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ask hn: could we use shellshock to patch vulnerable systems?
since we know that it took weeks before most servers were fixed from the heartbleed vulnerability, couldn't we use shellshock to make a worm that would upgrade bash wherever it can? are there legal issues about fixing a vulnerability in a system that doesn't belongs to you?<p>[edit] ok, i guess the part about the legal issues was a bit candid. what i am really saying is wouldn't it be a good thing to have a worm closing vulnerabilities, compared to the thousands of hackers exploiting this vulnerability to steal or spy? | >are there legal issues about fixing a vulnerability in a system that doesn't belongs to you?yes. because it doesn't belong to you. therefore you have no right to 'fix' it. | since this is a rce bug, sure, you can fix it. but its not your place to fix a vulnerability. it's on the vendor to provide the patch.i will point out like its been pointed out in another comment this probably breaks the law somewhere. |
ask hn: could we use shellshock to patch vulnerable systems?
since we know that it took weeks before most servers were fixed from the heartbleed vulnerability, couldn't we use shellshock to make a worm that would upgrade bash wherever it can? are there legal issues about fixing a vulnerability in a system that doesn't belongs to you?<p>[edit] ok, i guess the part about the legal issues was a bit candid. what i am really saying is wouldn't it be a good thing to have a worm closing vulnerabilities, compared to the thousands of hackers exploiting this vulnerability to steal or spy? | since this is a rce bug, sure, you can fix it. but its not your place to fix a vulnerability. it's on the vendor to provide the patch.i will point out like its been pointed out in another comment this probably breaks the law somewhere. | in france, you deserve 3 years in jail and a fine of 45000€ for this.<link> |
ask hn: could we use shellshock to patch vulnerable systems?
since we know that it took weeks before most servers were fixed from the heartbleed vulnerability, couldn't we use shellshock to make a worm that would upgrade bash wherever it can? are there legal issues about fixing a vulnerability in a system that doesn't belongs to you?<p>[edit] ok, i guess the part about the legal issues was a bit candid. what i am really saying is wouldn't it be a good thing to have a worm closing vulnerabilities, compared to the thousands of hackers exploiting this vulnerability to steal or spy? | in france, you deserve 3 years in jail and a fine of 45000€ for this.<link> | it would be treated the same as exploiting a system for any other reason.friendly worms have been done before (welchia). the problems with friendly worms are numerous. it is more than just a legal issue. a malicious worm is looking to propagate quietly and perhaps leave some sort of backdoor control channel. a friendly worm has to propagate (faster than malicious worms), and patch (without ddosing patching infrastructure), and self terminate (which harms it's ability to propagate). it's hard to imagine a real world scenario where a friendly worm would be effective. it would either take too long to develop, or it would do just as much damage as a regular worm. |
ask hn: could we use shellshock to patch vulnerable systems?
since we know that it took weeks before most servers were fixed from the heartbleed vulnerability, couldn't we use shellshock to make a worm that would upgrade bash wherever it can? are there legal issues about fixing a vulnerability in a system that doesn't belongs to you?<p>[edit] ok, i guess the part about the legal issues was a bit candid. what i am really saying is wouldn't it be a good thing to have a worm closing vulnerabilities, compared to the thousands of hackers exploiting this vulnerability to steal or spy? | it would be treated the same as exploiting a system for any other reason.friendly worms have been done before (welchia). the problems with friendly worms are numerous. it is more than just a legal issue. a malicious worm is looking to propagate quietly and perhaps leave some sort of backdoor control channel. a friendly worm has to propagate (faster than malicious worms), and patch (without ddosing patching infrastructure), and self terminate (which harms it's ability to propagate). it's hard to imagine a real world scenario where a friendly worm would be effective. it would either take too long to develop, or it would do just as much damage as a regular worm. | i'm pretty sure in many places this would be illegaldefinitely in the uk |
request hn: designers – shellshock vulnerability needs a logo
i'm not a designer, but as others have pointed out, the shellshock vulnerability will be communicated better and taken more seriously with a good logo, as heartbleed had.<p>if anyone with design skills can put one together, and get word out, i think it would be helpful for everyone, let me suggest an octothorpe (#) made of arcing electricity (lightning or similar), but take it where you like, it just needs to be simple and catchy.<p>i recommend explicitly placing it in the public domain, or cc licensing it for resuse, so no one thinks twice about using it in their news stories.<p>i'm not familiar with the logo buying/selling sites, but if someone put up a page that allowed donations for a good logo, i'd put in a little, and i suspect others would too, given a permissive license or public domain of course. | i'm no designer, but i doodled a thing that could be a logo: <link> criticism/use welcome! | here's something: <link> away, not claiming any rights on this. |
request hn: designers – shellshock vulnerability needs a logo
i'm not a designer, but as others have pointed out, the shellshock vulnerability will be communicated better and taken more seriously with a good logo, as heartbleed had.<p>if anyone with design skills can put one together, and get word out, i think it would be helpful for everyone, let me suggest an octothorpe (#) made of arcing electricity (lightning or similar), but take it where you like, it just needs to be simple and catchy.<p>i recommend explicitly placing it in the public domain, or cc licensing it for resuse, so no one thinks twice about using it in their news stories.<p>i'm not familiar with the logo buying/selling sites, but if someone put up a page that allowed donations for a good logo, i'd put in a little, and i suspect others would too, given a permissive license or public domain of course. | here's something: <link> away, not claiming any rights on this. | here is an svg of the earlier black-and-white computer-hit-by-shell logo: <link> free to use as desired. |
request hn: designers – shellshock vulnerability needs a logo
i'm not a designer, but as others have pointed out, the shellshock vulnerability will be communicated better and taken more seriously with a good logo, as heartbleed had.<p>if anyone with design skills can put one together, and get word out, i think it would be helpful for everyone, let me suggest an octothorpe (#) made of arcing electricity (lightning or similar), but take it where you like, it just needs to be simple and catchy.<p>i recommend explicitly placing it in the public domain, or cc licensing it for resuse, so no one thinks twice about using it in their news stories.<p>i'm not familiar with the logo buying/selling sites, but if someone put up a page that allowed donations for a good logo, i'd put in a little, and i suspect others would too, given a permissive license or public domain of course. | here is an svg of the earlier black-and-white computer-hit-by-shell logo: <link> free to use as desired. | i have created a public domain logo with svg and png rendering for the shellshock bash bug.<link> the image and link to zip of files with license. |
request hn: designers – shellshock vulnerability needs a logo
i'm not a designer, but as others have pointed out, the shellshock vulnerability will be communicated better and taken more seriously with a good logo, as heartbleed had.<p>if anyone with design skills can put one together, and get word out, i think it would be helpful for everyone, let me suggest an octothorpe (#) made of arcing electricity (lightning or similar), but take it where you like, it just needs to be simple and catchy.<p>i recommend explicitly placing it in the public domain, or cc licensing it for resuse, so no one thinks twice about using it in their news stories.<p>i'm not familiar with the logo buying/selling sites, but if someone put up a page that allowed donations for a good logo, i'd put in a little, and i suspect others would too, given a permissive license or public domain of course. | i have created a public domain logo with svg and png rendering for the shellshock bash bug.<link> the image and link to zip of files with license. | not a designer, but playing around with the concept.<link>
<link> if wanted, willing to refine or provide other file formats if requested. |
ask hn: what is your favorite keyboard for a mac?
i recently started a new job as a developer, and i was given a macbook pro by my company. i have been looking for an ergonomic keyboard with the same key layout, but it doesn't look like there are too many options. i know a ton of people develop on macs, what do you use? | same as for any other computer: das keyboard 3 (or filco tenkeyless otaku).the point being to use the same keyboard and the same mouse on all the computers you use (and configure the keyboard layout to be identical or the closest possible on all systems you use). this is how you increase the ergonomy of your human/computer interface. consider the keyboard/mouse part of your body, and use usb as human/computer interface instead. | kinesis advantage mpc, with the recessed keys. here's a picture of me with the keyboard: <link>'s very important that the keyboard is low enough so your wrists are straight. in other words, avoid putting it on top of a high desk.i've been using this keyboard since working with richard williamson and paul king at infoscape in in 1997. it does take some getting used to, and you might want to configure the location of some of the keys. i have all the mac modifier keys accessible to my thumbs on both sides so that i hit the modifier with one hand and use the opposite hand for the key, almost always.here's a link on amazon:
<link> |
ask hn: what is your favorite keyboard for a mac?
i recently started a new job as a developer, and i was given a macbook pro by my company. i have been looking for an ergonomic keyboard with the same key layout, but it doesn't look like there are too many options. i know a ton of people develop on macs, what do you use? | kinesis advantage mpc, with the recessed keys. here's a picture of me with the keyboard: <link>'s very important that the keyboard is low enough so your wrists are straight. in other words, avoid putting it on top of a high desk.i've been using this keyboard since working with richard williamson and paul king at infoscape in in 1997. it does take some getting used to, and you might want to configure the location of some of the keys. i have all the mac modifier keys accessible to my thumbs on both sides so that i hit the modifier with one hand and use the opposite hand for the key, almost always.here's a link on amazon:
<link> | i'd avoid mechanical keyboards for development work. they simply require more energy expended per keypress which will tire your hands, slow your typing speed, and further worsen rsa-like problems.plus some of them are super loud. which will annoy the people around you. however that's less of an issue with modern switches.unfortunately i don't have any mac specific suggestions for you. most of the people i work with are using microsoft keyboards (yes, even mac users). one person had a mechanical but when it broke they too moved to a microsoft soft-key keyboard. one manager has a apple wireless keyboard however.few suggestions:microsoft sculpt ergonomic, sculpt comfort, comfort curve 3000also amazonbasics wired keyboard, it is chiclet style which is super nice for a workplace (stays clean, etc), and it has soft touch keys which allow you to type very expediently.the reason people are suggesting mechanical keyboards are largely because they're in vogue at the moment. they went out of style, and now a lot of younger people think they're cooler than sliced bread (since they weren't around when every keyboard was mechanical). i'd suggest that before you even considered spending $100 on a mechanical keyboard (instead of $10-15 on some of the soft touch ones) you go play with one (e.g. best buy, they're in the "gaming section," not keyboards as they're a fashion accessory). |
ask hn: what is your favorite keyboard for a mac?
