kinds of programming that'll help you in general. Go is drastically less bloated than Java. Stupidly fast compilation and running lets you use it almost (but not quite) like you might Python for some things. A rec…
Comment linking /2013/05/improving-pi-searchers-speed-by-moving.html
on “Building Web Apps in Go”Submitted Minting Money with Monero and CPU Vector Intrinsics as a story · 154 points
HN discussionHelp me convince people to do a few things a bit better: http://da-data.blogspot.com/2016/04/stealing-googles-coding-... (tl;dr of my linked blog post: Apply a slightly lighter weight form of some industry engineering practices in CS research coding. I think it's feasible. It doesn't solve all of the problems, because as discussed elsewhere in this thread, some of them are incentive-related and I'm not going to clai…
Comment linking /2016/04/stealing-googles-coding-practices-for.html
on ““Extremely angry with the state of academic CS research right now””Submitted Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code as a story · 84 points
HN discussionMatt linked to my course, but also: I did a tiny analysis of this with my pi searcher ( http://da-data.blogspot.com/2013/05/improving-pi-searchers-s... ) -- it's a toy compared to the kind of system that Matt described, but my experience was extremely positive. Rewriting it in Go made it easier to architect the system right to take advantage of persistence. It's hugely faster. We also have a paper accepted to SOSP t…
Comment linking /2013/05/improving-pi-searchers-speed-by-moving.html
on “Rewriting a large production system in Go”Submitted Experience with ePaxos: Systems Research using Go as a story · 80 points
HN discussionSpeaking as a part timer on Brain who's not a machine learning person, I've found and believe that MI just opens up more opportunities for good programmers. There are a ton of problems out there that we couldn't solve well with computers without MI, and so didn't even attempt. Now we can attempt them, and they're both fun and hard. (I wrote a longer-form answer to a very similar question a few months ago: http://da-…
Comment linking /2016/05/dont-quit-that-programming-career-yet.html
on “The Google Brain Team – Looking Back on 2016”Submitted Two Years of Voice-Based Assistants, Echo and Home as a story · 73 points
HN discussionOk. Krugman actually annoyed me enough with this one to respond. Here's an attempt to start a slightly more technically sophisticated dialogue with Krugman about Bitcoin. http://da-data.blogspot.com/2013/12/to-krugman-finding-intri... Now if I could find one of my economist colleagues to actually get him to read it... :-)
Comment linking /2013/12/to-krugman-finding-intrinsic-value-of.html
on “Bitcoin and positive vs. normative economics”Submitted Teaching Distributed Systems in Go as a story · 66 points
HN discussionI'm not talking about normal people. I'm talking about the couple you described that makes slightly more money than I and my wife and yet has less than half the savings I do. Edited to add: And I'm surrounded by academics more than anything else. To quote the millionaire next door (page 136): > Isn't it interesting that a disproportionately high number of used-car shoppers come from the ranks of teachers and profess…
Comment linking /2016/12/finances-for-recent-cs-phds-headed-to.html
on “Bootstrapping Calculator: Do you have enough savings to fund your business?”Submitted Teaching Distributed Systems in Go (2013) as a story · 53 points
HN discussionWhy wait? :) I did this a while ago (2car -> 1car, with a child), and have zero regrets. We now have two kids, and are still 1-car'ing it, with the occasional rideshare. It's fantastic not having to deal with the crap a less-used car comes with. I wrote up my analysis, with a spreadsheet you can plug your own numbers into: https://da-data.blogspot.com/2015/06/why-my-car-cost-more-th... We chose not to go zero car fo…
Comment linking /2015/06/why-my-car-cost-more-than-taking-uber.html
on “Spend analysis of 6 years, 686 rides, and $12k spent on Uber (2017)”Submitted Show HN: Concurrent cuckoo hashing – fast, compact, multi-reader as a story · 17 points
HN discussionI mean, a serious FPGA lab would simply keep their FPGA techniques secret until they build a sizable advantage. There's a lot of tech that would be built up: a custom memory controller, an implementation of various Cryptocoin PoW systems, and of course, the Bill of Materials for the ideal power-efficiency for various designs, etc. etc. Something like an FPGA + Interposer to HMC would be a huge R&D effort, and just a…
Comment linking /2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.html
on “Monero Declares War on ASIC Manufacturers”Submitted No, C++ still isn't cutting it as a story · 11 points
HN discussionNote, though, that the preprocessing and augmentation is (at least in TF) done within the framework itself. I helped debug the pure-TensorFlow version of the Inception input pipeline, and getting it to match the earlier DistBelief version was agonizing -- it really shows all of the differences (and bugs) in the image processing ops. And there can be subtle effects -- differences in which image resizing algorithm you…
Comment linking /2016/02/cleaning-imagenet-dataset-collected.html
on “Benchmarking CNTK on Keras: Is It Better at Deep Learning Than TensorFlow?”Submitted Nobody ever implements sort – or reasons for reimplementing basic algos as a story · 8 points
HN discussion> I woke up on May 28th, 2014 [one month after Monero launched], on vacation with my family in the middle of the desert, to find a copy of my private source code plastered across the bitcointalk message board. Announced as a "new optimized version" of the Monero currency miner, it was enthusiastically adopted by cryptocurrency miners across the world. And in the process of doing so, my daily profit from the Monero M…
Comment linking /2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.html
on “The Dark Side of Zero Knowledge: Masking the initial setup in Zk-SNARK”Submitted Cleaning the ImageNet dataset as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI'm a huge fan of this project - we're using it to fuzz TensorFlow [1]. (I wrote the initial fuzzers and Frank Chen got the running under OSS-Fuzz). It was surprisingly easy: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorf... and has, thus far, found bugs in the linkages to libpng, libjpeg, strtonum, the proto parser, and some of the internal utility types. I strongly recommend testing out one of the fu…
Comment linking /2017/01/finding-bugs-in-tensorflow-with.html
on “OSS-Fuzz – Continuous Fuzzing for Open Source Software”Submitted Finances for Recent CS Ph.D.s Headed to Academia as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYeah, I heard about that. Thing is, I talked to him last sem and he wasn't sure that Go would be allowed at that point, so I decided to wait a sem. Have you heard anything from the people doing it in Go this time? Its awesome to have the opportunity to use it, but I think it would throw people off for a the first 1-2 weeks while they were getting used to it which might put them at a disadvantage relative to the clas…
Comment linking /2013/02/teaching-distributed-systems-in-go.html
on “Teaching Distributed Systems in Go”Submitted Indirect shellshock scanning through public logfiles as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIf folks are interested in the old Monero PoW function (and, uh, the reason they changed it), I wrote up a thing about it a long time ago: https://da-data.blogspot.com/2014/08/minting-money-with-mone... The history of people trying to design GPU or ASIC-resistant proof-of-work functions is long and mostly unsuccessful. I haven't looked into RandomX; it's possible they've succeeded here (or possible that with the alt…
Comment linking /2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.html
on “How Monero's proof of work works”Submitted Cleaning the Imagenet Dataset (collected notes) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://da-data.blogspot.com/?m=1 "Dave's Data" - very much a "whatever I want to post about" blog but with some of my historical cryptocurrency mining exploits, some CS professor babble, some cooking, and recently some Rust. My most read article was the one where I discussed a pretty crazy adventure creating an optimized miner for the monero cryptocurrency, discovering in the process the mechanism that had been use…
Comment linking /2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.html?m=1
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Why my car cost more than taking Uber everywhere as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
