Hacker News Reader

Melkmanon Semiconductor Startups – Are they back?

Yeah, to bad Mapper was acquired by ASML. Would be interesting to see what maskless fabbing with Electron beam lithographically could do for small production runs. If you get the price for that down designing and testing of integrated circuits would be attainable for many more organisations. Maybe Multibeam can get it to work.

Melkmanon Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

I also have a TP-Link Omada setup. For layer2 networking with switches and AP's it's fine. Cost effective, reasonably stable, acceptable performance and features that are regularly used are all there.

The layer-3 stuff however is still early days and I can't recommend getting the secure gateway at this time. No IPv6 support. Depends strictly on an internet uplink configuration for default route to which all traffic is then NATted. Can't change that. No real security features, no packet inspection etc. The routing features really feel like an alpha version. They are working on it and have a roadmap to a more workable layer-3 solution. So maybe in the future the will be as nice as the Ubiquity solution.

Cloud is not needed but possible. You can get an OC-200 controller for not much money that fills the role of single pane configuration webinterface. The software for that controller can also be downloaded for Linux on PC or ARM if you want to use your own hardware. Also the network keeps running if the controller is down.

Melkmanon You don’t need all that complex/expensive/distracting infrastructure (2019)

Also, when cost caused by downtime and updates and/or hardware problems exceed the cost of this full time engineer. Even then K8s is probable not the next step. Simple HA with a load balancer and seperate test and production environments plus some automation with an orchestration tool works wonders.

Melkmanon Delft café premieres with EEMCS blockchain euro

Ignoring fraudsters will only work if that causes a cost to the fraudster bigger than the gain by double spending. Basically you will have to use key pairs tied to natural persons. If there is any anonymity or pseudonymity the fraudster will just generate a new key pair and double spend again. How does this system guard against that ?

Melkmanon Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

The link estimates the surface of the panels to be 30m2. Since the panels are 3.1m wide the length would be 9.6 meters. But even at 30 meters it would be very very hard to engineer a system that can keep a laser beam aligned on a moving target with sub microradian precision. I'd guess Starlink laser are more divergent to make hitting the target easier. Keeps the exit pupil a manageable size too (narrower beams need bigger optics).

Melkmanon Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

Because a beam in an open medium always diverges due to wavefront errors and diffraction. A very good laser system might possibly have a divergence of only 1 microradians. For reference a typical laser pointer has a divergence angle of 1 to 2 milliradians. With the 2000km or so between satellites for Starlink the laser "spot" on the receiving satellite with the very good laser will be about 2 meter. Not enough to receive multiple beams on one satellite without overlapping.

Melkmanon Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

Consistency is not the only value of a system of units. Convenience is also of importance. And that is where the metric system shines. Having all measures of a unit in multiples 10 combines perfectly with our decimal calculations. Having as few as possible magical numbers to convert and combine between units makes making mistakes harder. How many calories in kinetic energy has a pound going 10 miles per hour ? I know a kilo going 10 meters per second has 50 joules of kinetic energy without looking up anything and doing the calculation in my head.

Melkmanon Linux distributors frustrated by Google's new Chromium web browser restrictions

Ehhh, isn't the point of using Chromium not using Google API's and customizations ? If you want to use Google products why not use Chrome proper ?

Melkmanon Loon’s final flight

Most people will already have a phone and a phone plan but missing coverage in many places. Starlink makes it pretty cheap and easy for network operators to place solar/wind powered cell towers without need to dig wired connections or make microwave chains. That can seriously speed up the rollout to improve coverage. And users don't have to do anything.

Melkmanon Saying Goodbye to Loon

Further discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25868713 apparently

Melkmanon Saying Goodbye to Loon

I think that was to be expected. They wouldn't have had a realistic chance of competing with LEO constellations. As long as it was uncertain those would be realized Loon stood a chance. With the current status and speed of Starlink development and deployment it has a high chance of providing regular service in a few years. In my opinion of course.

Melkmanon Kazakhstan government is intercepting HTTPS traffic in its capital (again)

CAA is not the record for this. As @schoen already replied, it is only used by CA's to check if they are allowed to issue a certificate to a domain.

But with DANE TLSA Resource Records you can pin a public key to a website. Alas the implementation of TLSA-RR checking in browsers is dependent on extensions at this time. I wish it was native in browsers with a big red sign when violated. When done in combination with DNSSEC it's very hard to fake certificates. Or more precisely asymmetric cryptography key pairs used by servers. Certificates for TLS would not be needed anymore if TLSA-RR's were standard practice. A company might still use a certificate to attest it's identity beyond internet domain ownership.

Edit: This is for TLSA 3 1 1 and 3 1 2 records. That's what I have experience with. Just read on Wikipedia a lot more is possible with TLSA-RR's including certificate and CA pinning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na...

Melkmanon What was it like to be a software engineer at NeXT?

