Entropy

Analyzing ~425 days of Hacker News posts with standard shell commands

January 05, 2016

(About) 425 days ago (at the time of this writing) I started scraping Hacker News via its shiny new API. And then I promptly forgot about it. That is, until I noticed my cronjob had been throwing errors constantly for a few weeks:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/dummy/projects/hn-cron/hn.py", line 62, in <module>
main()
File "/home/dummy/projects/hn-cron/hn.py", line 53, in main
log_line = str(details['id']) + "\t" + details['title'] + "\t" + details['url'] + "\t" + str(details['score']) + "\n"
KeyError: 'url'

Instead of fixing anything, I just commented out the cronjob. But now I feel somewhat obligated to do at least a rudimentary analysis of this data. In keeping with my extreme negligence/laziness throughout this project, I hacked together a few bash commands to do just that.

A tale of lost entropy

September 03, 2015

Recently, while looking at a JavaScript function intended to generate a cryptographically-secure random IV to be used in AES-GCM, I noticed something interesting which I immediately suspected was not unique to this project. Sure enough, Matt, my awesome colleague, sent me a link to a how-to article describing the process of generating random values in Node.js that included the exact same quirk.

Here is their example (with minor edits so as not to call out the author of that how-to post too explicitly):