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avoid3d

86 karma · joined October 29, 2013

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avoid3d··on The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)
The OP is imagining a device with a “hollow core” of atmospheric pressure helium surrounded by a solid and continuous membrane.

Since this hollow core would be much larger than the crystalline structures in a metal would this not therefore be a very weak comparison?

avoid3d··on The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)
This relates to the difference between how a real gas and how an ideal gas behave in this scenario.

The difference in this situation will be very small in my opinion, broadly because the gas molecules in the atmosphere still have comparatively high mean free paths and therefore won’t interact with the “escaping” helium molecules.

avoid3d··on Mediocre Engineer's Guide to HTTPS
I work for an acquired startup that tried to solve this problem.

It’s been around 8 years and we’re up to 50 or so people. I’d say we are okay at it.

We haven’t gotten fundamentally better over time recently, it’s more like there is some asymptote of how much you can really tell with a certain amount of insight into the systems between source and destination.

The only real progress we’ve made has been integrating with more and more sources of information about the state of the network.

avoid3d··on Someone has been attempting to DDoS us for weeks and we do nothing
How are you arriving at that number?

60 seconds per minute 60 minutes per hour 24 hours per day 30 days per month ~2.59 million seconds per month

One billion requests into 2.59 million seconds is 386 requests per second.

avoid3d··on Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection
Very pedantic but I’d want to know. A watt is a unit of power, which means gigawatts per day is a rate of change of power.

If you want a unit of energy you need power multiplied by time not divided, so “gigawatt days” not “gigawatts per day”.

avoid3d··on Desmond Tutu, anti-apartheid icon, dies at 90
To compare apartheid to being asked to follow scientifically validated an internationally agreed protocols to not spread a disease to those around you, geesh.
avoid3d··on Desmond Tutu, anti-apartheid icon, dies at 90
I disagree with this comment. I don’t want to start a debate, just to give my experience and perspective.

I am a South African, I am white, just for transparency.

In my experience:

White people are still in a position of economic and social power such that the (unjust) assumptions made by an average person during apartheid are still mostly the same.

White people are stereotypically more educated, have more money, connections and are more trustworthy etc.

To say that white people are the subject of reverse racism while making any comparison to apartheid, where people where abducted, tortured, disappeared, forcefully relocated and removed from their land, is simply ignorant.

I make this post not to try and change your mind, but simply to give some representation to an alternate view point.

avoid3d··on IBM has built a digital rat brain that could power tomorrow’s smartphones
One reason that these nets are not there yet, is that they are sticking to the 'firing' analogue of natural brains. They are using binary output over time that averages out, a technique that has so far been much slower than neural networks with continuous output.
avoid3d··on IBM has built a digital rat brain that could power tomorrow’s smartphones
I imagine they meant kw, and that 20w is close enough to 1kw. (btw, I thought the human brain uses a lot more than 20w, maybe 20w in chemical signals, but a lot more in heat?)
avoid3d··on IBM has built a digital rat brain that could power tomorrow’s smartphones
While you are correct that the count of neurons is not the only thing the synthetic brain has to boast, merely saying 'wired like a rat brain' is not really much extra.

It does not speak to the complexity of the network. I interpreted that line as 'connected in the same topology' but immediately thought, yeah right, they definitely don't have the same 'branching factor' as a real rat brain. (not sure of the correct words here, but some real neurons have many thousands to millions of connections).

avoid3d··on The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation (2012)
Staitght up is also wrong if you want a circular orbit.
avoid3d··on Everything you need to know about the Shellshock Bash bug
Its a joke, eval(uate) is evil...
avoid3d··on Justin.tv has shut down
Given that the person stated that they are only consuming hundreds of gigabytes I think we can assume that they mean megabits not gagabits.
avoid3d··on Quantum gas goes below absolute zero
This is really on the edge if where I don't know what I'm talking about anymore but I would think not.

The forces holding atoms together and the energies associated with changing those forces are far larger than the amounts that are presented in this study.

avoid3d··on Quantum gas goes below absolute zero
The reason that negative temperatures are hard to explain is that the definition of temperature in the sense used by physicists is not very accessible.

