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Jeff Epler
Personal blog · emergent.unpythonic.netprogramminghardware
Jeff Epler's personal blog at emergent.unpythonic.net covers programming and hardware. Since 2012, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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22mentions?
7HN people?
2012–2024first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for posts on building avalanche-noise random number generators, cited by commenters on RNG hardware and their own builds. Other linked posts cover MAME vector output, font rendering and Stanford AI in the 70s.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I've been a computer programmer since I first started typing in program listings on a Commodore Vic 20 when I was about 8. My hobbies include electronics, CNC manufacturing, photography, be…
Most-linked posts?
- /012578688263 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-07-30
- /software/hershey2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-11
What Hacker News says?
Avalanche noise... https://emergent.unpythonic.net/01257868826
Comment linking /01257868826
on “RTL-entropy: Uses RTL-SDR to turn a DVB-T dongle into an entropy source”This looks real cool, and the logic behind treating OpenSCAD files this way in a 3d printing workflow is impeccable. I stumbled at first because all my scad files use language features not supported in hob3l. It might help to call more attention to the .scad → (openscad) → .csg → (hob3l) workflow. Blew right past my notebook's 8GB RAM trying to slice a complex fractal model at 6 levels of recursion. This is a "favor…
Comment linking /files/sandbox/flake5.csg.gz
on “Show HN: 100x Faster Slicing of SCAD Files for 3D Printing”"TRUE RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR EXPLOITING THE RANDOMNESS OF QUANTUM PHYSICS" not sure what they mean by this. Likely it is just "avalanche noise". This is not very difficult. In fact, I build an hardware RNG that is based on avalanche noise (not my development): https://emergent.unpythonic.net/01257868826
Comment linking /01257868826
on “Backdooring the Lottery [pdf]”I build an avalanche random number generator based on this: https://emergent.unpythonic.net/01257868826 More fun
Comment linking /01257868826
on “True Random Number Generator for a True Hacker (2015)”Here are 100 more items just like table 6, generated in, oh, about 2 seconds on an i7-4790k. https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/trolled.txt Here's the search program (built with g++ -O3 -fopenmp -fno-strict-aliasing on debian stretch) https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/search.c Just put the corpus "pg10.txt" in the current directory and run. Newlines in the corpus are turned to spaces; carriage…
Comment linking /files/sandbox/search.c
on “A Note on SIMON-32/64 Security”I also tried to verify "table 6", which appears to be correct except for the second row, where the hex value shown for "C" is accidentally the same as "E". Correcting it to 0x7761792c20666f72 causes all the "test cases" to come out as claimed. https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/474bis.py It does seem like there has to be some interesting cryptanalysis going on to produce this many interesting pairs, parti…
Comment linking /files/sandbox/474bis.py
on “A Note on SIMON-32/64 Security”I tried to verify "table 5", but while the "YHWH" keys all worked, only 2 of the 5 " " keys did. https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/474.py (Table 5 isn't "important", it's just a justification of why their algorithm 1 skips analyzing pairs where the plaintext in each pair is identical; and finding such keys doesn't seem TOO hard to do in the obvious way, you can get one such key every 4 billion trials or…
Comment linking /files/sandbox/474.py
on “A Note on SIMON-32/64 Security”You can also output vector graphics from MAME, allowing you to play old monochrome vector games without rasterization. This is hacking VGA rather than audio output: http://emergent.unpythonic.net/software/01115603825
Comment linking /software/01115603825
on “Oscilloscope clock”I am nearly done building my own. Had a couple of boards etched for me (16 Euro incl. shipping for 4 boards with holes pre drilled) I will lend the soldering gun from my brother today and build it. Unfortunately I realized I am short 1 4.kO resistor... http://emergent.unpythonic.net/01257868826 Too much for you? You can live with security by obscurity? Buy this thing: http://www.entropykey.co.uk/ With both systems y…
Comment linking /01257868826
on “USB Random Number Generator”Ring oscillators (more specifically, XOR or other mixing operations between at least two oscillators) are a good basis for a TRNG. I've implemented one of my own (source code now lost :() : https://emergent.unpythonic.net/projects/hm2rng with links to an academic paper that still works. the whirlygig rng page appears to have moved to https://warmcat.com/hardware%20design/linux%20peripherals/20...
Comment linking /projects/hm2rng
on “Ring oscillators on Silego GreenPAK 4”I thought about buying one but then build my own: http://emergent.unpythonic.net/01257868826 Got the board etched including hole drilling via ebay (as a service).
Comment linking /01257868826
on “Entropy Key”And 112.6 and 27.192, also in China, are connecting at a few MiB/s each client IP. However, its clients aren't serving up the "\0" client IDs and are connecting with encryption. https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/Screenshot_202...
Comment linking /files/sandbox/Screenshot_2021-10-16_19-55-13.png
on “300k Chinese bots currently abusing Ubuntu's torrents”After a short time serving one of those torrents, I have lots of connections from China, each pulling down about 130KiB/s. My outgoing bandwidth has been rising slowly, from only 400KiB/s when I started writing this comment to 3MiB/s now. https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/Screenshot_202... % Information related to '117.188.0.0/14AS9808' route: 117.188.0.0/14 descr: China Mobile communications corporation
Comment linking /files/sandbox/Screenshot_2021-10-16_19-49-32.png
on “300k Chinese bots currently abusing Ubuntu's torrents”Keith Packard made a very small font, Twin, based on the Hershey fonts, that could be easily embedded in other code. The paper describing it is here: https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/twin-ols2005/twin_ols2005.p... It's embedded in the Cairo graphics library for debug/test text, just like the one in the article. The data table is here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/cairo/cairo/-/blob/master/src... and the code that…
Comment linking /software/hershey
on “Texture-Less Text Rendering”I'm glad this seems to validate the numbers I'd calculated last year based mostly on wikipedia sources: https://emergent.unpythonic.net/01471617505 It's a curious fact that in my area the fuel/energy cost of a mile of travel in a 44MPG gasoline hybrid is close to the a mile of travel in a 100MPGe EV. So it's hard to see a lifetime cost of ownership savings driving an EV. https://emergent.unpythonic.net/01470953274
Comment linking /01470953274
on “New Numbers Are in and EVs Are Cleaner Than Ever”WAITS has the true details; good to see my memory was not any more unreliable than usual. > The first character alphabet that was programmed for my plotter was Elvish rather than Latin. To be fair, tengwar is so much more regular than latin, that it only stands to reason one might wish to debug with it, parametrically* generating letterforms, before committing the effort to digitising a full latin alphabet, letter b…
Comment linking /software/hershey
on “Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s”That's neat! A number of years ago I attempted to create a program that would exhaustively evaluate short, digitless "dc" programs to find the shortest programs for all numbers under a million: https://emergent.unpythonic.net/01518231512 & a database of all my results for numbers up to 1 million: https://emergent.unpythonic.net/01525128151 While dc does have looping and function calls, my program didn't investigate…
Comment linking /01525128151
on “Show HN: Integer Decompiler – Get the shortest program generating a given number”Not much information about the hardware randomness source. Information on how to generate digital TRNG from a reverse-biased PN junction has been all over the internet for a couple of decades. My 2009 design, which simply slotted into an Arduino board, furnished 200kB/s (1.6Mbit/s) of data that passed all the statistical tests I threw at it at the time (mostly diehard(er)). To do all this in an 8-bit microcontroller…
Comment linking /01257868826
on “Random Power – The value of unpredictability (TRNG board)”
