Tavern on the Meta

I guess the only interesting thing I could find out is whether the added calculations to change the order of testing would slow down the program any, compared to the straight run.

balpha

yeah, because generating the numbers from 0 to 9999 is such an intensive operation that it needs performance-optimization ;)

rchern

7:50 PM

(:

Mark C

Come on, that's not what I'm talking about

D:

rchern

i'm not exactly sure what you're talking about honestly |:

Mark C

I would generate a "secret" key, then compare the mean time to match for different search distributions

Like I was saying, I must've not been thinking clearly, because on average the mean time should be the same

So the only interesting thing I would find out is if (for a larger number set, obviously) the added calculations to produce periodic searching or blind "binary" searching would make a slight difference in the MTTM. (Edit: i.e. take more time compared to vanilla 0..99)

rchern

how would it decrease the time complexity?

Mark C

That's what I'm saying, it won't, because we don't know anything the number.

Or do you mean the last part?

rchern

7:57 PM

i'm just...confused.

5

balpha

the only thing that might be of a little help is knowing distribution of often-chosen passwords (assuming the number was chosen by a human)

Mark C

Hooray for quotes out of context

Yes.

balpha

like, you'd probably check 1234 before 4198

Mark C

Right, or possible birthdays or such

Does anyone know the distribution of the last 4 digits of Social Security numbers?

balpha

the fourth-to-last digit of german SSNs is a letter :)

and it's the first letter of the last name, so you can get that distribution from the phone book

(anyone here remember phone books?)

Mark C

8:00 PM

Oh my goodness, I didn't remember you were from Berlin!

Knorke!

balpha

I just moved here 1 1/2 years ago

Mark C

But it's so cool!

balpha

and I will never ever ever ever use the word "Knorke"!

Mark C

Ah, no wonder then

Well, it's supposed to be an old word, not a trendy one

Where from?

rchern

ssn's in the us follow a numbering scheme for the different sections

Mark C

8:02 PM

So, @Balpha, do you think if I had, say, 1M numbers to test, would doing a "skip search" or a mock binary search add any significant amount of time?

balpha

1 million is a still a pretty small number

Mark C

@Rchern What do you mean by sections?

@Balpha Okay, yeah, but by then it would be measurable

It's not so small if you're running interpreted code on Windows 3.1!

rchern

xxx-xx-xxxx, 1st 3 digits, middle 2 digits, last 4

Mark C

Okay, and I'm wondering about the last four

rchern

consecutively issued

i think at least shrugs

Mark C

8:05 PM

And cycled, or what?

I guess if we could figure out the numbering scheme we could guess people's SSNs if we knew enough about them

rchern

nah

Zypher

@MarC the first two are place of birth (city) and year of ISSUE

rchern

google.com/search?q=ssn%20numbering (;

balpha

> The last four digits are serial numbers. They represent a straight numerical sequence of digits from 0001-9999 within the group.

Social Security number

In the United States, a Social Security number (SSN) is a nine-digit number issued to U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and temporary (working) residents under section 205(c)(2) of the Social Security Act, codified as . The number is issued to an individual by the Social Security Administration, an independent agency of the United States government. Its primary purpose is to track individuals for taxation purposes. In recent years the SSN has become a de facto national identification number. A social security number may be obtained by applying on Form SS-5, "Application for A Social Sec...

Mark C

Oh my goodness, so cracking someone's SSN boils down to my cell phone problem if you know where they were born and when they got a number?

Strange, I wonder why my second number is more than ten years after I was born

balpha

8:08 PM

you know the FBI reads this chat, right? just sayin'...

rchern

@Zypher, hmm, i didn't know year was part of it.

Mark C

:P

Zypher

yep

@MarkC that just means your parents needed to get one for you at that point ... normally people get them @16 when they get a job ...

you don't go get one till you need it

balpha

hey @Zypher, had a good lunch? Coz, you'll be dragging servers from Corvallis to NY all day :)

rchern

just says 1st 3 are the area code

Zypher

8:10 PM

also ... SSN's where NEVER ment to be a verification mechinisim

Mark C

Check out the notice at the top of this page:

Zypher

@rchern that can't be right ... my first 3 and area code are NOWHERE near eachother

rchern

not the same as phone area code

Mark C

**Attention All Users**
After June 25, 2011, the High Group List will no longer be updated. Please see Randomization for more information on SSA's new assignment process and how it may affect you.

Zypher

@balpha yep ... some good roast pork and Sauerkraut

rchern

8:11 PM

> Generally, numbers were assigned beginning in the northeast and moving south and westward, so that people on the east coast had the lowest numbers and those on the west coast had the highest numbers. As the areas assigned to a locality are exhausted, new areas from the pool are assigned, so some states have noncontiguous groups of numbers.

Mark C

See socialsecurity.gov/employer/ssnvhighgroup.htm

balpha

I'd love to know what "administrative reasons" cause such a stupidity:

The middle two digits are the group number. The group numbers range from 01 to 99. However, they are not assigned in consecutive order. For administrative reasons, group numbers are issued in the following order:
ODD numbers from 01 through 09
EVEN numbers from 10 through 98
EVEN numbers from 02 through 08
ODD numbers from 11 through 99

Mark C

Ah ha, it's a group number

The story in #SSNs_invalidated_by_use_in_advertising is unbelievable.

"I'll just use my secretary's SSN for our product!"

balpha

►

2

Mark C

What's that?

OH NO!!