It has to do with how much a certain property of a system (object) changes when you add a certain quantity of heat energy.

In certain edge cases adding energy makes this quantity change in the opposite to usual way and therefore the temperature is negative.

avoid3d··on The Meter: The Measure of a Man
To clarify: that sphere is not a 'standard' in a sense that it is going to definite a kilogram. It is a tool which is going to be used to measure the correct numbers to define the kilogram in terms of universal constants. In this sense it is very different from the 'bells' you refer to, and I think the way you stated the link was misleading.
avoid3d··on Minimal Perfect Hashing
I don't understand what you mean?

10 things to store, 1000 buckets to store in, less than 0.1 probability of a collision? That seams both not very impressive or even correct?

avoid3d··on Facebook was down
Perspective: 1 hours downtime a year is already better than 4 9s
avoid3d··on Authentication for Single Page Apps
This sounds like security through obscurity, made worse by the fact that it is probably difficult to guarantee that users who are shown the 'privileged' modules are somehow to be trusted.
avoid3d··on Authentication for Single Page Apps
I believe that you have a misunderstanding regarding 'what is happening here'.

This isn't 'client side authorisation' in the sense you are talking of.

Specifically it still relies on a /session route which only accepts valid authorization objects which can be though of as keys in a more 'traditional' 'server side authentication' approach.

avoid3d··on New Aluminum-Air Battery Powered Car Travels 1,800 Kilometers Without a Recharge
Note that these batteries wouod have to be replaced every time they are empty not 'once a year .
avoid3d··on IsoPlex: Popcorn time alternative maintained by Isohunt
Why do you think it's illegal?
avoid3d··on Dash – Beautiful instant offline docs for almost everything
Consider however that if we all bought off the app store, then while apple may take 30% of our payments, the author may benefit far more from the increased exposure due to the inherent popularity contest that is the app store.
avoid3d··on Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima
You lost 6 orders of magnitude to this IMHO:

5610 million km^3 = 5.61 * 10^3 * 10^6 km^3 = 5.61 * 10^9 km^3 = 5.61 * 10^9 * 10^9 m^3 = 5.61 * 10^18 m^3

But you said the resulting volume was = 5.61 * 10^12 m^3.

I think you forgot that it was 5610 million km^3.

avoid3d··on Show HN: WordPass – password generator giving over 90 bits of entropy
I don't like calling non-uniform distributions 'predictable'.

Think of it like this: A coin which produces heads 99/100 times is not predictable, since you cannot predict when the next tails is coming, you just know that they are rarer.

As for the distance to the next prime thing, you are just plain wrong, in a sense that he is talking about a seeded pnrg, i.e the starting prime is a seed and you don't get to know which it is, out of all integers...

avoid3d··on Scammed
My understanding is that the bad grammar lets them filler out the non gullible earlier in the funnel.
avoid3d··on Ask HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?
In the graphic on the home page:

It erks me that different words 'stalkers' and 'stalking' are used to refer to the two parts of the graph, when there is no distinction between them.

Confused me that's all :)

avoid3d··on The $100,000 Battery That Could Help Hotels Save Bundles of Money
That still feels iffy to me. Do you agree that lead acid would be the better choice if it was vastly less expensive?

Remember that the deep cycle thing can be counteracted by installing twice the number of batteries.

I think that maybe power density (as opposed to energy density) is the problem here anyway, rendering the discharge depth argument moot.

avoid3d··on Toyota's firmware: Bad design and its consequences
Hello, I signed up specifically to argue with you (be proud).

I think that may have been an overzealous algorithm giving the car a blip of throttle to stop it from stalling when it is idling.

An engine still needs fuel and air to run when even when there is no load on it and this is controlled by a computer. This computer targets some rpm for idling. If the rpm drops substantially low, due to for example a 'mechanical' glitch like dodgy fuel, then the computer may over compensate with too much throttle, causing the revving you experienced.

:)