Hacker News Reader

cafon OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems

> It's misaligned because everyone has this obsession with putting agents in poorly put together, security-theatre sandboxes, we've inadvertently trained a bunch of sandbox escape artists.

Almost sounds analogous to ineffective use of antibiotics leading to resistant strains of bacteria.

cafon A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines

[We can broadly trust the US government] not to promote broken encryption to its own agencies.

cafon Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

The phrase "incandescent with rage" comes to mind when reading that order. A couple of choice quotes:

To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath.

This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction.

cafon Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

This capability is called "Trip To House Load".

cafon Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

This is potentially the first real black start of a grid with high renewable (solar/wind) penetration that I am aware of.

The South Australia System Black in 2016 would count - SA already had high wind and rooftop solar penetration back then. There's a detailed report here if you're interested:

https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Market...

cafon Ham radio operators receive signals from Voyager 1 on Dwingeloo telescope

You may be thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap

cafon HAM radio operators receive signals from Voyager 1 on Dwingeloo telescope

It's only just re-opened to visitors after an extended closure that began in the COVID times!

cafon A transformer supply crisis bottlenecks energy projects

I think about $25, twice that in the Muppets Christmas Carol because they doubled the amount he offers for some reason.

cafon A transformer supply crisis bottlenecks energy projects

I did actually do this the other day, to get some idea of how much Scrooge is offering to pay the boy in the street to go and buy the turkey for him at the end of A Christmas Carol.

cafon A pretty visualisation of the European power grid (2022)

Since your supply is alternating current, the electrons aren't net moving at all.

The question isn't even well-formed. It's like playing tug-of-war and asking exactly which player on the other team you're pulling against.

cafon The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”

They don't all produce separated plutonium, this also includes those that produce enriched uranium, which is also fissile.

The three reasons to produce fissile material are weapons, non-explosive military uses and civilian power reactors. Even many of the weapons states aren't producing new fissile material for weapons these days, they have more than enough.

cafon The meme-ification of the "Demon Core"

Fifteen nations that currently do so, if anyone is interested: Russia, United States, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, China, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, India, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, and North Korea.

cafon The meme-ification of the "Demon Core"

The terrible consequences are definitely an implied part of the meme, otherwise it's just someone messing about with some pieces of metal and screwdriver and isn't funny at all.

cafon Mapping the Ionosphere with Phones

The existing ground-station ionosphere data mentioned has been used to detect missile launches: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1216884/detecting-mi...

I imagine you could do the same thing with much better coverage using this distributed ionosphere monitoring method.

cafon The history of Unix's ioctl and signal about window sizes

The nomenclature "hanging up" a terminal even dates back to pulse-dialling landline phones where the receiver was physically hung up on a hook to activate a switch that opened the circuit and ended the call.

cafon The history of Unix's ioctl and signal about window sizes

The ioctl works remotely as well, because ssh sends window size messages across the channel.

cafon How do merging supermassive black holes pass the final parsec?

A rogue star having a close interaction with our solar system would be catastrophic enough, and we know there's lots of those in our galaxy.

cafon Singapore OKs 4,300km subsea cable for importing electricity from Australia

The current operating requirements in South Australia mandate around 80MW of gas generation for system strength reasons.

So even on last Saturday when "operational demand" in South Australia reached the ballpark of -200MW (that is, rooftop solar generation was exceeding the demand in the state by 200MW), there was still 80MW of gas in the mix. (The excess was being exported to Victoria).

cafon Singapore OKs 4,300km subsea cable for importing electricity from Australia

There are 5 different businesses that own and operate the distribution network in different parts of Melbourne (AusNet, Jemena, Citipower, Powercor and United Energy).

AusNet owns & maintains the transmission network in Victoria, but it is under the operational control of AEMO.

Dispatch of generation and FCAS instructions is NEM-wide and the responsibility of AEMO.

cafon Singapore OKs 4,300km subsea cable for importing electricity from Australia

Load shedding is quite rare, I believe the only instance recently in Melbourne was on the 13th of February when several transmission towers carrying the Moorabool-Sydneham 500kV circuits were destroyed in the severe storms that day, and load-shedding was required to keep the system in a secure state.

Outages are almost always due to faults in the local distribution network.

cafon First images from Euclid are in

You could think of it in the sense of "saving money" - if you're a notorious spendthrift, the money hasn't actually disappeared, but it's of no use to you anymore.

cafon UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius

The article posts one reason why they'd give it up: they feel the ongoing issue of the Chagos Islands is hurting their ability to get diplomatic support in other international matters that are far more important to them.

cafon Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

Australia: <puppet looking sideways meme>

cafon Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

The explosive scanning is the thing where they pull some people out of line and run a wand over you and your gear, then put it into a machine and wait a few seconds for the analysis.

cafon Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

I think if both sides of the equation more consistently approached things in a reasonable manner then both sides would be better off.

Replace "reasonable" with "trusting" and this is literally a restatement of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

cafon The magic of DC-DC voltage conversion (2023)

Yes, it's called a charge pump.

There's one specific sub-type called a Cockroft-Walton voltage amplifier.

cafon PC Floppy Copy Protection: Softguard Superlok

It's hard to believe this was just incompetence - Sierra games were technically impressive for the time, making great use of graphics and sound. But what other explanation is there? If Sierra's goal was simply to prevent casual copying, they didn't have to bother with licensing Superlok at all, a simple bad CRC on one sector would have sufficed. It's all very odd.

Probably the simplest explanation is that management decreed that Superlok was to be used, and the developer tasked with it complied in the most minimal manner possible.

cafon PC Floppy Copy Protection: Softguard Superlok

"Lemmings cracked by Fabulous Furlough" will occupy memory synapses for the rest of my life.

cafon Linux Pipes Are Slow

It is, at least on Linux for ordinary pipe(2) pipes.

I just wrote up a test to be sure: in the process with the read side, set it to non-blocking with fcntl(p, F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK) then go to sleep for a long period. Dump a bunch of data into the writing side with the other process: the write() call blocks once the pipe is full as you would expect.

cafon Linux Pipes Are Slow

Presumably ringbuffer_wait() can also be signalled through making it 'readable' in poll()?