i recently started a new job as a developer, and i was given a macbook pro by my company. i have been looking for an ergonomic keyboard with the same key layout, but it doesn't look like there are too many options. i know a ton of people develop on macs, what do you use? | i'd avoid mechanical keyboards for development work. they simply require more energy expended per keypress which will tire your hands, slow your typing speed, and further worsen rsa-like problems.plus some of them are super loud. which will annoy the people around you. however that's less of an issue with modern switches.unfortunately i don't have any mac specific suggestions for you. most of the people i work with are using microsoft keyboards (yes, even mac users). one person had a mechanical but when it broke they too moved to a microsoft soft-key keyboard. one manager has a apple wireless keyboard however.few suggestions:microsoft sculpt ergonomic, sculpt comfort, comfort curve 3000also amazonbasics wired keyboard, it is chiclet style which is super nice for a workplace (stays clean, etc), and it has soft touch keys which allow you to type very expediently.the reason people are suggesting mechanical keyboards are largely because they're in vogue at the moment. they went out of style, and now a lot of younger people think they're cooler than sliced bread (since they weren't around when every keyboard was mechanical). i'd suggest that before you even considered spending $100 on a mechanical keyboard (instead of $10-15 on some of the soft touch ones) you go play with one (e.g. best buy, they're in the "gaming section," not keyboards as they're a fashion accessory). | i use the wireless apple one, but the microsoft sculpt ergonomic keyboard is very popular in my office<link> |
ask hn: what is your favorite keyboard for a mac?
i recently started a new job as a developer, and i was given a macbook pro by my company. i have been looking for an ergonomic keyboard with the same key layout, but it doesn't look like there are too many options. i know a ton of people develop on macs, what do you use? | i use the wireless apple one, but the microsoft sculpt ergonomic keyboard is very popular in my office<link> | i use the es-87 keyed up labs mechanical keyboard with mx brown switches. it has a hardware switch for mac compatibility. i am happy with it. <link> es-87 is not ergonomic, but since i suffered from rsi a couple of months ago, my personal opinion is that there is no better prevention or cure of keyboard-related health issues than just reducing the time spent at the keyboard. pen and paper help a lot to reduce the amount of throwaway code that should not have been written in first place. |
billionaire ordered to unlock martin's beach but won't be fined $20m
| reminds me of the app the show hidden public gates to access malibu beaches <link> version <link> | this is a dupe of [0] from yesterday, with ~100 comments.[0] <link> |
billionaire ordered to unlock martin's beach but won't be fined $20m
| this is a dupe of [0] from yesterday, with ~100 comments.[0] <link> | i never knew about this place, but now i'm certain i will be getting in the water there soon. |
billionaire ordered to unlock martin's beach but won't be fined $20m
| i never knew about this place, but now i'm certain i will be getting in the water there soon. | this begs the question: would you take an investment from vinod khosla? |
billionaire ordered to unlock martin's beach but won't be fined $20m
| this begs the question: would you take an investment from vinod khosla? | i guess i just don't understand why vinod would risk his reputation and his historical legacy on this issue. it seems to me that he and everyone else on the planet would want to go down in history as a "good guy". especially because he has the opportunity with so much money to just do the right thing. the concept that is most sad to me is how an individual can not see past their own nose, and not think about all of the other people, in this case surfers who would get so much enjoyment out of this access. the cool thing about life is we continue to learn from others mistakes. clearly, we can all learn that in life the most important thing to do is always think about others and not about yourself first. |
show hn: javelin browser
| to me, including "mobile-first" as one of your key value proposition seems a little odd.my immediate reaction was to wonder whether any mobile browsers aren't mobile-first? from my (incomplete) knowledge of smartphone browsers they all feature interfaces designed for smartphones and smartphones alone.there must be a better word to use in your tagline - i notice you decided on using "truly mobile" further down ;) | i notice that you use www.theverge.com in a number of the screenshots for javelin. the writers at the verge, the developers that build the site, the designers that make it beautiful - are all paid through ad revenue. please consider at least adding the ability to whitelist sites if you are going to bundle ad block.*full disclosure - i am a developer at vox media, the publisher of the verge. |
show hn: javelin browser
| i notice that you use www.theverge.com in a number of the screenshots for javelin. the writers at the verge, the developers that build the site, the designers that make it beautiful - are all paid through ad revenue. please consider at least adding the ability to whitelist sites if you are going to bundle ad block.*full disclosure - i am a developer at vox media, the publisher of the verge. | developer here!i've been working on javelin since feb this year and this is the 4th iteration, and on reddit (r/android), and just a quick interesting byte. javelin actually started as a "porn" browser! see: <link> i'm headed to sf in october, anyone wanna grab a beer/coffee? i'm contactable at [email protected] |
show hn: javelin browser
| developer here!i've been working on javelin since feb this year and this is the 4th iteration, and on reddit (r/android), and just a quick interesting byte. javelin actually started as a "porn" browser! see: <link> i'm headed to sf in october, anyone wanna grab a beer/coffee? i'm contactable at [email protected] | i've been using your browser for a couple months now (i think i saw it mentioned on android police if you're curious) and i've been liking it. it looks slick, and works exactly how i think it should. the one problem i have with it is one i'd like other opinions on, both for my curiosity and your benefit.frankly, it's not my daily driver because i don't know who you are and don't trust you. using a (no offense) no-name browser is somewhat of a risk as the developer could potentially be recording personal info. of course, i have no guarantee that mozilla isn't either. however, and yes i'm fully aware of how silly this sounds, i trust mozilla despite never looking at their code or knowing any of the developers.i'm guessing privacy is important to you (since you have the option of using a vpn service as iap) so i'm curious how you would allay my fears of using a random browser from someone other than the big three.either way, i wish you luck. |
show hn: javelin browser
| i've been using your browser for a couple months now (i think i saw it mentioned on android police if you're curious) and i've been liking it. it looks slick, and works exactly how i think it should. the one problem i have with it is one i'd like other opinions on, both for my curiosity and your benefit.frankly, it's not my daily driver because i don't know who you are and don't trust you. using a (no offense) no-name browser is somewhat of a risk as the developer could potentially be recording personal info. of course, i have no guarantee that mozilla isn't either. however, and yes i'm fully aware of how silly this sounds, i trust mozilla despite never looking at their code or knowing any of the developers.i'm guessing privacy is important to you (since you have the option of using a vpn service as iap) so i'm curious how you would allay my fears of using a random browser from someone other than the big three.either way, i wish you luck. | bug reports for the developer nubela:swipe from the left to open the menu, then scroll down, so that part of the text is cut off, then swipe to the left to close the menu part of the way, but drag your finger back right before the menu closes. if you now scroll, the cut-off text is still visible, creating weird visual artifacts. this goes away when you close the menu completely and reopen it.when i edit the title and url of a bookmark, the buttons are “cancel” and “edit”. i think “save” would work better. i feel like what i am doing is already “editing”, since i chose “edit” to get here.i tried to set javelin as the default browser, but when the browser list popped up, by reflex i hit just once instead of always. but javelin still said “javelin is now your default browser”. (then i realized what had happened and went back and did it again.) if possible, javelin should detect when the user clicked the wrong button. if that is not possible, maybe you should show a small picture of the always button before showing the dialog, to remind the user to hit that button.in the page describing the pro features, one of them is choosing your homepage. but i can already do that in the free version. it works when i go to settings > change homepage.javelin doesn’t support a blank homepage. i tried setting the homepage to nothing (“”) or to “about:blank”, but either way, the homepage just becomes “webpage not available”. the error shows because javelin is automatically adding an “http://” before “about:blank” – “about:” pages should have no protocol.i tried to press and hold on the icons (the eye icon and share icon) in the toolbar to see a tooltip describing what they do. however, those icons don’t have tooltips. i would have liked to have been able to see a “reading mode” tooltip when i pressed and held on the eye icon instead of having to actually press it to find out. the icons in the toolbar for reading mode have the same problem.when there are no tabs, i see a message “javelin browser, flies.” the message confused me a bit because it is ungrammatical. it should be either “javelin browser flies.” or “javelin browser – it flies.”i couldn’t get javelin sync to work at all. i authorized it for my google account and saw the message saying i have been sent an email. but my bookmarks are still the default javelin ones (minus the ones i manually deleted); none of them are my chrome for android bookmarks. this is still the case even after i “sync bookmarks now” – though since that command gives no feedback, i couldn’t tell whether it worked. (i didn’t install the desktop chrome extension linked in the email because i don’t want that home page, but the email said my device was already synced, so that shouldn’t make a difference.) so either your sync is broken or there is another step that you forgot to mention, like “wait one hour” or “restart your phone” or something.in the menu on the left, the checkboxes look a little weird, because it is a blue checkmark on a turquoise background. i can see it, but i think they would look better if you made the check-marks very light gray, a color closer to the text but still distinct from it.when i logged into a site, i got two dialog boxes asking me to save the password. the first was a generic android one like in google chrome. i clicked not now, and then javelin showed its colorful one at the bottom. you should hide the default one so that only the javelin one shows.i couldn’t figure out how to activate the “fullscreen browsing” that you show in one of your website’s screenshots. i tried scrolling through web pages, and i looked at all the settings, but i never had the action bar and the soft buttons displaying but transparent like in the screenshot. the soft buttons are always visible. i can hide the action bar completely with that setting, but then i can’t open it all from within the app, and that’s different from the screenshot anyway. it’s not described as a pro feature on the enable javelin pro page either. you should make it more obvious how to enable that mode, or remove the screenshot if that feature is now gone.this is a big list of bugs, many tiny ones and some big ones, but i’m still trying out javelin for now – you haven’t driven me back to chrome yet. i am especially interested in your adblock and full-screen features (so it’s too bad i can’t figure out how to use full-screen). i wish you luck with developing your browser. |
building a better and more diverse community
