Also possible to get a heatmap of a keyboard to see what keys were pressed last. I've seen this attack carried out in a youtube video, where a hacker could log back into a kiosk terminal simply by grabbing the heat signature emitted from the last few keys pressed.

I like the happy medium of one ultra quantum unbreakable master passphrase which is used to unlock easier to guess passwords. SO somebody owned your Imgur account full of memes. So what? Always assume an account is breakable.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/11/gchq-passw...

As a rule of thumb, I would go after natural language phrases first, because it is impossible to tell if the phrase was machine-generated. It's nearly impossible to arrange dots randomly on a page with a pencil because there is always some structure or engrained rigidity in human guesswork. There is also the possibility that the dots were done by 'inception', and certain biases were programmed in via subliminal messaging. Don't trust humans to do a machine's tasks.

Yeah what I meant is that sometimes the phrase appears like natural language, and was probably uttered once, if not on a stray ebook than somebody once said it. Of course then we have have the question of whether history starts the moment it is electronically recorded.

If NLG upsets you, you can always settle for a Markov chain and some atmospheric noise to seed the random values

Thanks for clearing that up :)

Anxiety is a complicated subject, and can be interpreted differently depending on the sufferer's knowledge of certain areas of neuroscience and psychology. I've been lucky to study anxiety deeply enough that it no longer has control over me. As a sidenote, anxiety comes from the German word for anger, and is the result of unaddressed internal dialogue within the sufferer, closely related to cognitive dissonance, or witnessing too many paradoxes throughout the day. Avoid paradoxical thinking - it gets in the way of the task at hand, which is usually something mundane like getting in a lift, or even walking the dog.

XKCD's diceware argument fails under certain conditions. Computationally very hard to crack, but when plucked from actual phrases that have been uttered; weak.

So to give an example, any natural language phrase like:

"I took a walk in a park" is easier to crack.

I am certain there is somebody coding an infinite-monkey-type bruter to crack diceware as we speak:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

I see this a lot now, with the proliferation of libraries that allow for arbitrary passwords. Possibly some form of systemic trickling down of bad practices into software with horrible consequences

"Your password must contain the seventh circle of hell, and a Taco Emoji"

I call this 'inventor syndrome' because innately people want to better the world in some way, instead of just leech from technology.

MY only issue with that approach is people re-inventing the wheel. There is more code on Github than one could imagine, and not enough people evangelizing for Less-lines-of-code.

Of course it may take a programmer two decades to realize this, but what's the phrase:

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few"

I hear you. Raw unfiltered links always have hidden gems.

One thing though: Greptweet has an archive somewhere with a huge trove of tweets that users of the service have searched for, and were thus logged and kept. (Some even go over the 3200 limit). It's a massive Tarball, so set aside time to download it and parse out boring/noisy links.

A lot of HN links are tech-press posts which consist of hearsay and merely proxy the thoughts of others. The recent changes in HN with regards to more academia-style posts is refreshing.

Nice trove to pore through when I find the time.

I like to use Twitter to analyze HN datasets. It's mostly limited to links, because that's what I'm after mostly.

https://twitter.com/newsycombinator https://twitter.com/HackerNews .. And a few other accounts. Try to avoid Bitly wrapped links.

Use something like Greptweet to harvest the tweets and parse out any noise.