Apple is in no way like Microsoft of old. Microsoft did not build generic computers of their own. Other companies like Gateway, Compaq, HP, Dell or Packard Bell did. The Microsoft tax was the agreement between Microsoft and those companies to install Windows on any and all computers they made and pay licenses for all of them. Since Windows had a 95%+ OS market share every computer manufacturer needed an agreement with Microsoft and no generic PC without a Windows license could be bought.

Apple only forces their software on hardware they manufacture themselves. If you want other software, just buy hardware made by a different company. There are still many of them.

Melkmanon Why do we use the Linux kernel's TCP stack? (2016)

I think an other reason to use the Linux stack is that it's performance is good enough for most every task. Writing your own stack will cost you a lot of time and is only advantageous if there is a big improvement in performance and that improvement is really needed. A bit like a software libraries and frameworks. If you write your application without frameworks you can probably speed up your application quite a bit. But it will cost you a lot of extra development time.

Melkmanon Hermann Hauser: ‘It’s in Nvidia’s Interests to Destroy Arm’

Google does not provide that service for free. Where do you think the $27 billion Google search revenue comes from ? Also you might want to read https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capit... The reason Amazon an Google are successful is that they are unopposed monopolists that acquire or destroy any business that might pose a risk to them.

Melkmanon Home Office Projects Series: Air conditioner setup

I know it's only one datapoint but recently we had four indoor airco units installed in our house for the bedrooms and livingroom. I expected a single outdoor unit. However during talks with the installer he advised us to go for two outdoor units. This was cheaper in hardware, a bit more efficient and way cheaper to install by placing one outdoor unit on the front of the house and one on the back so all rooms could be reached within a meter or so from the outdoor units.

Melkmanon The GNU project is leaking into Microsoft

The problem is that github is not just a place to host a git repository. It's also a bugtracker, release publisher, wiki etc. Microsoft is by no means held to use free software for those facilities. This means there is a good chance at eroding the use of free software which is counter to the FSF goals.

Melkmanon You can't tell people anything (2004)

Neh, the better an engineer gets, the better they are at asking questions which make the person with the idea realize there are some problems with his idea. These problems may be fixable.

Shooting down ideas is not productive. Making sure ideas are realizable is.

Melkmanon Intel is changing the future of power supplies with its ATX12VO spec

I wonder how easy this would make server local UPS systems. A battery with a single buck/boost converter should be enough as a power supply. Just need to add a mains fed charge circuit.

Melkmanon How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for Google

Then, as an idealist, what do you expect from other people to reach your goal ? If 50% of the people do 80% of what is needed you're at 40% of your goal. If 10% of the people do 100% you're only at 10% plus you've turned your goal in to an "us vs them" instead of "everybody for the greater good". Voting with your wallet 80% of the time is a valid means to support what you think is right. An idealistic minority doesn't change the world. The majority does.

Melkmanon Why Juicero’s Press Is So Expensive

Calling an STM32F407 absurdly over-specced is hyperbole. It's just a 6$ micro controller, not a smartphone class SoC like a Snapdragon. They probably need it to do the QR code scanning and IoT DRM thingies.

Melkmanon Microsoft Office 365 beats out Google’s G Suite in S&P 1500

You mean like a virus ?

I found it a weird analogy because I couldn't figure out who are supposed to be the Spaniards. Is it Google because they are up against a competitor that is massively entrenched in the office suite market ? Or is it Microsoft because they seem to be expanding their presence.

Melkmanon ISP explains data caps to FCC: Using the Internet is like eating Oreos

Well, that's a bunch of nonsense. If you eat twice as much oreos you use up twice as much resources. For network connections that is not true. Once a connection has been made no extra resources are used for traffic over that connection. The only problem is in the uplinks when a provider has estimated a 1:100 overbooking should be enough but customers start using their connection for more than 1% of the time.

Melkmanon Yes, We Can Build Industry in Space – And We Should Start Now

More adventurously, he suggests that new communications technology could allow computing to be moved off of the Earth, reducing demand for energy.

Since latency to the moon is more than 2.5 seconds round trip I think the utility of moon based data centers will be marginal. Maybe as off site backup site or big batch processing.

Melkmanon Bitcoin's $137k Jackpot

Almost all currencies are digital today. Bank notes are just a physical transaction mechanism. You could use Bitcoin notes if you want with the private key under a scratch layer. The big difference is exactly that Bitcoin has no central authority. If that doesn't matter to someone he'd be perfectly happy to use state endorsed currencies.

Melkmanon Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

Malaria is not a sentient organism that feels cornered and will lash out because of that. The chance that it will mutate to an other infection mechanism is directly related with the number of specimens in circulation. Killing off it's carrier will reduce it.

Melkmanon AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol 3-0 [video]

Cats haven't expressed self-recognition in the MSR test. However humans younger than 18 months also don't pass that test. So to say it is a measure of conciousness is quite a stretch.

Melkmanon Why did the half-plane, half-helicopter not work?

Hmm, I'd say that V22 Osprey does work. It's still a compromise and a full heli or full plane is better suited for most tasks but a hybrid does have its use.