| any '-ism' cannot be a real '-ism' if does not combine prejudice (which is the only thing people think it is) plus power (the social, cultural, and political heft which usually underlies the ability of prejudice to keep or enforce -isms in place)<link> folks understand this primary principle, most of you arguing for this "anti-white and asian" bias will simply be tools of the status quo. equality does not mean treating all people equally, when all people don't have the same footing, and don't have the same political power (which is conferred from our social and political system). | in anticipation of the comments we've gotten in the past:* we hold everyone to the same admissions standard, regardless of race or gender. the grants are our way to create a more diverse applicant pool.* hacker school is free for everyone* we admit everyone who applies who we think is a good fit. no man has ever been rejected because a woman was accepted, so there's no way in which this harms men.* we auto-generate pseudonyms for applicants, so our initial application review focuses on people's code and what they write, not their race or gender(i'm one of the founders, and i'm happy to answer any questions folks have about hacker school.) |
building a better and more diverse community
| in anticipation of the comments we've gotten in the past:* we hold everyone to the same admissions standard, regardless of race or gender. the grants are our way to create a more diverse applicant pool.* hacker school is free for everyone* we admit everyone who applies who we think is a good fit. no man has ever been rejected because a woman was accepted, so there's no way in which this harms men.* we auto-generate pseudonyms for applicants, so our initial application review focuses on people's code and what they write, not their race or gender(i'm one of the founders, and i'm happy to answer any questions folks have about hacker school.) | that's actually quite clever, wrt. generating everyone who applies a nonsense pseudonym so there's no unconscious bias happening in the pre-selection process. |
building a better and more diverse community
| that's actually quite clever, wrt. generating everyone who applies a nonsense pseudonym so there's no unconscious bias happening in the pre-selection process. | really impressive program! i'm glad that these guys are encouraging diversity, but focusing on keeping the bar for admission the same across all candidates. |
building a better and more diverse community
| really impressive program! i'm glad that these guys are encouraging diversity, but focusing on keeping the bar for admission the same across all candidates. | i am so happy to see this program in place. we all talk about how most problems we have with diversity come from upstream, and now a school is directly addressing it. an objective solution to an objective problem. |
rethinkdb 1.15: geospatial queries
| i wish every software project had a faq like this: <link> | i really appreciate their transparency with their stability report ( <link> ). it's even linked right on the front page and shows what type of issues you can expect at scale. |
rethinkdb 1.15: geospatial queries
| i really appreciate their transparency with their stability report ( <link> ). it's even linked right on the front page and shows what type of issues you can expect at scale. | hey guys, slava @ rethink here. i'll be around all day on hn to answer questions.we'll be doing a live webcast[1] today at 1:30pm pt showcasing geo features and some example apps you can build with them, would love for you to join us![1] <link> |
rethinkdb 1.15: geospatial queries
| hey guys, slava @ rethink here. i'll be around all day on hn to answer questions.we'll be doing a live webcast[1] today at 1:30pm pt showcasing geo features and some example apps you can build with them, would love for you to join us![1] <link> | mysql has had geospatial extensions for years. they even work. the underlying table format is an r-tree, which, unfortunately, is only available for myisam. point in rectangle is very efficient, and other queries that can be expressed as multiple point in rectangle tests are reasonably efficient. "nearest" is not efficient, but for many purposes ("find nearest mcdonalds"), generating a query rectangle for a reasonable driving distance, then sorting by distance, is effective. |
rethinkdb 1.15: geospatial queries
| mysql has had geospatial extensions for years. they even work. the underlying table format is an r-tree, which, unfortunately, is only available for myisam. point in rectangle is very efficient, and other queries that can be expressed as multiple point in rectangle tests are reasonably efficient. "nearest" is not efficient, but for many purposes ("find nearest mcdonalds"), generating a query rectangle for a reasonable driving distance, then sorting by distance, is effective. | i've made a comment to this effect before, but seriously do yourself a favor and check out rethink. it's been great to work with, and has been 100% rock solid. the only complaint i have is keeping up with the change of pace for everything that's going on has been tricky ;).it's great and fun to build apps with and all of the guys at rethink are incredibly helpful (even with my sometimes naive questions). |
package data like software
| beautiful idea, not dissimilar from dat [0] (if you haven't already, you guys should talk).i find the django relationship to be an odd choice - the vast majority of people working with data are not using django. why pair the two?[0]: dat-data.com | a humble suggestion from your friends at the california civic data coalition |
package data like software
| a humble suggestion from your friends at the california civic data coalition | love the idea!i would ask for a little more separation of concerns. one package for raw but cleaned data with a collection of schemas, and a second for loading arbitrary data + schemas in to django (and probably accomplishing all of the extra administrative steps provided in the example).that way if i want to add other schemas for a non-django use in the same package (say if i care more about analysis than clicky-interfaces) or not use django, i can still use a package manager for the same data. |
package data like software
| love the idea!i would ask for a little more separation of concerns. one package for raw but cleaned data with a collection of schemas, and a second for loading arbitrary data + schemas in to django (and probably accomplishing all of the extra administrative steps provided in the example).that way if i want to add other schemas for a non-django use in the same package (say if i care more about analysis than clicky-interfaces) or not use django, i can still use a package manager for the same data. | a lot of the nitty-gritty data munging and processing often gets discarded after a project or never included in the project repo in a meaningful way. i like drake [0] because we used it a lot at factual and it really made data generation and formatting very repeatable and easy.i really think the packaging system the author is going for would be best built on top of drake or a similar workflow management program. instead of following their laundry list of configuration steps one could manage that automatically with a source-controlled workflow. drake does have the advantages of non-linear and async workflows being pretty easy to build, maintain, and update.what i would love to see is a data package manager that downloads the raw data and processing workflow, updates any software packages needed to run the workflow, and then spits out the data in the form you need it, whether csv/tsv/json/etc. i don't know much about dat yet, but it looks like it would be a good end-point for serving the data as well.0 - <link> |
package data like software
| a lot of the nitty-gritty data munging and processing often gets discarded after a project or never included in the project repo in a meaningful way. i like drake [0] because we used it a lot at factual and it really made data generation and formatting very repeatable and easy.i really think the packaging system the author is going for would be best built on top of drake or a similar workflow management program. instead of following their laundry list of configuration steps one could manage that automatically with a source-controlled workflow. drake does have the advantages of non-linear and async workflows being pretty easy to build, maintain, and update.what i would love to see is a data package manager that downloads the raw data and processing workflow, updates any software packages needed to run the workflow, and then spits out the data in the form you need it, whether csv/tsv/json/etc. i don't know much about dat yet, but it looks like it would be a good end-point for serving the data as well.0 - <link> | whew, reading the first few paragraphs after seeing the title started to scare me. i was afraid they were going to advocate locking data up inside of a proprietary app and only releasing that to the public in place of releasing the raw data!i ran into this years ago with the imdb dataset. it appears to be formatted such that it aggressively resists sane parsing. of course, i expected to want to update the data and whatnot, so i built code to download the data files or updates, parse them, and put them into a sane format (in my book, only csv and json qualify right now). then i wrote a simple tool to take any generic json and create tables from it and insert all the data. this just always seemed to be the right thing to do to me. just hacking the file into a useable format and plunging ahead with analysis seemed like a bad option to me, but i take it from this article that it is the common approach?it may just be an artifact of the kinds of systems i've worked on (bank, govt) but i'm not comfortable unless 'deployment' consists of executing 1 script which can take a system from absolute barebones (no db schema, no existing tables, no prearranged libraries, nothing) to production-ready. what if you have a catastrophe and your backups are hosed? what if you want to spin off a new environment for testing? the idea that there has to be existing state whose personal history is assumed to be in a certain state, or that after the system deploys someone has to grab some scripts out of their home directory and remember to apply them (and in the right order) before things can get going just terrifies me. what if that employee gets a brain tumor? i suppose it doesn't matter quite as much if your system being down for 5 minutes doesn't result in a report on the national news and impact hundreds of millions of people, but still... don't most people have a personal investment in knowing their system isn't just an array of spinning plates with a chasm of chaos awaiting an earthquake? |
ask hn: what db to use for huge time series?
hi hn, i wanted to know if anyone had good recommendations for a database for massive timeseries. i took a look at influxdb and druid, both of which look promising but they're young projects and i don't want to strand myself with a deprecated component at the core of the system i'm working on. does anyone have any suggestions/advice/experience they can share to provide some guidance here?<p>thanks in advance! | approximately, if you have something like 10+ billion items, use cassandra.if you have less than 10 billion items, postgres will be fine, and is easier to manage imo.if you do use postgres, you should vertically partition the table. this will help keep indexes smaller, improve the the cache hit rate, vastly improve the ease with which you can drop older data, and make various other admin tasks easier.i've done this in the past with a compound primary key of (topic_id, t) where t was a microseconds-past-the-epoch timestamp (bigint) unique within a topic. then set up a parent table: create table events (topic_id, t, data_fields..) and "create table .. inherits events" from it into multiple subtables, named based on the timespan they will hold, like events_2013, events_2014.depending on how much data you have, either partition by day/month/year/etc. i partitioned every million seconds (~11 days), since that kept the resulting table sizes a bit more manageable (gigs not tbs).add a check constraint to each sub-table to constrain the timespan (ie, where t between ?? and ??).when you do a select * from events where topic_id = 1 and t between $x and $y order by t desc; the query planner knows which sub-table(s) to query, and doesn't touch the other tables at all.you can also add a before insert trigger to the parent table that inserts into the correct sub-table, otherwise get clients to compute the correct table name when inserting. | kdb+ <link> have no affiliation, other than being a customer. its as close to a standard as you can find in finance.there are many useful tutorials out there that let you try it out and you can usually get an eval version to try before you buy.<link>
if you find something that is comparable in terms of performance and features, but cheaper, please mail me!! i would be very grateful. |
ask hn: what db to use for huge time series?