Comic Sans, augh!

radp

8:22 PM

@balpha Policy to split jobs between worker threads, obviously!

balpha

Yeah, RPC via carrier pidgeon

radp

btw @jin I commute to university. That means that I'm arrive late to lessons (if I can! stupid 0815 lessons.) and leave early. Not much room for "social skills," except maybe for lunch together. Not everybody "gets to" live in dorms. :)

Popular Demand

@aFewHoursAgoWhenIWasn'tHere: cmu.edu/news/archive/2009/July/july6_ssnprediction.shtml

Feature request: allow me to actually send messages to the room in the past. I know, I know, that's time travel, but information has no mass, so I don't see what the problem.

balpha

8:39 PM

@PopularDemand Closing this as a dupe of the feature request you will make on June 7, 2012

Tim Stone

@PopularDemand Heh, I was going to link to that too. Interesting stuff.

(@YiJiang)

I have to start reclaiming some of that annoying agricultural space, heh, need to expand.

Oh, he's disappeared...hmm.

Mark C

Is that 3000 or even later?

rchern

what is that?

Tim Stone

Sim City 4

Mark C

Figures, I think 3000 was just a barely updated 2000

Tim Stone

8:47 PM

For some reason it keeps trying to give me a mission that involves driving a car to that island you can see at the top of the screenshot, only it's impossible to get over there...

Mark C

@PopularDemand Ah-ha, so it's been done! (Not surprising, I guess.)

@Popular, so how much of the transcript did you read?

@Tim So there's no landscaping or bridge-building in SC4?

Tim Stone

You can't modify the landscape once you've created the city.

And the terrain on the island is too steep to build a bridge.

Mark C

But you could have beforehand?

Tim Stone

Yeah.

rchern

rut roh, time for the servers to risk drowning and dysentery

Tim Stone

8:55 PM

Heheh

Mark C

Quick hacker question: Is it possible to audit someone else's reputation?

And by the way, have y'all read this? foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol2_1/tpj0201-0004.html

It's "Perl and Nuclear Weapons Do not Mix"

rchern

@YiJiang, did you see the comment I added to the pull request?

Tim Stone

@rchern I second the comment, since we also have just normal /del too now.

rchern

9:10 PM

aye

Mark C

9:32 PM

Is all this work on R.Chern's Famous StackExchange Chat Script?

radp

9:46 PM

reminder; #stackoverflow and the rest of the network may have some downtime today, starting NOW: http://goo.gl/tdbR

Tweeted by codinghorror on October 23, 2010 at 8:54 PM

for values of now in the past hour

rchern

i haven't seen any downtime yet

Tim Stone

0

Q: Does where your employees sit affect the quality of games they produce?

In Game Dev Story, you are able to change where your employees sit. Does this have any affect on how well they perform (for example, a seat closer to the boss will result in more points added to a game), or are these changes purely cosmetic?

A game about making a game...I see.

rchern

lol what?

Tim Stone

itunes.apple.com/us/app/game-dev-story/id396085661?mt=8

Not really sure why someone is literally on fire in one of those screenshots, but yeah...Interesting. :P

rchern

heh.

radp

9:54 PM

how do you URL escape )?

trying to link to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa645739(VS.71).aspx

rchern

%28 and %29

Tim Stone

10

Q: Links to URLs containing parentheses

How do I add a link to a URL containing parentheses () (or "round brackets" by heathens)? For example: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752574(VS.85).aspx The parentheses around "VS.85" causes it to look like this: Markdown: [IHtmlDocument2 reference](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...

support markdown hyperlinks linking

radp

@rchern thanks

rchern

also, escape("()") in js

radp

newslite.tv/2010/10/21/amazing-360-flip-leaves-crashe.html

Tim Stone

10:00 PM

Hmm...What to work on now...

radp

@rchern I'll try to remember that.

Tim Stone

@radp Wow, that's pretty crazy

1

Q: Why is Java "String" type written in capital letter while "int" is not?

Hi, I am curious. Why do I have to type String myStr with a capital letter whereas I type int aNumba with a lower-case letter?

java

..Heh.

radp

._.

bbl, asking "How do you uncover a tile in Minesweeper" on Gaming.

or should I ask "How do I move a card from one pile to the other in Freecell?"

Tim Stone

Those are silly questions.

You should instead be asking why the king dude in Freecell looks so shady.

Sitting up there, with his shifty eyes...

rchern

10:18 PM

haha, nice

Tim Stone

Hmm, what else should be crammed into this userscript...I want the satisfaction of being productive, without the annoyingness of doing real work.

3

Aiden Bell

Starred @TimStone

Still no followers on my A51 proposal :(

Tim Stone

Heh. :P I'd actually be happy to do work-work if I didn't have to deal with the database stuff right now, I hate how tedious that becomes.

follows

Aiden Bell

Whooooo Thanks @TimStone - though hopefully not a sympathy follow lol

Tim Stone

I'm not 100% sure what you're going for, so I'm legitimately interested to see how it develops.

Aiden Bell

10:31 PM

Just questions about existing companies and organisations really.

Tim Stone

I just..forgot to relook at it yesterday, heh.

Aiden Bell

I think that a "Google" Q&A is too narrow, and a "Tech Companies" seems arbitary

You think it is too broad with governments?

Tim Stone

Hm, maybe...

Aiden Bell

Hmm, I think so, but I also know that 90% of questions about companies are equally valid for governments and they are the biggest consumer in most economies

Tim Stone

11:29 PM

Ah, Gaming makes me so happy..

1

Q: Can you sink Tall Ships?

So I'm playing Moby Dick: The Video Game, and every now and then a tall ship comes by. For anyone not familiar with that term, I'm talking about the large, masted ships. (In this game, they are the ones that fire cannons at you.) These ships usually kill me, and so far I've been unable to sink...

how-to moby-dick

Who would have guessed there was a Moby Dick: The Video Game?

Aiden Bell

lol

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