I'm attempting to get a better understanding of cryptography and have run into some questions about bcrypt.  Bcrypt relies on the blowfish cipher, which is a reversible method of encryption. But bcrypt is not reversible. How is that possible? Or am I mistaken? What does bcrypt do on top of blowfish to make it irreversible?  Why does bcrypt use blowfish instead of twofish or threefish?
I'm attempting to get a better understanding of cryptography and have run into some questions about bcrypt.   Bcrypt relies on the blowfish cipher, which is a reversible method of encryption. But bcrypt is not reversible. How is that possible? Or am I mistaken? What does bcrypt do on top of blowfish to make it irreversible? Why does bcrypt use blowfish instead of twofish or threefish?
How are answers with the same vote score sorted? Work out the type of c# application a class contained in a DLL is being used by Calling a Java method with no name What is the difference between "thee" and "thou"? I am looking for various ways of explaining to my students (in an elementary statistics course) what is a two tailed test, and how its P value is calculated.  How do you explain to your students the two- vs one- tailed test? I  to the question "" which was specific to the question asked.  Another user engaged positively with my answer, as there was a small conversation thread.  That person then  and made what I would say are minor modifications (the comments I left in my original code that pertained to the specific case are still in the places where he made edits to be more specific).  The answer does acknowledge that it is a general case of my specific code.  Ignoring the fact that I'm involved in it, what should one do when seeing this situation?  The only thing I can think of, and I'm not sure that it's necessarily the right solution, is to flag the answer for moderator attention.  Other possible actions, which I believe are wrong, are:   Editing the answer; that would change its intent Voting the answer down; it's a technically correct answer   One could leave a comment, but that can lead to confrontation and escalation (depending on the parties involved) which would be counterproductive.  The only thing I've done, which is not really related, is edit the answer to hyperlink the already existing attribution (but I do this as a regular edit for any answer which explicitly references another).  What's the best approach here, if any? Compare classifiers based on AUROC or accuracy? I have a binary classification problem and I experiment different classifiers on it: I want to compare the classifiers. which one is a better measure AUC or accuracy? And why?  Raondom Forest: AUC: 0.828  Accuracy: 79.6667 %            SVM: AUC: 0.542  Accuracy: 85.6667 % Background I was ignorant as an undergraduate and didn't focus heavily in any specific area. I finally graduated with a single math/computer science degree that consisted of 5 math classes beyond multivariable calculus and a few relatively basic computer science classes (algorithm analysis, SQL database design, etc.). My only research experience is in economics. Now, I work at a research institution in economics where I primarily write Stata/MATLAB code. Question I'd like to get more mathematics under my belt over the next few years in order to either enroll in a PhD program in economics/finance or a M.S. program in finance. What are my options for getting more math experience that I can use in graduate school admissions? Options These are the options I thought of so far, but I would like to know more if possible.  Study enough courses through a system like Open CourseWare to gain enough experience to enroll in more advanced undergraduate classes part time, which my employer might pay for, and then ideally move into an M.S. program in applied math.  Return to my alma mater for a M.S. degree in math that would at least give me a basis to either move into another math graduate program with higher rankings or a lower-ranked graduate program in the fields of my choice.  Join the Air Force and hopefully take advantage of the GI bill to take more courses somewhere and gain entrance into an M.S. program in applied math.  (Sadly) Forgo advanced mathematics and find a consulting job, which although unpleasant in the field of economics (in my opinion), wouldn't be difficult to obtain given my research background in the field.   Do I have any other options? I also plan to take the GRE subject test in mathematics to prove that I have at least minimal knowledge, regardless of what course I pursue (since many graduate programs will require it). Easy way to write contents of a Java InputStream to an OutputStream I was surprised to find today that I couldn't track down any simple way to write the contents of an InputStream to an OutputStream in Java. Obviously, the byte buffer code isn't difficult to write, but I suspect I'm just missing something which would make my life easier (and the code clearer).  So, given an InputStream in and an OutputStream out, is there a simpler way to write the following?  byte[] buffer = new byte[1024]; int len = in.read(buffer); while (len != -1) {     out.write(buffer, 0, len);     len = in.read(buffer); } What happened to /etc/apt/apt.conf? I was browsing through the apt folder to try my proxy settings and I was unable to find the apt.conf file in Ubuntu 11.04. Is there any alternative file for it?  Adding proxy settings to 99-synaptic in apt.conf.d does not help as it gets overwritten everytime I restart the system. Why was the MCU Super Soldier program considered a failure? In Marvel Cinematic Universe, military tried to create super soldiers like Hulk, but they failed. So, the program was shut down.  Where did they fail? Didn't Blonsky get Wolverine-type super healing capability? Why couldn't it make the military stronger? Other than this, wasn't Abomination a success (despite the fact that it wasn't an original work of the military)? He was defeated by Hulk, but enemy forces don't have a Hulk. When it comes to anger, who cares as long as you are focused on the target? Abomination was indeed in full control and he was always after Hulk. Differences in the behaviour of pinching a garden hose and closing a tap Let's say you have a garden hose connected to an ordinary water tap which is opened fully. If you pinch the end of the hose, water leaves the hose at a higher speed (and this can be useful while watering plants, to reach pots which are further away). However when a tap (with no hose connected) is opened only slightly, water flows out at a low speed, possibly even in drops.  