Hacker News Reader

intpxon Million Times Million

Oh thanks for completely breaking my numeracy. Gotta relearn maths real quick

intpxon Ask HN: Nvidia pretended their robot was not remote controlled – why?

RC car remote control != semi-autonomous robot remote control

intpxon Home Unschooling

Tl;dr people, especially kids, who are supported in chasing their curiosity will learn things

intpxon Why do War Thunder players leak classified information? [video]

Ah yes. Dullingshires law

intpxon DeepSeek could represent Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's worst nightmare

Except there has yet to be a breakthrough on anything that isn’t Nvidia, using anything that isn’t cuda/nccl etc

That day is certainly coming, but today is not that day

intpxon DeepSeek could represent Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's worst nightmare

You can’t buy the gpus individually, and even if you can on a secondary market, you can’t use them without the baseboard, and you can’t use the baseboard without a compatible chassis, and a compatible chassis is full of CPUs, system memory etc. on top of that, you need a fabric. Even if you cheap out and go RoCE over IB it’s still 400gbs hcas, optics and switches

Yea, a node in a cluster costs as much as an American house. Maybe not on its own, but to make it useful for large scale training, even under the new math of deepseek, it costs as much as a house.

intpxon NFL tells New England Patriots to shut down Bluesky account

So like being on twitter with the pederasts, crypto scammers and nazis is good for the brand?

intpxon Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

intpxon SFPD refuses to say where they've placed 400 automated license plate readers

they are probably on the wide open internet with hardcoded creds too. https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/ics-advisories/icsa-24-165-...

intpxon Houthis knock out underwater cables linking Europe to Asia

Or they could build resilience because shit happens

intpxon A800 40GB Active Graphics Card

Announced awhile ago but available now.

intpxon Simulate an Ubuntu-like VM inside macOS

Multipass is pretty clutch for trivial VMs on MacOs for sure. I use it for a bunch of ssh jump boxes running vpns to different sites. The macOS build does not support custom images (lest not without [some truly insane hacks](https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1260#issuecomm...) , which doesn’t really matter for what I use it for but it is kind of a bummer. If you need something with a little more grunt but don’t want to go full blown with writing your own QEMU tooling or fussing with something like UTM or Parallels, [quickemu](https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu) is a really nice qemu wrapper with sane defaults that can expose a whole lot of power if you need it.

intpxon Spotify's push into audiobooks sparks concern among authors

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/13/spotify-is-acquiring-sonan...

Before the acquisition, sonatics tech looked pretty cool. https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/13/spotify-is-acquiring-sonan...

that being said-- NOT A FAN. i want books read by human people who are good at reading to me. I dont want teddy ruxpin, i want my dad!

intpxon Show HN: New visual language for teaching kids to code

This is pretty cool, The UI is a little tough-- deleting code blocks is clunky. its also hard to break out of the type modals there should also be some kind on context aware help dialogue to tell you what operator/type you have active is/does

intpxon ICE faces heat after agents install apps, VPNs on official phones

i.e. they are really, really lazy

As of two years ago when i dumped fedspace, the agency i was tied to had the phones legit mdm locked down and usage was actively monitored. It sucked so hard that phone was effectively unusable, but when the site youre at makes you leave all personal electronics outside the fence, its better than nothing.

intpxon Making Bulletproof Wood [video]

my back of the napkin math only puts this around the same stopping power as plywood of similar thickness. Sand bags work a lot better and are a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to produce

intpxon ESP32 Wemos D1 Mini – Sprinkler Controller Open Source

Apart from the fact that sprinkler systems are almost always 24VAC and every commercial sprinkler controller I have ever used or investigated use optocouplers/fets/triacs I don’t really have a good reason to get irritated by homebrew designs that use relays, but I do get irritated. I think the irritation comes from wanting to really learn-by-copying how to design these circuits and many hours searching for exemplars and reading datasheets left me pretty confounded (though most of this was during the great supply chain squeeze so I couldn’t find the right combos of triacs and optocouplers ins stock and the datasheets led me to believe that subbing out a non zero cross would probably be a problem, or not being able to find logic level triacs)

intpxon ESP32 Wemos D1 Mini – Sprinkler Controller Open Source

I think there is more to it than that— AC lets you move current over longer wires without voltage drop or having to use really thick wire. This is why Tesla triumphed over Edison. Honestly, there are a ton of applications that could benefit from low voltage AC that don’t leverage it because DC is king in on the test bench and that inertia creates the need for klunky workarounds to overcome its deficiencies in large, long series circuits.

intpxon Bruce Schneier: On the Cybersecurity Jobs Shortage

> There's also a huge industry around certification and compliance that adds almost no value. I've never known any experienced security professional who places any value in CISSP, CEH, etc. (In fact they're often a negative indicator of competence). They're the security equivalent of a 6-week coding bootcamp. Mostly just a cash grab.