hi hn, i wanted to know if anyone had good recommendations for a database for massive timeseries. i took a look at influxdb and druid, both of which look promising but they're young projects and i don't want to strand myself with a deprecated component at the core of the system i'm working on. does anyone have any suggestions/advice/experience they can share to provide some guidance here?<p>thanks in advance! | kdb+ <link> have no affiliation, other than being a customer. its as close to a standard as you can find in finance.there are many useful tutorials out there that let you try it out and you can usually get an eval version to try before you buy.<link>
if you find something that is comparable in terms of performance and features, but cheaper, please mail me!! i would be very grateful. | for a good answer, you need to provide a lot more detail in the requirements:- what do the writes look like? if they are coming in a stream how many writes per second do you need to support? if they are a bulk load how large and frequent are the batches? simple numerical values?- what do the reads look like? how many queries per second do you need to support? how much data per query? how fast do the queries need to be? will your queries be simple aggregations? dimensional queries? unique dimension value counts? are approximations tolerated?- how much history do you need to keep?- what are your requirements for availability?- what are your requirements for consistency?- how fast does new data have to show up in reads?without more detail, you're going to get dozens of suggestions which may each be right for a particular case. |
ask hn: what db to use for huge time series?
hi hn, i wanted to know if anyone had good recommendations for a database for massive timeseries. i took a look at influxdb and druid, both of which look promising but they're young projects and i don't want to strand myself with a deprecated component at the core of the system i'm working on. does anyone have any suggestions/advice/experience they can share to provide some guidance here?<p>thanks in advance! | for a good answer, you need to provide a lot more detail in the requirements:- what do the writes look like? if they are coming in a stream how many writes per second do you need to support? if they are a bulk load how large and frequent are the batches? simple numerical values?- what do the reads look like? how many queries per second do you need to support? how much data per query? how fast do the queries need to be? will your queries be simple aggregations? dimensional queries? unique dimension value counts? are approximations tolerated?- how much history do you need to keep?- what are your requirements for availability?- what are your requirements for consistency?- how fast does new data have to show up in reads?without more detail, you're going to get dozens of suggestions which may each be right for a particular case. | depending on how 'huge' your timeseries are, you might be pleasantly surprised with postgres. postgres scales to multiple tb just fine, and of course the software can be easier to write since you have sql and orms to rely on. it's also an incredibly mature and stable software package, if you're worried about future-proofing.some (constantly-growing) timeseries can be stored on a per-row basis, while other (static or older) timeseries can be stored in a packed form (e.g. an array column).i find that most of the time, "big data" isn't really all that big for modern hardware, and so going through all of the extra software work for specialized data stores isn't really all that necessary. ymmv, of course, depending on the nature of your queries. |
ask hn: what db to use for huge time series?
hi hn, i wanted to know if anyone had good recommendations for a database for massive timeseries. i took a look at influxdb and druid, both of which look promising but they're young projects and i don't want to strand myself with a deprecated component at the core of the system i'm working on. does anyone have any suggestions/advice/experience they can share to provide some guidance here?<p>thanks in advance! | depending on how 'huge' your timeseries are, you might be pleasantly surprised with postgres. postgres scales to multiple tb just fine, and of course the software can be easier to write since you have sql and orms to rely on. it's also an incredibly mature and stable software package, if you're worried about future-proofing.some (constantly-growing) timeseries can be stored on a per-row basis, while other (static or older) timeseries can be stored in a packed form (e.g. an array column).i find that most of the time, "big data" isn't really all that big for modern hardware, and so going through all of the extra software work for specialized data stores isn't really all that necessary. ymmv, of course, depending on the nature of your queries. | not a database but hdf5 (<link> is used for storing all sorts of scientific data, has been around for a while and is very stable. pytables is built on top of it and there are lots of other languages that can have existing libraries to read/write hdf5 (matlab, python, c, c++, r, java, ...) |
a fight over rooftop solar panels
| ...wow, could we have a more biased article please? there's really no need for even the tiny hints this one provided about the reasons electric grid maintainers don't like net metering. | why was google funding alec in the first place? |
a fight over rooftop solar panels
| why was google funding alec in the first place? | i don't understand why this is such a large issue. i get charged a generation fee, and a transmission fee for my electricity. if my generation is done by the power company, my neighbor with solar panels, or a giant wind farm out in the desert i'd expect the generation money to go to the person who generated the power[1]. then the transmission fee would be paid to the power company to maintain the grid and everything else that goes with it.so as people start generating their own power, transmissions charges go down. this means that transmission charges for people not generating their own power go up to cover the mostly fixed cost of maintaining the electric grid. i think charging a reasonable transmission fee (or toll) per kwh sold back to the power company is a reasonable compromise that prevents people from benefiting from a fully maintained electrical grid, but not paying for it.[1]obviously it's impossible to tell where any specific user's generation came from |
a fight over rooftop solar panels
| i don't understand why this is such a large issue. i get charged a generation fee, and a transmission fee for my electricity. if my generation is done by the power company, my neighbor with solar panels, or a giant wind farm out in the desert i'd expect the generation money to go to the person who generated the power[1]. then the transmission fee would be paid to the power company to maintain the grid and everything else that goes with it.so as people start generating their own power, transmissions charges go down. this means that transmission charges for people not generating their own power go up to cover the mostly fixed cost of maintaining the electric grid. i think charging a reasonable transmission fee (or toll) per kwh sold back to the power company is a reasonable compromise that prevents people from benefiting from a fully maintained electrical grid, but not paying for it.[1]obviously it's impossible to tell where any specific user's generation came from | solar panels have dropped so much in cost since 2009 that what used to be a cute, green-washing positive card for utilities to play is now a dangerous threat.if too many install solar they won't be able to make the payments on their existing polluting plants.the us government should offer now to cover all defaults on existing plants, but not on new gas or coal plants. that would reduce utility incentive to oppose widespread solar.in reality, residential solar can benefit utilities in a major way in areas with high cooling loads, because the generated power comes right at the peak load (if the panels are oriented to the west, slightly less so for south orientation). and solar is much cheaper for peak power than a peaking plant that only operates a few days a year. peaking power is the most expensive power because you need to make payments for a plant that rarely is turned on and generating revenue, but must be there otherwise you'd have brownouts whenever everyone runs their air conditioners run at the same time. |
a fight over rooftop solar panels
| solar panels have dropped so much in cost since 2009 that what used to be a cute, green-washing positive card for utilities to play is now a dangerous threat.if too many install solar they won't be able to make the payments on their existing polluting plants.the us government should offer now to cover all defaults on existing plants, but not on new gas or coal plants. that would reduce utility incentive to oppose widespread solar.in reality, residential solar can benefit utilities in a major way in areas with high cooling loads, because the generated power comes right at the peak load (if the panels are oriented to the west, slightly less so for south orientation). and solar is much cheaper for peak power than a peaking plant that only operates a few days a year. peaking power is the most expensive power because you need to make payments for a plant that rarely is turned on and generating revenue, but must be there otherwise you'd have brownouts whenever everyone runs their air conditioners run at the same time. | >on monday, google announced that it was cutting ties with the american legislative exchange councilwtf??? google was participating in alec?! all the backward and oppressive laws brought to life across america at federal and especially state levels during the last decade are basically alec's doing. animal enterprise terrorism acts and stand your ground are among those for example. and google was among the ones behind it! |
ask hn: open-source projects that could use documentation help?
hey hn, a friend of mine is a budding technical writer, and is trying to get some actual documentation experience under her belt. anyone have a project they could use some docs for? | this is an interesting problem, because it's not unique to technical writers.some suggestions:
* mozilla. <link> , <link>
shoot them a mail and they can probably connect her with a project to work on. mdn in particular can always use someone to browse through the contributions and correct/improve them. they'll even connect you with a mentor to get you started if you ask!* open hatch. <link>;contribution_type=documentat...
i've tried to use this site in the past, it's a little rough around the edges but if you're looking for single bite-sized tasks you may find them here.other than that, try browsing github issue lists and seeing if there's anything that strikes your fancy? | the git man pages are a mess. and not easy to fix. but it is a much needed task.one of the challenges is that the pages are constructed from from multiple files as an attempt to factor out the documentation of switches that are common to multiple git commands, but i think this makes a lot of the pages harder to read. i'd rather the man page for git log (say) document just its unique options and then at the end say "git log also accepts any of the rev-list options...see it for details." |
ask hn: open-source projects that could use documentation help?
hey hn, a friend of mine is a budding technical writer, and is trying to get some actual documentation experience under her belt. anyone have a project they could use some docs for? | the git man pages are a mess. and not easy to fix. but it is a much needed task.one of the challenges is that the pages are constructed from from multiple files as an attempt to factor out the documentation of switches that are common to multiple git commands, but i think this makes a lot of the pages harder to read. i'd rather the man page for git log (say) document just its unique options and then at the end say "git log also accepts any of the rev-list options...see it for details." | angularjs can really, really use some help there.<link> |
ask hn: open-source projects that could use documentation help?
hey hn, a friend of mine is a budding technical writer, and is trying to get some actual documentation experience under her belt. anyone have a project they could use some docs for? | angularjs can really, really use some help there.<link> | while it may not look like it, in my opinion the uwsgi project desperately needs documentation help.<link> is just an endless list of features, and no clear red thread as to what you actually need to get going.it's hard because it just supports everything for some reason. |
ask hn: open-source projects that could use documentation help?