The actions of pinching the end of a hose and of almost-closing an open tap seem similar, so why the difference in behaviour? Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token with JSON.parse How to fix byte array java.lang.NullPointerException In Ubuntu, I want to scroll up while a command is running in my terminal window and generates new output (the command that is running is rspec). I can scroll up, but each time rspec generates a new line of console output, it throws me back down to the bottom. Is there a way to scroll all the way up? I'm using terminator on Linux Mint/Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I found a possible workaround.  says that with stty ixon  you can turn on &quot;XON/XOFF flow control for terminal output. Being able to pause output by typing ^S and resume it by typing ^Q [...]&quot; This it not totally what I wanted though, without having to pause the output (and maybe wondering when forgetting to turn it on again), I thought there might be a simple modifier key like shft-alt with mouse wheel scroll-up. Are there better solutions? So I am asked to find all the isomorphisms between $G = (\mathbb Z_4,+)$ and $H = (U_5,*)$.  I solved it as follows: we will have two isomorphism corresponding to the two generators of $U_5$.  The first isomorphism : $\phi([x]_4)$ = $[2]_5^x$   The second isomorphism is: $\phi([x]_4)$ = $[3]_5^x$   Notice that [2] and [3] are the only generators of $U_5$ one can check it systematically or use the fact that $a^m$ is a generator iff gcd(m,4) = 1.  So I just wanted a verification of my work I showed that they are bijective, well defined, and is a homomorphism. Reset post score to 0 on migration I suggest that when a post is migrated from one site to another, that the question vote score get reset to zero (or perhaps only a negative vote score is reset to zero). Often people will downvote a question when the only thing that's "wrong" with it is that it's posted on the incorrect site. After migration, those downvotes hang around as a negative score and may unfairly bias the treatment of the question. Update:   Once upon a time there was a feature called . Its goal was to help our most active users find the questions they can answer. &quot;New nav&quot; never made it out of beta and that beta only ever made it to Stack Overflow users. Several months ago we gave new nav a sad, but overdue burial. As we promised, we've been working on a replacement for new nav, and now it's time for us to start rolling it out. We're calling it custom question lists and we are really excited about its potential to help all users get at the questions that are most interesting to them. While we hope what we've built hits the mark for many of you who have requested a feature like this (e.g., , , , , , ), we know how difficult it is to make something complex simple. So, we are rolling this out in beta to gather feedback from you and iterate on it. (Don't worry, we promise to actually release it this time.) When it's live later you'll be able to opt-in to the beta by turning on a new account preference. This will enable the feature for Stack Overflow, Meta Stack Overflow, and Meta Stack Exchange. It will be available for all network sites when the beta period is over. Schedule for future improvements This feature will roll out in four phases:  Phase I: Filter and sort controls to let you modify a question list view (Julyish) Phase II: Saved custom lists (In progress, ETA November 2018) Phase III: Notifications on custom lists (December 2018) Phase IV: Final fixes and official release (January 2019)  Sneak peak Phase I: Filter and sorts We'll add filter and sort controls to question lists. This does two things:  Clarifies the definition of built-in views - Naming is hard and short names can't always describe what a view is showing you. By exposing the filter and sort controls it is more obvious. Introduces the ability to create new custom views - This won't be super useful until we add the ability to save the views to the UI (phase II). Until then you can bookmark the URL and get back to your views.  Question list with new controls   Views drop down   Filter   Sort   Phase II: Saved custom question lists In this phase we will add the ability to save your custom questions lists. Create custom list In our current design, a dialog will be pre-populated based on the filters and sorts you're currently using. Give it a name, confirm your options, and click save.  Accessing your saved lists When you save your custom lists they will show up in the &quot;More&quot; drop down for question list views. Additionally, you can add them to the left navigation bar for easy access (see image below).  Phase III: Notifications For phase III we'll enable indicators for when new items are available in a custom question list. When you pin a question list to the left nav you can see a dot on any list with new items.  Feedback welcome As usual, we're interested in your constructive feedback. This is a work in progress and, as mentioned, will be rolled out in phases. You can provide feedback on the concepts now based on the information in this post and provide feedback based on the working elements as they are released. I accidentally issued some commands I thought were safe in the terminal, and I ended up with no System Settings and lots of other missing functionality, but the OS still boots normally. I've decided I want to install Lubuntu instead of fixing Ubuntu for a fresh start and since my laptop is running on a 1GHz dual core AMD CPU.  I created a bootable USB as I usually do and placed Lubuntu 17.10 amd64 using Rufus 2.14.1086. I have GRUB that was installed with Ubuntu upon first install I still have Win8.1 which I still want to keep.  PS: I also tried creating a startup disk from Ubuntu  The question is: How can I boot from USB with GRUB2 so I can overwrite Ubuntu? What are tag badges? How do they work?