Hacker News Reader

Zarathuston Pentium on a 386 Motherboard

However, looking at the Pentium Overdrive pinout the extra row of pins doesn’t seem to be at all essential. There is a number of extra power points and some signalling pins to support L1 cache coherency when using write-back. Nothing too much to worry about.

Uh... sure, if you say so.

Zarathuston The main thing about Phenylacetone meth is that there's so much of it

In Canada you can still buy that over the counter. You get id-ed and they keep a record of your purchases, but since it's now generic pills it is now much cheaper than it was before

Zarathuston A viable solution for Python concurrency

"Viable" as in "you have no other choice sometimes". This forces you to deal with 3 libraries each with their own quirks, pitfalls and incompatibilities. Sometimes you even deal with dependencies reimplementing some parts in a 4th or 5th library to deal with shortcomings.

I really don't care that much which of them survive, I just want to rely on less of them

Zarathuston Tool can make photos undetectable to facial recognition without ruining them

That is the nature of captchas by design. 2000s captchas can probably be solved by off the shelves OCR.

Zarathuston UMN CS&E Statement on Linux Kernel Research

My take on that is that it's up to the kernel maintainers to unban them. If they end up the investigation with: "Yeah, that was bad but we won't do anything about it", it's unlikely to get the banning side to move an inch.

Zarathuston UMN CS&E Statement on Linux Kernel Research

If they really care about being banned, they'll have no choice but to follow thorough

Zarathuston Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer

This indeed looks like a FUD statement, implying that they can have an infinite amount of potential vulnerabilities. Realistically though, writing parsers that do not yield control of your whole device is not that complex. The people exploiting iOS zero days can certainly do it.

Zarathuston Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer

It seems to be a retaliatory measure against this:

> When Cellebrite announced that they added Signal support to their software, all it really meant was that they had added support to Physical Analyzer for the file formats used by Signal.

Your case is valid about potential judiciary impact, but it would require for Signal to monitor cases involving Cellebrite and step forward to help the defense while unprompted to do so. Furthermore, Cellebrite clients seems to include entities that do not care so much about a fair trial.

Zarathuston The Bhikkhu Diet (2003)

We live in a society (many of us) where "low calory food" is synonym of "healthy". I think it's one of the ultimate modern luxury, to look for food that will yield little energy for you.

Zarathuston E.Deorbit (2016)

China showed a few years ago that blasting satellites with missiles is neither subtle or sustainable. This kind of thing could be weaponized much more efficiently

Zarathuston UK unveils new Tempest fighter jet

Russia announced the abandonment of the su-57 yesterday. https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/russi...

Zarathuston The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/facts-and-figures

It is possible that code itself is not that complex, but the interaction between all modules certainly has a high level of complexity.

"In the International Space Station’s U.S. segment alone, more than 1.5 million lines of flight software code run on 44 computers communicating via 100 data networks transferring 400,000 signals (e.g. pressure or temperature measurements, valve positions, etc.)."

Zarathuston The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

The code base for the International Space Station is probably also VERY complex

Zarathuston Lockheed Martin has obtained a patent for a compact fusion reactor

This is a critical part to consider in "current" fusion research. Most of it rely on the deuterium / tritium fusion which will probably require a classic nuclear plant to generate the fuel. This makes the whole "infinite clean energy" claim pretty bogus for now.

Zarathuston How Dropbox handles downgrades

Wow, dropbox made it long and annoying to give them less money. Verdict : I love it!

Zarathuston Indistinguishable from Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips (2012) [video]

You have a bunch of nice images. Are those taken with "standard" microscopes?

Also you mentioned a background in metrology. How do you inspect something a few atoms thick?

Zarathuston New Gravitational Wave Detection from Colliding Black Holes (2017)

This article is from September

Zarathuston The Plasma Magnet Drive: A Simple, Cheap Drive for the Solar System and Beyond

Claim 5 is a bit puzzling to me :

A key feature of the plasma magnet is that the diameter of the magnetosphere increases as the density of the solar wind decreases as it expands away from the sun. The resulting expansion exactly matches the decrease in density, ensuring constant thrust. Therefore the plasma magnet has a constant acceleration irrespective of its position in the solar system.

I'm not 100% sure about the science here, but the "exactly" looks a bit magical to me. If I understand the concept correctly, when the sail is closer to the sun, the particles "pressure" on the sail will "compress" and reduce its effective area.

Zarathuston Modernize C++: Sink Functions

a shared_ptr would probably also be a better choice if the ptr should go through several nodes of the pipeline

Zarathuston Breaking Elgar’s Enigma

So it seems that even music has its own kind of numerologists

Zarathuston The secret world below Chicago

You can also go to the Bell Center to see the Canadiens too. It's just a bit trickier to get around.

Zarathuston TIKKU – a micro-apartment building with a foot-print of one car parking place

What's wrong with webpage design? Having a web page about images you want to show actually showing whole images isn't cool anymore?

Zarathuston The secret world below Chicago

This is my favorite part of Montreal. When it's -20C outside, having access to everything without going outside is good city planning

http://montrealvisitorsguide.com/reso-underground-city-la-vi...

Zarathuston Radio Attack Lets Hackers Steal Cars with Just $20 Worth of Gear

A slim jim worked because the wires holding the lock were exposed inside the door. An extremely cheap fix was to wrap those with a metal cylinder.

I was under the impression that this was standard for at least 15 years but since we're talking about automotive industry, some makers may not even be aware of that yet

Zarathuston Why I don't support Net Neutrality

If you had a large choice of ISPs, then Net Neutrality wouldn't be required. It would come by default as the client could move from a restrictive ISP to a less restrictive one.

Since there is virtually no competition in large parts of the world, it is very important to force the single monopoly to behave in the interest of the consumer with laws.

The regulations the author is talking about are not the same regulations that enforce net neutrality. Net neutrality has nothing to do with sharing telephone poles.

Zarathuston Why I don't support Net Neutrality

"ISPs are not too big to compete with because Google can do it" is not a valid argument.

Zarathuston Announcing the New AWS Secret Region

They have a robot constantly hot-swapping disks between racks maybe?

Zarathuston Japanese Company Offers Extra Days Off to Workers Who Don't Smoke

A way to punish slackers + moral stance? Why not! In other news, tobacco consumption varies from person to person and stepping away from your desk 15 minutes at a time should not be abnormal.