hey hn, a friend of mine is a budding technical writer, and is trying to get some actual documentation experience under her belt. anyone have a project they could use some docs for? | while it may not look like it, in my opinion the uwsgi project desperately needs documentation help.<link> is just an endless list of features, and no clear red thread as to what you actually need to get going.it's hard because it just supports everything for some reason. | the perl 6 project is always happy about doc contributions. currently we have a specification, which is aimed at compiler writers: <link> and then the beginning of some user-facing documentation: <link>;translating" specification documentation into user-facing documentation would be very helpful. for questions, feedback and getting started, it's best to reach the community through irc: <link> |
many eyes theory conclusively disproven
| i don't know the details behind these discoveries, but weren't they found by security researchers looking through open source code?wouldn't that actually support the theory that open source is "more secure"?are there any studies done on bugs found in proprietary packages that could give a better definition to "fewer security problems"? | > "the average programmers writes 10x more code than they read."not in my experience. and i certainly wouldn't trust such programmers. |
many eyes theory conclusively disproven
| > "the average programmers writes 10x more code than they read."not in my experience. and i certainly wouldn't trust such programmers. | "companies like microsoft pay programmers to review code..."apparently these (well-paid) ms programmers don't do their job well<link> |
many eyes theory conclusively disproven
| "companies like microsoft pay programmers to review code..."apparently these (well-paid) ms programmers don't do their job well<link> | i think there's a problem with this reasoning, which is that it may be that these bugs are discovered now only because they are open source, and many more such deep bugs exist in closed-source software.the flip side of the boon that is code reusability is software monoculture, which means that a significant bug in a core library can have catastrophic effects in many systems, so it's likely that the most severe bugs are rarest (hardest to observe), but the longer they go undiscovered, the more catastrophic they will be. it may be that while we'll find some deep, 20-year-old flaws in core open source code, we'll find way more 20-year-old flaws in closed source code, except we'll find them in 5 years, after the internet of things has taken off and a serious bug will be 100x more dangerous. |
many eyes theory conclusively disproven
| i think there's a problem with this reasoning, which is that it may be that these bugs are discovered now only because they are open source, and many more such deep bugs exist in closed-source software.the flip side of the boon that is code reusability is software monoculture, which means that a significant bug in a core library can have catastrophic effects in many systems, so it's likely that the most severe bugs are rarest (hardest to observe), but the longer they go undiscovered, the more catastrophic they will be. it may be that while we'll find some deep, 20-year-old flaws in core open source code, we'll find way more 20-year-old flaws in closed source code, except we'll find them in 5 years, after the internet of things has taken off and a serious bug will be 100x more dangerous. | this bug was found by a redhat security auditor. it's a bit unfair to pose this as an obvious bug that should've been found at any point in the past 25 years, because i'm pretty sure that redhat has had security auditors for a long while. although probably fewer in number than microsofts security auditor team they are likely faced with the same problem:a huge backlog of old crufty software written in arcane style using programming languages that discourage proper structuring, riddled with bugs promoted to features for backwards compatibility reasons.what we really should be doing is reimplementing software like this, learning from predecessors, and making sure software that depended on bugs of the past are fixed so they don't. since we're in the open source world, we don't have to end up the same as windows did. |
fivestars (yc w11) raises $26m
| i don't get why people opt-in to tracking and behaviour analysis just so they can get a free taco, that seems counter intuitive. there is little choice, when you purchase things online, but that doesn't mean it is desirable. there are really old fashioned ways of maintaining customer loyality, offer a good product, hire attractive waiters and maybe offer a stamp bonus card. spam mail from the local coffee shop surely does not increase customer satisfaction. | only 1 location in all of nyc so far, it seems. |
fivestars (yc w11) raises $26m
| only 1 location in all of nyc so far, it seems. | this might be a dumb reason, but i stopped using fivestars because it was just such a hassle. the card interfered with the other nfc cards in my wallet, and eventually started showing up as unregistered when i did try to use it. in the months that i was using it, i earned exactly zero rewards at the venues that i was using it at. |
fivestars (yc w11) raises $26m
| this might be a dumb reason, but i stopped using fivestars because it was just such a hassle. the card interfered with the other nfc cards in my wallet, and eventually started showing up as unregistered when i did try to use it. in the months that i was using it, i earned exactly zero rewards at the venues that i was using it at. | is a weird sf/silicon valley cognitive dissonance required to say that 100% automated software "communication" is "establishing a personal connection"? the fact that an algorithm asks me to come back after i stop frequenting a restaurant doesn't strike me as personal, just kind of overbearing and hal 9000-esque.or a cashier reciting my name after reading it off a prompter. safeway has been doing that for years and i don't feel a personal connection just because they're tracking my every move and making me well aware of it on a daily basis. |
fivestars (yc w11) raises $26m
| is a weird sf/silicon valley cognitive dissonance required to say that 100% automated software "communication" is "establishing a personal connection"? the fact that an algorithm asks me to come back after i stop frequenting a restaurant doesn't strike me as personal, just kind of overbearing and hal 9000-esque.or a cashier reciting my name after reading it off a prompter. safeway has been doing that for years and i don't feel a personal connection just because they're tracking my every move and making me well aware of it on a daily basis. | > “we see things in order of a 20% lift,” says ho. that means shoppers that would come into a store once a week now typically come in three times a week, he says. “is there some sort of new silicon valley math i wasn't informed of? |
faster unsigned division by constants (2011)
| i think all modern compilers do this now. i know the d compiler does:<link> | nice analysis! there is a similar problem in base-255 pixel math, with a similar solution. you want 255 * 255 = 255 when you multiply pixels, so you are doing divide-by-255 (not-256), which in 8 bits is somewhat "uncooperative".i wrote up a few solutions many years ago, one of which is sree kotay's idea: adding one to the numerator (what this article says but without the awesome proof): <link> would be great if compilers could do all this for you, with a proof like this to go with it. |
faster unsigned division by constants (2011)
| nice analysis! there is a similar problem in base-255 pixel math, with a similar solution. you want 255 * 255 = 255 when you multiply pixels, so you are doing divide-by-255 (not-256), which in 8 bits is somewhat "uncooperative".i wrote up a few solutions many years ago, one of which is sree kotay's idea: adding one to the numerator (what this article says but without the awesome proof): <link> would be great if compilers could do all this for you, with a proof like this to go with it. | note that while most compilers already replace fixed-divisor divisions with multiplications, this algorithm presents a more optimized solution for certain "problem" divisors, notably 7. |
faster unsigned division by constants (2011)
| note that while most compilers already replace fixed-divisor divisions with multiplications, this algorithm presents a more optimized solution for certain "problem" divisors, notably 7. | i just tested gcc, icc, and clang to see how well they perform these optimizations on their own. code for my test is here: <link> short answer is that they all do it well. for a loop like this compiled with -o3: for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) {
compilersum += randomint[i]/const;
}
icc 14.0.3 takes 4.1 cycles per iteration, clang 3.4.1 takes 3.8 cycles, and gcc 4.8.1 manages to spend only 1.3 cycles for each division!apparently gcc realized it was able to not only use a shortcut for the division, but also managed to vectorize the loop. here's the inner loop it produced: 4019f0: 66 0f 6f 00 movdqa (%rax),%xmm0
4019f4: 48 83 c0 10 add $0x10,%rax
4019f8: 48 39 c5 cmp %rax,%rbp
4019fb: 66 0f 6f c8 movdqa %xmm0,%xmm1
4019ff: 66 0f 6f e0 movdqa %xmm0,%xmm4
401a03: 66 0f 62 c8 punpckldq %xmm0,%xmm1
401a07: 66 0f 6a e0 punpckhdq %xmm0,%xmm4
401a0b: 66 0f f4 cb pmuludq %xmm3,%xmm1
401a0f: 66 0f f4 e3 pmuludq %xmm3,%xmm4
401a13: 0f c6 cc dd shufps $0xdd,%xmm4,%xmm1
401a17: 66 0f fa c1 psubd %xmm1,%xmm0
401a1b: 66 0f 72 d0 01 psrld $0x1,%xmm0
401a20: 66 0f fe c1 paddd %xmm1,%xmm0
401a24: 66 0f 72 d0 02 psrld $0x2,%xmm0
401a29: 66 0f fe d0 paddd %xmm0,%xmm2
401a2d: 75 c1 jne 4019f0 <main+0xb0>
i put the other two here: <link> didn't look closely enough to identify which methods they were using. can someone else tell? |
faster unsigned division by constants (2011)
| i just tested gcc, icc, and clang to see how well they perform these optimizations on their own. code for my test is here: <link> short answer is that they all do it well. for a loop like this compiled with -o3: for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) {
compilersum += randomint[i]/const;
}
icc 14.0.3 takes 4.1 cycles per iteration, clang 3.4.1 takes 3.8 cycles, and gcc 4.8.1 manages to spend only 1.3 cycles for each division!apparently gcc realized it was able to not only use a shortcut for the division, but also managed to vectorize the loop. here's the inner loop it produced: 4019f0: 66 0f 6f 00 movdqa (%rax),%xmm0
4019f4: 48 83 c0 10 add $0x10,%rax
4019f8: 48 39 c5 cmp %rax,%rbp
4019fb: 66 0f 6f c8 movdqa %xmm0,%xmm1
4019ff: 66 0f 6f e0 movdqa %xmm0,%xmm4
401a03: 66 0f 62 c8 punpckldq %xmm0,%xmm1
401a07: 66 0f 6a e0 punpckhdq %xmm0,%xmm4
401a0b: 66 0f f4 cb pmuludq %xmm3,%xmm1
401a0f: 66 0f f4 e3 pmuludq %xmm3,%xmm4
401a13: 0f c6 cc dd shufps $0xdd,%xmm4,%xmm1
401a17: 66 0f fa c1 psubd %xmm1,%xmm0
401a1b: 66 0f 72 d0 01 psrld $0x1,%xmm0
401a20: 66 0f fe c1 paddd %xmm1,%xmm0
401a24: 66 0f 72 d0 02 psrld $0x2,%xmm0
401a29: 66 0f fe d0 paddd %xmm0,%xmm2
401a2d: 75 c1 jne 4019f0 <main+0xb0>
i put the other two here: <link> didn't look closely enough to identify which methods they were using. can someone else tell? | i know many compilers use this optimization. however i recently used this for the case where the divisor was a variable but restricted to a few possible values. i expanded it to a switch case statement where each possible divisor was expanded to a constant value allowing for this optimization. for this processor, there is no hardware divide so this made for significant performance gains. |
physically based camera rendering
| i always thought it was amusing to see lens flare, which is axiomatically a camera effect, on first-person-shooters. | the best video game camera simulation that i've seen described is the gdc 2009 talk "star ocean 4 : flexible shader management and post-processing" from <link> it's unfortunate that applying such realistic methods to such anime-like characters produces such a creepy effect (reminiscent of "real dolls" imho)i'm not sure if the researchers at tri-ace are related to those at <link> but, i wouldn't be surprised. |
physically based camera rendering
| the best video game camera simulation that i've seen described is the gdc 2009 talk "star ocean 4 : flexible shader management and post-processing" from <link> it's unfortunate that applying such realistic methods to such anime-like characters produces such a creepy effect (reminiscent of "real dolls" imho)i'm not sure if the researchers at tri-ace are related to those at <link> but, i wouldn't be surprised. | why simulate all the flaws of real cameras? this doesn't add anything to realism imo. |
physically based camera rendering
| why simulate all the flaws of real cameras? this doesn't add anything to realism imo. | this is great, too bad the demo was too intensive for my laptop. |
physically based camera rendering
