HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

alvern

253 karma · joined November 3, 2015

github.com/alvern
submissionscomments
alvern··on Office real estate crash will be so sharp, values unlikely to recover by 2040
In 2022 I would have accepted $10 per sq ft if it ticked all the boxes. There's been a few spaces I kicked myself over not signing soon enough ($6 per sq ft, 3200 sq ft, large with ample power 480v with 600 amp service, concrete roof, dock door)
alvern··on Office real estate crash will be so sharp, values unlikely to recover by 2040
If you look on loopnet, the cost of office versus warehouse per sq ft is staggering. It's a large visual indicator of a bubble.

I've been looking for 1500-3000 sq ft for a light manufacturing space for around two years. In my area warehouse $/sqft is $5-7 a year. Office space is $13 for old and dated layouts. I have no use for that dotcom era conference room. I need 10 ft dock doors, tall ceilings, and reliable 3 phase power.

Buying land outside my metro area and building new is becoming the only option for me until this crash actually happens. Sprawling out of the metro would only bite me down the line because the labor market is even tighter in rural areas.

alvern··on Achieving 11M IOPS and 66 GB/S IO on a Single ThreadRipper Workstation
I've not been successful trying this with HPE servers. Most server fans (Foxconn/Delta) run 2.8 amp or higher. Not aware of any "silent" gaming grade fans that use more than 0.38 amps. That's not even considering the CFM.
alvern··on SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
This makes sense. Most of the Jetson/Xavier/Nano boards already use a Carmel ARMv8 chip. I just hope this spurs more development in ARMv8. Currently the majority of ARM is ARMv7 (smartphones and Raspi).
alvern··on Tesla’s former CTO is building a giant lithium-ion battery recycling operation
Currently anything Li-ion is around $1.50 per pound (Midwest US prices) to be accepted for hazardous waste recycling. This means it costs you the consumer to have your laptop battery recycled.

I work with a company that recycles older hybrid batteries from Toyota, Honda, Ford. Most of these are NiMH and pay $0.40-$0.80 per pound for the Nickel value alone.

So a NiMH hybrid battery is worth $50 for the core from a Prius, but a lithium battery from a Nissan Leaf would cost you ~$700 to recycle.

alvern··on Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests
I think the repeaters would block out any of the mobile radios. So you could see the dispatchers easily, but the individual mobile operators (EMS, Fire, Police) would be hard to distinguish.

If the mesh was every Digital TV tuner inside a municipality, then maybe the mesh could triangulate position.

alvern··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
Are you following the open inverter forums?

[1] https://openinverter.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=151

alvern··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
https://list.alvernrocinante.com/

I've been setting up old GPUs for folding@home and recently acquired a Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier for machine vision.

Currently I'm building a 6 camera rig using Raspberry Pi IMX219 or IMX477 cameras to create an ultra high FPS rolling shutter.

alvern··on Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera
This is an awesome development for building out machine vision or microscope cameras. It'll be great to adapt the Pi to an Amscope or Dinocam for inspecting small part features in an industrial setting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_mount

alvern··on Introduction to Permaculture (1994)
If you're just dipping into Permaculture, get a few books by Ruth Stout. Her method of "no-work" gardening is a pillar in the homesteading, self-sufficiency, and permaculture communities.

Warning, her writing style is closer to rambling than academic/professional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Stout

alvern··on Covid-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan Application for Small Businesses
Applicant does not present live performances of a prurient sexual nature or derive directly or indirectly more than de minimis gross revenue through the sale of products or services, or the presentation of any depictions or displays, of a prurient sexual nature.

That's a strange way to exclude sex workers.

alvern··on Essential shutting down after failing to launch ‘GEM’ smartphone
My biggest issue with the PH1 was the lack of cases. I work in an industrial environment where I need an otterbox or bulky protective case. The PH1 only lasted for a month before I dropped it on a concrete floor and cracked the screen.
alvern··on AMD’s 64-Core Threadripper 3990X, only $3990 Coming February 7th
I don't have a answer to your frequency problem but I ran into similar issues with memory usage when trying to process LIDAR data in pandas and keras. I ended up buying an old HP quad xeon 4U with 320gb of DDR3 for $330 shipped. I used https://labgopher.com/ to find the server deals.
alvern··on Launch HN: Got-it (YC W19) – Bluetooth labels for tracking things at work
Have you given any thought to encryption over bluetooth?

I'm thinking specifically about the DOD/ITAR material traceability market. They would eat this product up at $1 per label.

alvern··on 16-inch MacBook Pro
So the top of the line specs get you:

* 2.4GHz 8‑core 9th‑generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz

* 64GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory

* AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 8GB of GDDR6 memory

* 8TB SSD storage

for $6099USD. I wonder how it will handle the thermals.

alvern··on Edward Snowden in His Own Words: Why I Became a Whistle-Blower
Freedom is a police state.
alvern··on Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO
Forgive my ignorance, but how is TravisCI on lifesupport? Is this because Idera aquired them?
alvern··on GM, Volkswagen Say Goodbye to Hybrid Vehicles
The first generations are regularly going for $5k-$8k.
alvern··on A Guide to Recording 660FPS Video on a $6 Raspberry Pi Camera
1107 fps on the V2 IMX219 camera. I wonder how fast or how large of a frame it could do on a Pi4 or odroid (article mentions the 640x64 frame is limited by memory bandwidth).
alvern··on Data Engineering Cookbook
What part of the world are you working in? In the US it seems common to switch between software developer and software engineer interchangeably. But in the UK & AUS an engineer title means something completely different.
alvern··on Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid
(Los Angeles deal) would provide 7% of the city's electricity beginning in 2023 at a cost of 1.997 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per kWh for the battery.