Preach. The number of times I have had to explain basic computer to a cissp is larger than I’d like to admit.

intpxon 32“ E Ink screen that displays daily newspapers on your wall (2021)

It’s been 16 years since the Kindle was released and I am super bummed that e-ink/e-paper is still so friggin expensive and esoteric.

intpxon YOLOv7: Trainable Bag-of-Freebies

They call it ‘Tasks’

https://huggingface.co/tasks

intpxon Ask HN: Why isn't there any standard for machine readable CV's?

For my most recent move, I didn't even submit a CV, resume, or cover letter. My (very sparse) LinkedIn profile was enough to get a callback and interview. I'm no huge fan of LinkedIn, but I like the idea that a digital portfolio of some sort can replace antiquated methods of documenting skills and experience. I'd love to see the day when folks are landing jobs based primarily on their commit histories.

intpxon Ask HN: Stuck as a CS Major. Is there a way out?

Aerospace contractors hire CS to do physics modeling and simulation. Go to a place that will pay for your masters in something you’re interested in and pivot to science

intpxon Nvidia Omniverse

Ok, here's what I think this is.

There are tons of fields that have high demand for 3d simulation environments. To date, they have either had to build one from the ground up, or leverage (and pay for) a game engine. Game engines have some inherent problems in these domains because they do not solve for the same kinds of problems-- they solve for game physics and pretty environments. They also can make it really to translate what I'll call 'CAD' models to a 3d space while maintaining strict dimensional accuracy. I have no idea if Omniverse actually solves for this kind of application, but it looks like it might attempt to create a 3d environment much more fine grained control over physics and representational accuracy.

intpxon Why are semi trucks in the US and Europe so different? (2018)

and all of the owner/operators who specifically want pre year 2000 rigs so they don't have to have an ELD.

intpxon Why Not Having a CS Degree Is Awesome (2019)

I'm in the same boat, but didn't come to tech until the mid 2000s, mostly on the operations side. I think what I'm missing (or had to learn on my own) from not having a CS degree is all of the table stakes stuff-- the theory. Being a good programmer is not about learning the syntax of a language, its about algorithms, data structures, logic, computational complexity theory etc etc etc. Boot camps, as author endorses, teach you how to source a whole bunch of libraries you don't understand and know nothing about, save the one feature you've been taught to source it for. This makes for bad, unscalable, insecure and unmaintainable code. (disclaimer-- many libraries and frameworks are fantastic and make it possible and reasonable to write code that is maintainable, scalable and secure. There are also some languages where its really easy to string a bunch of really crappy libraries together and get something that 'works') I'm in the position now where I am trying to enumerate all of my known unknowns and learn dive into so I can be the kind of programmer who can actually write good, performant, scalable code, more or less from the ground up.

intpxon The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

I recently went through a round of interviews for a job where strong communication skills are vital. One interview was just me responding to simulated emails in a shared google doc so the interviewer could see me work through the responses. In addition to witnessing my real time edits, I guess they also had the benefit of a higher level of confidence that the product was my actual work effort.

intpxon Apple removes Python 2.7 in macOS 12.3 beta

Bingo. This falls under the scope of support for an enterprise linux company-- orgs pay them to keep stuff backwards compatible long after the upstream deprecates it. Apple is decidedly not an enterprise support organization. RHEL also doesn't want you using system python as your dev python. RHEL 8 uses 'platform-python' for the bits the system needs and if you install 3.6, they share the common bits If your using a mac as a dev box, and really need python 2.7, you still have options.

intpxon HTTP Toolkit

Is there an internet law for when you spend weeks looking for a framework or library to solve a problem and it only reveals itself after your organization makes a really bad choice to do something else? I have been looking for exactly this kind of local proxy to dynamically hack headers and dynamically spoof responses for an internal app. This would have been the perfect starting place...

intpxon A submarine's weakness: its software?

Just a guess, but stealth is one of the primary design requirements even passive coils are RF devices.