| this is great, too bad the demo was too intensive for my laptop. | i would love to see something that's more like "physically based eye rendering" - rendering what your eyes would see and transmitting it through the monitor at the best quality possible, rather than rendering what a camera would see. |
the anatomy of a door-to-door taobao delivery
| great to see someone going into detail on this- the taobao experience is awesome. there are a few flakey carriers but over all- nothing even close in the us. it's become my favorite thing about living in china. | loved the story of the couple and the author's analysis. would enjoy more if done so. |
the anatomy of a door-to-door taobao delivery
| loved the story of the couple and the author's analysis. would enjoy more if done so. | as someone who lives in shanghai, this is an interesting look at how it works. however, as an expat who can't speak chinese yet, this website is one of the larger sources of my frustration.need something simple and don't know where to get it? if you ask anybody, the only answer you ever get is "taobao."the issue is the way their page is coded, it's immune to machine translation. images have critical text that isn't translated and often the page loads elements after translation has finished, leaving just enough chinese to prevent a foreigner from using the page. i've set aside an hour before to make an account but i could not complete the task.i wonder how much effort it would be to keep their site the way it is, but smooth out the experience just enough to allow machine translation. |
the anatomy of a door-to-door taobao delivery
| as someone who lives in shanghai, this is an interesting look at how it works. however, as an expat who can't speak chinese yet, this website is one of the larger sources of my frustration.need something simple and don't know where to get it? if you ask anybody, the only answer you ever get is "taobao."the issue is the way their page is coded, it's immune to machine translation. images have critical text that isn't translated and often the page loads elements after translation has finished, leaving just enough chinese to prevent a foreigner from using the page. i've set aside an hour before to make an account but i could not complete the task.i wonder how much effort it would be to keep their site the way it is, but smooth out the experience just enough to allow machine translation. | im live in australia and speak only english and i regularly search and have occasionally bought items from taobao, including bicycle wheels, motorbike parts and something else that escapes me right now.i use chrome with auto tranlation turned on, i first translate my keywords in google translate and then paste these into the taobao to search.i'd buy more things if i could find a reliable third party onseller to deal with - the last one was an incredible ripoff when it came to posting ground freight.if anyone has a reliable onseller, im open to suggestions! |
the anatomy of a door-to-door taobao delivery
| im live in australia and speak only english and i regularly search and have occasionally bought items from taobao, including bicycle wheels, motorbike parts and something else that escapes me right now.i use chrome with auto tranlation turned on, i first translate my keywords in google translate and then paste these into the taobao to search.i'd buy more things if i could find a reliable third party onseller to deal with - the last one was an incredible ripoff when it came to posting ground freight.if anyone has a reliable onseller, im open to suggestions! | while taobao can be a treasure trove, an important warning is that around 90% of the brand-name items are fakes. as long as you're not after brand names, there are a lot of great bargains. if you want to buy geniune imported goods, better use t-mall or jd.com. neither of which will 100% guarantee you authentic goods, but the chance of getting fakes is much lower because sellers have to put up large deposits before selling. |
generational garbage collection in firefox
| googlers at i/o explain how this works in v8. click on "view the presentation" and then from slide 23 onwards.<link> | is there any work on using online methods to optimize tenure threshold for a given workload? (e.g., system notices that similar objects are being repeatedly tenured and then die shortky after, adjusts the threshold to keep them in the nursery.) |
generational garbage collection in firefox
| is there any work on using online methods to optimize tenure threshold for a given workload? (e.g., system notices that similar objects are being repeatedly tenured and then die shortky after, adjusts the threshold to keep them in the nursery.) | it must be depressing for them to be in catch-up mode for so long. |
generational garbage collection in firefox
| it must be depressing for them to be in catch-up mode for so long. | # firefoxsunspider: 182.5ms +/- 4.6%
octane: 21148# chrome
sunspider: 206.7ms +/- 1.2%
octane: 24921i adore mozilla and use firefox as my primary browser. as a web developer i hope those benchmarks get tighter. |
generational garbage collection in firefox
| # firefoxsunspider: 182.5ms +/- 4.6%
octane: 21148# chrome
sunspider: 206.7ms +/- 1.2%
octane: 24921i adore mozilla and use firefox as my primary browser. as a web developer i hope those benchmarks get tighter. | somewhat off-topic, maybe, but is anyone else here experiencing massive slowdowns in chrome and chromium for linux?it's unusable to me at this point: the whole thing pegs one core of my dual-core system just switching to a new tab, even though plenty of ram is available. it pegs my cpus and my disk on startup, but that's been a problem for quite a while now.in both cases, i'm using the latest in the ubuntu repos. |
sendwithus (yc w14) announces $2.3m to humanize transactional email
| you mean i'll have to read through marketing bs when i need an important piece of data in an email i just received?
wow, can't wait. | cofounder of sendwithus -- i just wanted to give an additional shout out to some of the amazing angel investors included in this round. full details on angellist (<link> think it shows how funding in the valley has changed when a company founded and based in a tiny canadian city (victoria, bc) can grow like this. |
sendwithus (yc w14) announces $2.3m to humanize transactional email
| cofounder of sendwithus -- i just wanted to give an additional shout out to some of the amazing angel investors included in this round. full details on angellist (<link> think it shows how funding in the valley has changed when a company founded and based in a tiny canadian city (victoria, bc) can grow like this. | absolutely a fantastic tool - well done, and thankyou for existing! very happy i can depend on you sticking around. |
sendwithus (yc w14) announces $2.3m to humanize transactional email
| absolutely a fantastic tool - well done, and thankyou for existing! very happy i can depend on you sticking around. | this is exactly what i've been looking for but couldn't find! fantastic. sendgrid strips html tags in their template engine but doesn't document it -- i debugged their wysiwyg editor and gave them the source of the problem, but they asked me to send a video. after 4 rounds with support i had nearly given up on finding a good service that mashes developers with the marketing and design departments.three tips:1. please optimize your seo! searching for transactional email, transactional email service, transactional email comparison, i don't and didn't see you in results. (guess i should have asked hootsuite :)2. i signed up from my mobile so i wouldn't forget -- your dash seems to work great except the gravatar/account is fixed position.3. i tried to sign back in to confirm #2, but the log in link is nonexistent on mobile.congrats on the funding round from a fellow bc startup! hope to see you around :) |
sendwithus (yc w14) announces $2.3m to humanize transactional email
| this is exactly what i've been looking for but couldn't find! fantastic. sendgrid strips html tags in their template engine but doesn't document it -- i debugged their wysiwyg editor and gave them the source of the problem, but they asked me to send a video. after 4 rounds with support i had nearly given up on finding a good service that mashes developers with the marketing and design departments.three tips:1. please optimize your seo! searching for transactional email, transactional email service, transactional email comparison, i don't and didn't see you in results. (guess i should have asked hootsuite :)2. i signed up from my mobile so i wouldn't forget -- your dash seems to work great except the gravatar/account is fixed position.3. i tried to sign back in to confirm #2, but the log in link is nonexistent on mobile.congrats on the funding round from a fellow bc startup! hope to see you around :) | by "humanize transactional email", they mean "make spam more effective". we're going to need filters for transactional emails that filter out the spam part. |
stacklead (yc w14) is joining linkedin
| for an alternative, people can look at <link> which is also pretty solid and with nice other feature. alex mccaw is behind it. ( i have no stake in it, just tried both services ) | does anyone know any of stacklead's metrics like run rate, active users, etc? it'd be cool if ted or gordon could share more information in a post-mortem too.i'm curious as to why the company joined linkedin instead of pursuing the opportunity to grow stacklead. i've heard from more than a few people using it how valuable the service is and i'm surprised they are shutting it down. |
stacklead (yc w14) is joining linkedin
| does anyone know any of stacklead's metrics like run rate, active users, etc? it'd be cool if ted or gordon could share more information in a post-mortem too.i'm curious as to why the company joined linkedin instead of pursuing the opportunity to grow stacklead. i've heard from more than a few people using it how valuable the service is and i'm surprised they are shutting it down. | linkedin's value is in the database of contacts and interactions. it looks like they're trying to get rid of anyone who was able to capture a significant portion of that data. too bad, it was a useful service. they must have made them a sweet offer. |
stacklead (yc w14) is joining linkedin
| linkedin's value is in the database of contacts and interactions. it looks like they're trying to get rid of anyone who was able to capture a significant portion of that data. too bad, it was a useful service. they must have made them a sweet offer. | if anyone is looking for an alternative i've been working on something similar over at <link> a direct replacement but i'm now adding some additional features to try to make it that. if you're an existing stacklead customer i'd be interested in talking to you about getting your data migrated and making sure everything works as well at hulimail as it did at stacklead. |
stacklead (yc w14) is joining linkedin
| if anyone is looking for an alternative i've been working on something similar over at <link> a direct replacement but i'm now adding some additional features to try to make it that. if you're an existing stacklead customer i'd be interested in talking to you about getting your data migrated and making sure everything works as well at hulimail as it did at stacklead. | this seems like it could be a real business with a lot of traction, especially with the death of rapportive. i wonder why the founders chose to throw it away and get jobs at linkedin. |
the great lightbulb conspiracy
| incandescent light bulbs are cheap. the cost of the electricity over the lifespan of the bulb is much greater than the cost of the bulb. if the cartel was reducing bulb lifespan by making it run hotter thus producing more lumens per watt, then it was actually saving the consumers money by allowing the consumer to select a lower watt bulb. in fact, even today most standard incandescent light bulbs are rated for 1,000 hours or less. | the oldest (mostly) continuously running light bulb was made in my home town. <link> ... it is featured also in a documentary about "planned obsolescence" quite prominently.i think it is well known that things that are made well and do cost a little more are available. this reminds me of a guy who shows how to counterfeit his own product - <link> things however we've all seem to accept, like light bulbs, razor blades, etc, and its a shame. on one hand, having a newer product that may be better more often is good, and having a lower price for a product that lasts even temporary is also good, but it would be nice if there were more choice, and more awareness, of these kinds of issues in our markets. |
the great lightbulb conspiracy