So 3.297 cents per kwh. That's on par with large hydro like Tacoma Power Park. I'm getting 11 cents per kwh for my solar currently in the midwest.

alvern··on More than 1k Android apps harvest data even after you deny permissions
[0] from the researchers pdf:

• We designed a pipeline for automatically discovering vulnerabilities in the Android permissions system through a combination of dynamic and static analysis, in effect creating a scalable honeypot environment.

• We tested our pipeline on more than 88,000 apps and discovered a number of vulnerabilities, which we responsibly disclosed. These apps were downloaded from the U.S. Google Play Store and include popular apps from all categories. We further describe the vulnerabilities in detail, and measure the degree to which they are in active use, and thus pose a threat to users. We discovered covert and side channels used in the wild that compromise both users’ location data and persistent identifers.

• We discovered companies getting the MAC addresses of the connected WiFi base stations from the ARP cache. This can be used as a surrogate for location data. We found 5 apps exploiting this vulnerability and 5 with the pertinent code to do so.

• We discovered Unity obtaining the device MAC address using ioctl system calls. The MAC address can be used to uniquely identify the device. We found 42 apps exploiting this vulnerability and 12,408 apps with the pertinent code to do so.

• We also discovered that third-party libraries provided by two Chinese companies—Baidu and Salmonads— independently make use of the SD card as a covert channel, so that when an app can read the phone’s IMEI, it stores it for other apps that cannot. We found 159 apps with the potential to exploit this covert channel and empirically found 13 apps doing so.

• We found one app that used picture metadata as a side channel to access precise location information despite not holding location permissions.

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_events/141...

alvern··on FTC finds Android Apps harvesting data with permissions off [pdf]
from the pdf

• We designed a pipeline for automatically discovering vulnerabilities in the Android permissions system through a combination of dynamic and static analysis, in effect creating a scalable honeypot environment.

• We tested our pipeline on more than 88,000 apps and discovered a number of vulnerabilities, which we responsibly disclosed. These apps were downloaded from the U.S. Google Play Store and include popular apps from all categories. We further describe the vulnerabilities in detail, and measure the degree to which they are in active use, and thus pose a threat to users. We discovered covert and side channels used in the wild that compromise both users’ location data and persistent identifers.

• We discovered companies getting the MAC addresses of the connected WiFi base stations from the ARP cache. This can be used as a surrogate for location data. We found 5 apps exploiting this vulnerability and 5 with the pertinent code to do so.

• We discovered Unity obtaining the device MAC address using ioctl system calls. The MAC address can be used to uniquely identify the device. We found 42 apps exploiting this vulnerability and 12,408 apps with the pertinent code to do so.

• We also discovered that third-party libraries provided by two Chinese companies—Baidu and Salmonads— independently make use of the SD card as a covert channel, so that when an app can read the phone’s IMEI, it stores it for other apps that cannot. We found 159 apps with the potential to exploit this covert channel and empirically found 13 apps doing so.

• We found one app that used picture metadata as a side channel to access precise location information despite not holding location permissions.

alvern··on Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
I've bought every board that comes out since the 2B. Most of them get gifted to relatives as Kodi boxes. The three I currently use are a 3B that runs the [0] LivPi CO2 and environment monitor, a zero W that has a noIR camera pointing at my plants under lights, and a 2B+ that runs piHole.

I recommend the odroid [1] XU4 (desktop) or [2] HC1 (nas) if you have anything that requires constant read writes. Pi SD cards do go bad over time unless you set it to run the OS from memory. Odroid made a smarter choice going with eMMC early on. The con of odroid is you have to hack everything that was already done on a pi to work.

[0] http://www.livpi.com/

[1] https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4-special-price/

[2] https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/

alvern··on Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
Last week Looker, today Tableau, next week Qlik or Alteryx?

I wonder how this will integrate with Einstein and other AI products salesforce already has. Pardot is the first to come to mind. They already own Heroku, Mulesoft, and Quip.

Exciting times to be a data geek. Hopefully this adds more money to the AI race.

alvern··on Low cost, all electric, benchtop injection molding machine
Or automatic pipe benders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXWzIgfTuuQ
alvern··on Low cost, all electric, benchtop injection molding machine
The work envelope is 4.8" x 6.0" so realistically you'd only get a ~4.375" diameter part geometry in there. You can't have hot plastic right up to the edge, the pressure would blow out the mold wall. This is assuming steel or aluminium molds. 3d printed molds would likely need even thicker walls to account for the voids in printing.

The one benefit would be if you were using or developing generative design in 3d printed molds, this would be a great test bed.

source - I work in the injection molding, 3dp, and CNC industry.

alvern··on Toyotas and Chevys Are Holding Up Better Than Most Luxury Brands
My 2006 Prius is at 388k. I've promised myself I wouldn't get another car until this one quits. But, it just won't die. I've also priced out getting an EV for my 42 mile commute but the ROI is not there compared to a used-paid for high mileage Prius.
alvern··on On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality
For the hackers out there, you can record CO2 with a K33 sensor. The [0] Livpi uses this chip.

EDIT: it appears the Livpi uses a K30 chip. The K33 [1] is the version sold on industrial sites.

[0] http://www.livpi.com/ [1] https://www.co2meter.com/products/k-33-icb-co2-sensor

alvern··on American Entrepreneurs Who Flocked to China Are Heading Home, Disillusioned
For example: 3D printers that are more amenable to 'short production runs' instead of just prototypes. Low cost / fast turnaround injection moulding. Quick turn around on smaller components.

This already exists in the North American market, I.E. Protolabs

Page 1 of 4Next →