Hacker News Reader

bruteon What every programmer needs to know about game networking (2010)

I found great joy in reading about Quake3's networking model [1]. It is build on top of the assumption that the network is unreliable: most of the packets will be dropped and those that make it are not in sequence.

[1] http://trac.bookofhook.com/bookofhook/trac.cgi/wiki/Quake3Ne...

bruteon Gravitricity

The efficency is said the be 80%, just like any other pumped storage system. It just uses considerably less space than a water reservoir (actually close to none, as the top of the cylinder remains untouched) and is scalable by adjusting the radius.

I guess the main problem is to keep the water confined (200bar of pressure) while keeping the mass movable. Maybe someday they build a small testing facility, so we know for sure.

bruteon Gravitricity

You just need more mass. Have a look at this concept: http://eduard-heindl.de/energy-storage/index-e.html (unfortunately the english version is very sparse, the german version has some more images and videos: http://eduard-heindl.de/energy-storage/ )

The idea is to cut a 1km diameter cylinder into the ground (solid rock), and then lift it up up to 500m by pumping water underneath it. The power stored can power a country for a day.

I am somewhat sceptical, but this guy is totally serious about it.

bruteon 0h h1 – A little logic game

With great power comes great responsibility.

bruteon 0h h1 – A little logic game

Rows 4 and 7 are identical

bruteon Show HN: PreTeX, a LaTeX preprocessor to make math typesetting easier

typo in Readme.md:

"Instead of writing $\displaymath \int_i^\infty$, just write d\int_i^\infty$"

should be d$, right?

bruteon Flat UI Colors

It always bothered me, that the colors of twm are so ugly.

Here is a recolored screenshot using the UI colors cited above: http://oi60.tinypic.com/140yiqr.jpg

Now it only needs some font aliasing and it is fit for a revival.

bruteon Shall we fork Debian?

The website could be replaced by a much shorter version simply stating "I dont like SystemD. -anonymous".

The author is essentially making a threat, that there will be a fork of Debian if the project does not give in to his demands. Then he states that he is totally not just speaking for himself, but for a much larger group, and in fact claims to have the majority on his side. I have a hard time evaluating the seriousness of these claims, as there is no intend to back up any of this.

As far as the arguments go, there is nothing new here. The concerns have been stated before, and have been heard, too.

bruteon Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds? (2007)

This would mean that on one hand (literally) you count the phalanxes (12), while on the other hand you use a completly different system and count your fingers (5). Why would you ever use 2 different counting systems? It seems that your argument is more in favor of base 25(=5 * 5) or base 144(=12 * 12).

bruteon Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds? (2007)

Leap seconds can be positive or negative (never happened) and are irregularly announced up to two times a year.

The wikipedia article on leap seconds[1] is worth reading and has this[2] great figure showing the variations of day length over the years due to various astronomical factors. It also shows how these small deviations slowly desync UT1 and UTC (red line), and that this issue cannot be solved by a linear scaling.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5b/De...

bruteon if (osName.startsWith("windows 9"))

Not only OSX but OSX 10.10

That are a lot of 10s.

bruteon Show HN: Gok – Webapps in Go the PHP way

In this particular example, they don't. They encourage you to define a Cookie struct, construct it with all the fields you know, pass it to the method with gok.SetCookie(Cookie{name: "blub", duration: 5000}) and the method should decide what to do based on the fields available

bruteon For German, Swiss Privacy Start-Ups, a Post-Snowden Boom

What the article does not mention is, that in Germany every email provider with more than 10.000 customers is by law (TKÜV) required to install technical equipment, that enables authorities to access all stored telecommunication data of a person put under surveillance. The access happens automatic and does not require further interaction with staff of the email provider.

It is even worse, as the same law extends to internet providers as well. Some people argue that this effectively is a government controlled man-in-the-middle infrastructure.

bruteon Show HN: Put “GIF” in front of any YouTube URL and hit enter

I wouldn't bet on it. http://pwnyoutube.com has been around for quite a while now. Although if I remember it right, youtube blocked some IPs associated with tools that let you download/convert videos, as these services violate the terms of use.

Btw: I find it nice that this tool supports https. pwnyoutube.com requires you to remove it manually, which makes it so much more inconvenient to use.

bruteon Paletton – Color Scheme Designer

HUSL was already mentioned, so I bring up HSP [1]. The idea is to adjust the lightness (the L in HSL) by something which is closer to the percieved luminescence.

Also I wonder if HSL will ever manage to replace HSB/HSV as the default choice for color pickers.

[1] http://alienryderflex.com/hsp.html

bruteon Online Color Challenge

Or try blendoku: http://www.blendoku.com/

bruteon “End-to-End incompatible with Chrome Update functionality”

In the case of the alleged steroid dealer, the feds seemed to compel Hushmail to exploit this hole, store the suspects’ secret passphrase or decryption key, decrypt their messages and hand them over.

http://www.wired.com/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/

Technically, they were forced to collect the key which they would not have stored otherwise, so this does not count as "had evidence in their possession"

bruteon ProtonMail: End-to-end encrypted email

Read the comments here[1] and have a guess how 'upfront' they were of the risks involved three weeks ago. Pay attention to the dates.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7757420

bruteon Replace TrueCrypt – Candidate alternatives

For TC we have this story: http://wroot.org/posts/daniel-dantas-hard-drive-encryption-w...

And for MS there is this story: http://www.geekwire.com/2013/report-microsoft-nsa/

This is of course no evidence for the (in)security of TC/Bitlocker, but I would call it indirect evidence, and certainly more than 'blind faith'.

bruteon Pass: Very minimal CLI password manager that follows Unix philosophy

Pass: The standard unix password manager 150 points by po 58 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495337

Still a very nice tool.

bruteon Show HN: Abbrase – password generation by abbreviated phrases

> "122079103" and "toldulbal" (tolerably dull ball) are equally hard to attack.

I believe this is only holds if the attacker has no further information on the password generation procedure. In the generated passwords, vocals are almost guaranteed to occur at least once in every triple. Also certain consonants have a higher probability to occur together, due to contraints of the english language. This should decrease entropy.

bruteon A new URL shortener

Blocking the flash plugin in FF(as I am confident many here do), results in a black "click to activate" box, which overlays the generated URL and effectively renders the service unusable.

Entering ycombinator.com yields "The url format is invalid.", which may be technically correct, but is not very user friendly. On the other hand other URLs like mailto:a@b.c or steam://run/212680 are accepted, I am undecided if one would want that.

bruteon Show HN: Fast and Extensible Parser for Markdown in PHP

Different markdown editors seem to be in disagreement how to parse the following: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/810ae1f7d52bcfffa1ef

If the second empty line marks the end of the list block, the indented html (code block) should preserve tags

bruteon Show HN: End-to-end encrypted email, based in Switzerland

http://www.wired.com/2012/08/wired_opinion_patrick_ball/all/ It's about cryptocat (secure chat) but the same principles apply. Note that cryptocat has switched to a browser addon-based design afterwards.

bruteon Show HN: End-to-end encrypted email, based in Switzerland

This is a browser addon, right? Is everything loaded locally? If no, what prevents you from putting up some javascript that transfers the decryption password (or the plain text) to you.

Sorry, didn't bother to download and look for the source code, to find out how the inner mechanics work. The website doesn't give much information either.