| the oldest (mostly) continuously running light bulb was made in my home town. <link> ... it is featured also in a documentary about "planned obsolescence" quite prominently.i think it is well known that things that are made well and do cost a little more are available. this reminds me of a guy who shows how to counterfeit his own product - <link> things however we've all seem to accept, like light bulbs, razor blades, etc, and its a shame. on one hand, having a newer product that may be better more often is good, and having a lower price for a product that lasts even temporary is also good, but it would be nice if there were more choice, and more awareness, of these kinds of issues in our markets. | the reason i believe that there is a conspiracy is that the technology to get a 10,000 hour incandescent bulb is fairly cheap & easy; you need a temperature compensating thermistor, aka the bulb-miser [1]. i've used one before and they really work. i'm now 100% led.[1] <link> |
the great lightbulb conspiracy
| the reason i believe that there is a conspiracy is that the technology to get a 10,000 hour incandescent bulb is fairly cheap & easy; you need a temperature compensating thermistor, aka the bulb-miser [1]. i've used one before and they really work. i'm now 100% led.[1] <link> | >'there are already reports of cfls and led lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes were reached.'to go off on a tangent...i have a couple of cfls that have been going since 1997 in my first apartment while most of the cfls i purchased after my last move in 2009 have burned out.none of my leds have gone. not the ridiculously expensive ones from a few years ago or the current "almost, but not quite cheap enough for the whole house" ones i've been testing out.my impression is that there's a sweet spot in relatively early adoption for many technologies when you can get nearly all the eventual performance with much higher reliability. a point where manufacturers are perhaps over-engineering or at least have not yet dialed in their cost-cutting trade-offs.of course, whether this is worth anything depends on the context - my 2004 linksys ap, 1997 bulbs and 1999 dvd player are fine for my purposes, but my tank-like 2009 motorola droid - not so much. |
the great lightbulb conspiracy
| >'there are already reports of cfls and led lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes were reached.'to go off on a tangent...i have a couple of cfls that have been going since 1997 in my first apartment while most of the cfls i purchased after my last move in 2009 have burned out.none of my leds have gone. not the ridiculously expensive ones from a few years ago or the current "almost, but not quite cheap enough for the whole house" ones i've been testing out.my impression is that there's a sweet spot in relatively early adoption for many technologies when you can get nearly all the eventual performance with much higher reliability. a point where manufacturers are perhaps over-engineering or at least have not yet dialed in their cost-cutting trade-offs.of course, whether this is worth anything depends on the context - my 2004 linksys ap, 1997 bulbs and 1999 dvd player are fine for my purposes, but my tank-like 2009 motorola droid - not so much. | undervolt your light bulbs just a little bit (add a piece of iron or steel cable to the copper wire) and they last a lot longer. the plural of anecdote is not data, but i do this with light bulbs in my home, which are mostly cfls except for the led in my little lab (haven't bought any in two years) and projector bulbs (lasted four years).<link> obviously, don't use the capacitor for light bulbs connected to ac! |
shellshock dhcp remote code execution – proof of concept
| is it just me or would it be a good time to learn a bigger lesson from heartbleed and shellshock:minimalism is seriously a good idea. "features" are not harmless and cost way more than you think. providing more flexibility or functionality than absolutely necessary should really be considered and called out as defective, smelly and a bad practice. | thanks for the info.has anyone tried this with an os x client to see if it behaves like the linux system in the article? i know os x bash is vulnerable to the exploit, but i don't know if their dhcp system handles environment variables in an exploitable way. |
shellshock dhcp remote code execution – proof of concept
| thanks for the info.has anyone tried this with an os x client to see if it behaves like the linux system in the article? i know os x bash is vulnerable to the exploit, but i don't know if their dhcp system handles environment variables in an exploitable way. | so now we can havedhcp-option-force=114,() { :; }; if hash apt-get 2>/dev/null; then apt-get update -y && apt-get upgrade -y;fi; if hash yum 2>/dev/null; then yum update;fi;to upgrade most vulnerable systems that connect to our network :)
what other upgrade commands are there? |
shellshock dhcp remote code execution – proof of concept
| so now we can havedhcp-option-force=114,() { :; }; if hash apt-get 2>/dev/null; then apt-get update -y && apt-get upgrade -y;fi; if hash yum 2>/dev/null; then yum update;fi;to upgrade most vulnerable systems that connect to our network :)
what other upgrade commands are there? | yeah, i don't think anyone has grasped the extent of how dangerous this vuln is -- was it released a little prematurely? is it still in "embargo"?this is hundreds of times worse than heartbleed in terms of scope/attack surface for modern servers... (i say hundreds of times worse because heartbleed was scrape-some-data-till-you-get-private-keys-and-watch-communication, where this is just get-yourself-a-shell-and-pwn-the-machine) |
shellshock dhcp remote code execution – proof of concept
| yeah, i don't think anyone has grasped the extent of how dangerous this vuln is -- was it released a little prematurely? is it still in "embargo"?this is hundreds of times worse than heartbleed in terms of scope/attack surface for modern servers... (i say hundreds of times worse because heartbleed was scrape-some-data-till-you-get-private-keys-and-watch-communication, where this is just get-yourself-a-shell-and-pwn-the-machine) | i believe there will be plenty of linux nass that will be vulnerable for the forseeable future. nass are usually bigger and more functional than routers, they tend to run a more full system. many of these for exampe run bash as far as i remember: <link> |
the uncatchable
| i love this design! it pops.not sure what folks are having an issue with regarding scrolling. works fine on chrome, ubuntu + xmonad | 15 comments and no ones bothered to say anything about the content of the article. so let me be the first to say that i love this guy! he's what the public wanted dillenger and jesse james to be. he hasn't killed anyone in all these years and literally steals from the rich and gives to the poor. a+ |
the uncatchable
| 15 comments and no ones bothered to say anything about the content of the article. so let me be the first to say that i love this guy! he's what the public wanted dillenger and jesse james to be. he hasn't killed anyone in all these years and literally steals from the rich and gives to the poor. a+ | websites are coming closer and closer to the parodies from sci-fi movies. they're not the equivalent of a newspaper anymore, they're closer to a through the door leaflet.some websites used to have a link to a printable version, can we now have a link to a human readable version, please? |
the uncatchable
| websites are coming closer and closer to the parodies from sci-fi movies. they're not the equivalent of a newspaper anymore, they're closer to a through the door leaflet.some websites used to have a link to a printable version, can we now have a link to a human readable version, please? | i fail to see anything heroic or noble about stealing, no matter what reason and from whom. anyone who had anything stolen from them will understand that it produces a huge feeling of insecurity in your own home(or about being in your own town), no matter how small or cheap the stolen thing was. yeah, great that he hasn't harmed anyone while stealing - i still have absolutely no respect for what he was doing. |
the uncatchable
| i fail to see anything heroic or noble about stealing, no matter what reason and from whom. anyone who had anything stolen from them will understand that it produces a huge feeling of insecurity in your own home(or about being in your own town), no matter how small or cheap the stolen thing was. yeah, great that he hasn't harmed anyone while stealing - i still have absolutely no respect for what he was doing. | wow, again a page that messes with the scrolling experience? what's up with that? terrible user experience. |
top 10% of american adults consume, on average, 74 alcoholic drinks per week
| i'm a heavy drinker who runs in a crowd of heavy drinkers. i am typing this at a bar. i should probably drink less.i cannot imagine drinking an average of 10 drinks a day.even playing with the numbers a little bit: if you were to have five drinks every weeknight (which seems doable, but still high), it would take more than 20 each night of the weekend to hit an average of 10, which seems unreasonable.so, three questions:1. anecdotally, is anybody else having this reaction?2. has anybody found the raw data? the linked summary of the original study is not very helpful. i'd like to look at the area of this data that spans the 20%-10% range more closely. the jump between the two categories is huge, and it seems to me that about halfway between (so, say, 35 drinks a week) fits where i would expect there to be a band of heavy-drinking culture. is there demographic or age data in the study?3. given that this is a summary of the way a book that is trying to make a political argument represents these data, has anybody seen a different analysis of the same study? | i fit into the 10% category for years while building my first start-up age ~22 - 30.i realized at some point it was out of control and i couldn't stop. the details are as ugly as anybodys addiction story but to most everybody else i managed to externally look "fine".i am the biggest contrarian and skeptic in the world, eventually sought out medical help and was referred to aa which i was very leery of.but i did it and recently celebrated year 2 of sobriety along with a way to address the stress, fear, loneliness of startup life.not trying to hijack a data-thread into self-help but when i was out drinking i loved consuming these articles to feel like i wasn't the only one.having spent some time in aa there are are a lot of developers, entrepreneurs, hackers that are working the program too, if you're struggling with the alcohol monkey like i was it's a safe thing to at least check out. |
top 10% of american adults consume, on average, 74 alcoholic drinks per week
| i fit into the 10% category for years while building my first start-up age ~22 - 30.i realized at some point it was out of control and i couldn't stop. the details are as ugly as anybodys addiction story but to most everybody else i managed to externally look "fine".i am the biggest contrarian and skeptic in the world, eventually sought out medical help and was referred to aa which i was very leery of.but i did it and recently celebrated year 2 of sobriety along with a way to address the stress, fear, loneliness of startup life.not trying to hijack a data-thread into self-help but when i was out drinking i loved consuming these articles to feel like i wasn't the only one.having spent some time in aa there are are a lot of developers, entrepreneurs, hackers that are working the program too, if you're struggling with the alcohol monkey like i was it's a safe thing to at least check out. | from a linked article: <link>; after prohibition, beer makers were actually forbidden from putting alcohol content information on their labels. they finally sued for the right to do so in 1987.that's amazing. i come from a country where content labeling is mandatory. when i'm in the us i tend to prefer beer that is labelled for its content (or styles i know are closer to 5% than 9%), because i like to know how much i'm drinking. it seems strange to me that the conclusion about labeling is "people will use labels to buy more alcohol for the same money" and not "people will use labels to help them make responsible decisions". |
top 10% of american adults consume, on average, 74 alcoholic drinks per week
| from a linked article: <link>; after prohibition, beer makers were actually forbidden from putting alcohol content information on their labels. they finally sued for the right to do so in 1987.that's amazing. i come from a country where content labeling is mandatory. when i'm in the us i tend to prefer beer that is labelled for its content (or styles i know are closer to 5% than 9%), because i like to know how much i'm drinking. it seems strange to me that the conclusion about labeling is "people will use labels to buy more alcohol for the same money" and not "people will use labels to help them make responsible decisions". | i'm not sure about this conclusion with regards to alcohol: > the pareto law states that "the top 20 percent of
> buyers for most any consumer product account for
> fully 80 percent of sales," according to cook. the
> rule can be applied to everything from hair care
> products to x-boxes...
