Hacker News Reader

galvanon My BC-250 Journey (With 40 CUs Unlocked)

Peeling the center fins of the heatsink (takes a few hours of patience with needle nose pliers/medical forceps) and zip-tieing a Arctic P12 Pro (or any other 120mm high static pressure fan) to it works pretty well. Note that you should probably take the heatsink off while doing this to prevent metal shards from shorting out your board (removing the heatsink might necessitate redoing the thermal pads/putty).

galvanon The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

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

galvanon Why is it so hard to build an airport?

Yes, TPE in Taiwan has the same setup. At Taipei Main Station in the city center, there are airline checkin kiosks and bag drops. You take the train to the airport, and your bags are ingested into the baggage system for you.

https://www.tymetro.com.tw/tymetro-new/en/_pages/checkin/ind...

galvanon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2023)

  Location: SF Bay Area
  Remote: Preferred
  Willing to relocate: Within the west coast
  Technologies: Kotlin, Java, Python, Scala, Bash, SQL, AWS, Kubernetes
  Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/wubrandon also via email request
  Email: bwu at-symbol berkeley dot edu

Senior engineer with 7 years of experience looking for a backend or generalist role. I have experience architecting and bringing to production scalable services integrated in microservice architectures. Interested in product and integrations work. Motivated learner and always open to picking up new tech.

galvanon Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge

Random digression, but if you're having problems with GPS reception on your S3, try tightening all the screws on the back of the device with an eyeglasses screwdriver or similar. The GPS antenna(e) are in the screwed-on backplate and connected via sprung contacts to the mainboard, so if the screws aren't tight, it won't make a solid connection. You can also try removing the backplate and (gently) prying up the spring contacts at the bottom of the motherboard, and then cleaning both them and the contacts on the backplate with isopropyl alcohol. I bought my S3 used and couldn't get a single GPS fix, but after tightening the (noticeably loose) screws, it now happens in a few seconds.

galvanon Lessons learned with 3D Touch

I don't think the OC was referring to multitouch, but rather how resistive touchscreens can measure different levels of pressure applied to them. For example, I have a Nokia N900 with a resistive touchscreen that I can draw with, pressing harder for a thick stroke and lightly for a thin one.

galvanon Speed Cameras and the City

They are already (in certain states) via the point system.[0] Getting a point tells your insurance company, and your premiums skyrocket. Insurance companies also pull your driving record periodically, and if you've had a ticket, the same thing happens.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_system_%28driving%29#Nort...

galvanon Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

What if you manually go to the GApps URL? (https://mail.google.com/a/your.school.mail.domain.here) I assume that's what your school's website is probably linking to, but it's worth a shot.

galvanon Yik Yak Hack

Actually, yes! *For enterprise-grade APs generally deployed at university campuses...[0] Moreover, such APs usually have methods to prevent communication between peers on the same wireless network.

[0] http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Mo...

galvanon TXT Record XSS

Ah, iodine. I've used it in airports, hotels, cafes - it's great. The only drawback is that it's slower than dialup and latency is off the charts. But when you're stuck on a cruise ship and internet access is $8 a minute, being able to ssh somewhere and browse the web and check your mail very slowly through links is worth it.

galvanon Show HN: Dumbphone – Turn your smartphone into a dumbphone

Google Voice? Sure it'd require two phone plans, but I guess it's either that or swapping SIM cards around.

galvanon Show HN: Get a list of your Amazon purchases and see what you can sell them for

It gets worse: attackers don't even need the paper invoices - at least in 2012, they were social engineering them directly out of Amazon CSRs [0].

[0] http://www.htmlist.com/rants/two-for-one-amazon-coms-sociall...

galvanon Cylinders in Spheres

I thought that at first, but the length of the hole is dependent on the width of the hole. The wider the hole, the shorter, because wider holes remove bigger caps.

With a sufficiently wide hole, you could indeed drill a 6" hole through a spherical Earth, it'd just look more like a thin ring the diameter of the Earth than a sphere.

galvanon The Joy of Typing

That's a bit different. Court stenographers, along with the people who do real-time TV captions, use specialized chording keyboards (stenographs, they look like this [0]) that allow them to type words or even whole phrases with a single or just a few strokes. That's how they're fast - you can only go so far typing one letter at a time.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/AgKnqWx.jpg

galvanon Does Deep Learning Have Deep Flaws?

In the linked paper [0], they actually tested that point: after applying Gaussian noise to samples, the model could still recognize them half the time[1], despite being nearly unreadable (to me).

[0] http://cs.nyu.edu/~zaremba/docs/understanding.pdf [1] http://puu.sh/9B4eG/1e9f7eb56b.png

galvanon My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment

Yup, that's the trick. I stopped using shampoo last year - my hair was greasy as all hell for around a month, then one day I noticed that it just stopped. Now, I just go into the shower and scrub thoroughly with hot water instead of shampoo. And it takes a couple days without showering for my hair to get oily and smelly now, instead of just one.

Oddly enough, my dandruff has stayed completely unaffected (and possibly gotten worse)...

Still use a plain bar soap on my body though, can't get past the self-stigma of the thought of only rinsing down there...

galvanon Ask HN: Screenshot Saturday

This is fantastic. Love the art style! Looks like I'm going to be spending the next few hours reading through this now...

galvanon Show HN: Untrusted, a JavaScript adventure game you play by modifying its source

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/486caea6cc41f13dca76

The robot goes down unless its x-coordinate is between 20 and 33, in which case it goes up. Kinda cheesy, but it works...

galvanon Ford Exec: 'We Know Everyone Who Breaks the Law' Thanks To Our GPS In Your Car

The traffic analysis case seems to be a lot like the way Google aggregates smartphone GPS data to do real-time traffic for Google Maps [0] [0] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/bright-side-of-sittin...

galvanon Lightpack – Ambient backlight for your displays

There's other versions [0] of the same idea that uses a Raspberry Pi and a USB video grabber to do the same thing with any HDMI signal (you only need an HDMI splitter and an HDMI to composite adapter).

[0] https://github.com/gkaindl/ambi-tv

galvanon Lightpack – Ambient backlight for your displays

I have the DIY version [0] of this on the back of my monitor right now, and the effect is quite nice, especially when playing games. The total DIY cost was $30 in components, namely a Teensy 2.0 microcontroller and a WS2801 RGB pixel string from eBay (unfortunately, I don't have nice mounting hardware so they're just stuck in cardboard strips).

[0] http://learn.adafruit.com/adalight-diy-ambient-tv-lighting/o...