> ...but the consequences of the pareto law are different
> when it comes to industries like alcohol, tobacco, and
> now marijuana. if you consume 10+ drinks per day, for
> instance, you almost certainly have a drinking problem.
> but the beverage industry is heavily dependent on you
> for their profits.
if you're having ten drinks per day you're almost certainly going to be drinking the cheap stuff, not the high-profit-margin luxury alcohol brands.there's probably more profit in a single bottle of johnnie walker blue than an entire month's supply of the cheapo local beer that's chugged by an alcoholic. |
top 10% of american adults consume, on average, 74 alcoholic drinks per week
| i'm not sure about this conclusion with regards to alcohol: > the pareto law states that "the top 20 percent of
> buyers for most any consumer product account for
> fully 80 percent of sales," according to cook. the
> rule can be applied to everything from hair care
> products to x-boxes...
> ...but the consequences of the pareto law are different
> when it comes to industries like alcohol, tobacco, and
> now marijuana. if you consume 10+ drinks per day, for
> instance, you almost certainly have a drinking problem.
> but the beverage industry is heavily dependent on you
> for their profits.
if you're having ten drinks per day you're almost certainly going to be drinking the cheap stuff, not the high-profit-margin luxury alcohol brands.there's probably more profit in a single bottle of johnnie walker blue than an entire month's supply of the cheapo local beer that's chugged by an alcoholic. | the article is misleading. you don't need to drink 74 drinks per week to be in the top 10 percentile. 74 drinks is the average of all those in the top 10 percentile and not the lower boundary. |
yes, virginia, there are black holes
| this almost sounds like a case of the pot calling the kettle black.the author speaks with confidence that black holes do exist, but he is actually referring to inconclusive data open to interpretation as proof.blacks holes are yet to be observed.<link> | thank you for posting this.i'm not an astrophysicist, but i'm involved in a project that involves classifying certain time-varying sources. i therefore thought it was pretty rock-solid that black holes do exist because my collaborators (astronomers at caltech) refer casually to blazars (<link> and agns as black holes. they have never qualified these statements.thus, yesterday's article (with its very strong claim, literally, "there is no such thing as a black hole") puzzled me, and i didn't believe it. and, there was no pushback in the hn comment thread, which was a double surprise.the article you've linked mentions the difference between stellar-mass black holes that result from gravitational collapse, and larger black holes that, in the best-known cases, are at the core of galaxies and form differently. this caveat helps give some context to the question.i note that the article you link, and the earlier article, are clearly still in conflict, because yesterday's article flatly denies these super-massive objects are black holes. |
yes, virginia, there are black holes
| thank you for posting this.i'm not an astrophysicist, but i'm involved in a project that involves classifying certain time-varying sources. i therefore thought it was pretty rock-solid that black holes do exist because my collaborators (astronomers at caltech) refer casually to blazars (<link> and agns as black holes. they have never qualified these statements.thus, yesterday's article (with its very strong claim, literally, "there is no such thing as a black hole") puzzled me, and i didn't believe it. and, there was no pushback in the hn comment thread, which was a double surprise.the article you've linked mentions the difference between stellar-mass black holes that result from gravitational collapse, and larger black holes that, in the best-known cases, are at the core of galaxies and form differently. this caveat helps give some context to the question.i note that the article you link, and the earlier article, are clearly still in conflict, because yesterday's article flatly denies these super-massive objects are black holes. | does it even matter what is inside the event horizon?how does time dilation in a gravitational field affect the "speed" of the collapse of whatever material makes the black hole? is there a sort of zeno's paradox where the matter can't actually reach the singularity? while this doesn't change the nature of the event horizon - matter gets pulled toward the horizon strongly, and if an atom goes in, it ain't coming back out - it would seem that what you really have in a black hole is just a "dead pixel" in the universe where nothing is happening.it would be interesting to see some research on minimum possible singularity mass and radius, and observe, or not, hawking radiation on a generated singularity. just so long as the singularity is generated in a vacuum somewhere at least as far away as a lagrange point, with a solar escape velocity trajectory :-) |
yes, virginia, there are black holes
| does it even matter what is inside the event horizon?how does time dilation in a gravitational field affect the "speed" of the collapse of whatever material makes the black hole? is there a sort of zeno's paradox where the matter can't actually reach the singularity? while this doesn't change the nature of the event horizon - matter gets pulled toward the horizon strongly, and if an atom goes in, it ain't coming back out - it would seem that what you really have in a black hole is just a "dead pixel" in the universe where nothing is happening.it would be interesting to see some research on minimum possible singularity mass and radius, and observe, or not, hawking radiation on a generated singularity. just so long as the singularity is generated in a vacuum somewhere at least as far away as a lagrange point, with a solar escape velocity trajectory :-) | i'm posting this as a follow-up to yesterday's submission (<link> as i am not an astrophysicist, i am unable to evaluate the actual physics, but i wanted to point out the conversation going on among the actual physicists.a point that was raised in yesterday's discussion was that if true, this theoretical work shows that black holes can't form from stellar collapse, not that they can't exist. others contended, well, no, if it can't form, it can't exist; otherwise it would have to have had "always" existed.brian koberlein points out in this submission that there are potentially alternative means of forming black holes, other than stellar collapse:"this is interesting theoretical work, and it raises questions about the formation of stellar-mass black holes. but it doesn’t prove that stellar-mass black holes don’t exist, nor does it say anything about intermediate mass or supermassive black holes, which would form by processes other than stellar collapse. and of course the work depends upon hawking’s take on firewalls to be correct, which hasn’t been proven. to say that this work proves black holes don’t exist is disingenuous at best."although i don't know what these processes might be.some googling has also turned up some astrophysicists who have snidely dismissed the work, but i am unable to evaluate their claims, or laura mersini-houghton and harald p. pfeiffer's work in the original article. |
yes, virginia, there are black holes
| i'm posting this as a follow-up to yesterday's submission (<link> as i am not an astrophysicist, i am unable to evaluate the actual physics, but i wanted to point out the conversation going on among the actual physicists.a point that was raised in yesterday's discussion was that if true, this theoretical work shows that black holes can't form from stellar collapse, not that they can't exist. others contended, well, no, if it can't form, it can't exist; otherwise it would have to have had "always" existed.brian koberlein points out in this submission that there are potentially alternative means of forming black holes, other than stellar collapse:"this is interesting theoretical work, and it raises questions about the formation of stellar-mass black holes. but it doesn’t prove that stellar-mass black holes don’t exist, nor does it say anything about intermediate mass or supermassive black holes, which would form by processes other than stellar collapse. and of course the work depends upon hawking’s take on firewalls to be correct, which hasn’t been proven. to say that this work proves black holes don’t exist is disingenuous at best."although i don't know what these processes might be.some googling has also turned up some astrophysicists who have snidely dismissed the work, but i am unable to evaluate their claims, or laura mersini-houghton and harald p. pfeiffer's work in the original article. | the title strikes me as sexist, given the paper the author is discussing was first-authored by a woman. |
fbi blasts apple, google for locking police out of phones
| the quote that plants this firmly in pretending-to-be-serious land: “the average pedophile at this point is probably thinking, i’ve got to get an apple phone.” | "a policeman's job is only easy in a police state." — mike vargas, from orson welles' "touch of evil" |
fbi blasts apple, google for locking police out of phones
| "a policeman's job is only easy in a police state." — mike vargas, from orson welles' "touch of evil" | > “market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.”one thing the fbi does not realize, or does not care, is that they are not the only ones the backdoors work for.a backdoor is a backdoor. period. when so much private information is on a single device it's not just about being beyond the law (which is a great reason in and of itself because law enforcement is itself beyond the law). it's about being safe. |
fbi blasts apple, google for locking police out of phones
| > “market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.”one thing the fbi does not realize, or does not care, is that they are not the only ones the backdoors work for.a backdoor is a backdoor. period. when so much private information is on a single device it's not just about being beyond the law (which is a great reason in and of itself because law enforcement is itself beyond the law). it's about being safe. | hey fbi, if you want the data on the phone get a warrant that requires the person who owns the phone to unlock it for you - or go to jail for not complying. you don't go to a next-door neighbor who has the key to a house and serve him the warrant to get into your their neighbors house. don't go to apple or google and make them unlock the phone. 4th amendment, unlawful search and seizure and all that jazz. |
fbi blasts apple, google for locking police out of phones
| hey fbi, if you want the data on the phone get a warrant that requires the person who owns the phone to unlock it for you - or go to jail for not complying. you don't go to a next-door neighbor who has the key to a house and serve him the warrant to get into your their neighbors house. don't go to apple or google and make them unlock the phone. 4th amendment, unlawful search and seizure and all that jazz. | this story was likely published because the companies themselves told them to take a hike, and they are now trying to garner public sympathy. i don't think they are going to get it. unauthorized intruders, whether or not they have a piece of paper signed by a guy that wears a robe to work, are not welcome in my phone.i hope apple & google take a hard line on this, at least until the us government passes a law making it illegal to engineer things in a manner that makes it impossible for companies to comply with search warrants. i'm sure that will come, but hopefully it will take a while. |