Hacker News Reader

knuteon Akamai Edge DNS was down

I believe EasyDNS can automatically push DNS settings to Route53 to host DNS in AWS. Doesn't protect you from fat-fingering a change, but you should be resilient to either EasyDNS or Route53 going down.

https://kb.easydns.com/knowledge/easyroute53/

knuteon Advanced console.log Tips and Tricks (2020)

`copy(JSON.stringify(foo))` is something I use all the time for pulling large objects into a text editor for easy browsing and searching.

knuteon No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

Even near-lightspeed travel (say, >0.2C) would be leaps and bounds beyond what we know how to do at this point.

knuteon Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers

I was also surprised that Debian was not the list of distributions they tried. That would be the first one I would reach for in this situation, and indeed is running fine for me on a VPC 256MB of RAM (although it is a 64bit CPU).

knuteon A Lock Picking Game Changer [video]

There was a while in the 90s/00s when code only required wood sheathing on the corners, and elsewhere you could have just insulating foam sheathing. So if you had vinyl siding, someone could pretty easily break into your house with just box cutters.

knuteon Union's evidence in Amazon vote 'could be grounds for overturning election'

I think it's important to remember that Sam Walton died in 1992, and the Walmart of today has very little in common with the Wal-Mart of 1992.

knuteon Monitoring a high risk conjunction between two large defunct objects in LEO

Drag is enough of an issue for the ISS that they actually rotate the solar panels to reduce drag when they're not in sunlight, which saves them ~1000kg of propellant per year.

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

knuteon Honda quits F1, invests in carbon-free tech instead

Also because the F1 audience is strongly concentrated in Europe, where Honda's market share is miniscule. Contrasted with Indycar, which is US-based, where Honda has a much larger presence.

knuteon I no longer build software

In the early 1990s and early 2000s web development was a nightmare. Having to test not just in different browsers, but different versions of different browsers, because they had substantially different behaviors. There was no "Inspect element", JavaScript debuggers were entirely absent or incredibly crude. Getting a decent looking web page to render and function correctly across all the different browsers you supported was a real achievement. You spent most of your time fighting browsers, not making actual progress.

knuteon AI slays top F-16 pilot in DARPA dogfight simulation

These are large aircraft (though the F-16 is significantly smaller than an F-22) but the pilot + ejection seat + airtight pressurized compartment + life support systems + displays and controls really starts to add up in both the mass and volume budgets.

But the pilot requires more design compromises. The requirement to have a large canopy protruding from the fuselage for maximum visibility is a challenge to both building a stealthy aircraft and aerodynamics.

Also, currently the pilot and their circulatory system keeps aircraft from turning at more than ~9G (and then only for brief periods of time). Without a pilot, it would be possible to build aircraft with stunning maneuverability.

knuteon How to Create a Software Engineer Resume Hiring Managers Will Love

One thing that's not on here: Proofread your resume. Have a friend look over it for you. Spell things correctly. I don't care if you use "JavaScript" or "Javascript" but pick one and stick with it. If you're a software engineer, the ability to type and attention to detail are important so show it in your resume. The number of resumes I've seen with glaring mistakes is too damn high.

knuteon Virtual tour of the tomb of Pharaoh Ramses VI

There are several linked from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities' Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/tourismandantiq

knuteon How a nuclear submarine officer learned to live in tight quarters

Meaning on station, performing a task, not just on patrol and free to take a break to come into port.

knuteon Hardware Microphone Disconnect in Mac and iPad

I once had a laptop with a manual switch for the wifi. Its sole purpose, as far as I could tell, was to get accidentally bumped and cause me to waste time figuring out why wifi wasn't working.

knuteon Hardware Microphone Disconnect in Mac and iPad

In my office I run lid closed because I have 3 nice large monitors and I don't really have room for a fourth. It's nicer to have three displays that match in size and resolution than 2+1 that doesn't.

knuteon Passenger airlines start shifting idled planes into freight business

I have also heard the Boeing believed that supersonic airplanes would become de rigeuer for passenger travel within 10 years or so, so they made the 747 freight-capable so they wouldn't be completely worthless in the future.

knuteon Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date

In my experience, the OS _does_ handle that automatically. If the app isn't verifying it, it's because they went out of their way to disable certificate validation.

Which is alarming.

knuteon Why Do American Houses Have So Many Bathrooms?

Was your sister in Pittsburgh? It's a thing there.

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

knuteon Detroit's salt mine: City beneath the city

> I have no idea how they were kept from rusting immediately.

Rust isn't a huge problem because the environment is very dry. Salt doesn't cause rust, it just makes it worse.

knuteon Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

easyDNS is pretty good.

knuteon California car burglaries are at crisis levels

Based on the anecdote in the story, you should always break the window without trying the door, because if you're on video trying and failing to open the door, that's evidence the door was locked and they can prosecute you.

Talk about perverse incentives.

knuteon Pokemon Sword and Shield Are Crashing Roku Devices

When the first-gen iPhone was released, they could break certain wireless networks built on Cisco hardware.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/07/21/1212217/duke-wi...

knuteon Sunsetting Mercurial Support in Bitbucket

https://github.com/enterprise

GitHub has offered an onprem server for some time now.

knuteon Blackbird SR-71 Flight Manual (2010)

There are faster air-breathing aircraft (e.g. [0]), but none of them are manned because with modern technology there's no need to put a person in them, and the people funding these developments aren't interested in spending lots of money just to chase records.

There's also the outside possibility that faster manned aircraft exist, but remain classified [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-51_Waverider [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(aircraft)

knuteon Multiple Boeing 787s in China experienced GPS 20 years rollover issue

Sometimes, perversely, important systems are the _least_ likely to be updated. Operators require extensive testing before widespread application of the updates, which takes time.

knuteon States should ban contracts barring employees from seeking higher pay at a rival

Just because you didn't have to sign a non-compete doesn't mean there wasn't shady business going on. What the article is talking about is franchisees signing agreements not to hire employees from other franchisees in the same brand. So if a new McDonald's opened up across town with higher pay, they would not have been able to hire you.

Also there are (or at least were) fast food restaurants making their employees sign non competes. Jimmy Johns had their sandwich makers on noncompetes until 2016 [0].

0: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-drops-non-compet...

knuteon Space station leak caused by drill, not meteorite

Also I believe the astronauts used epoxy to glue a patch over the hole, instead of just filling the hole with glue/epoxy, so the current solution should be much more structurally sound.

knuteon Russia tries more precise technology to block Telegram messenger

I obviously don't know how they're actually doing it, but you can perform all kinds of analysis on traffic even when it's encrypted. You can look at the distribution of packet size, the time distribution of packets, you can analyze who is sending packets to whom. Traffic analysis like this has been a field of study since at least World War I. [0]

If you want to find Telegram traffic, you're probably looking at fairly small packets, often sent in bursts. If you're observing the sender and the receiver, you might be able to correlate the the outgoing messages from one user with the corresponding incoming messages of another user.

Of course, there are corresponding countermeasures Telegram could take: pad messages, combine messages, split messages, introduce random delays, distribute messages among a number of different endpoints. It's an endless game of cat and mouse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis

knuteon Russian ALFA Class interceptor submarine

"Max depth" is kind of a nebulous concept though. There's the "test depth" which is as deep as they're willing to test the submarine. There's the maximum operational depth, which is some lesser depth that keeps a safety margin over the test depth. Then there's the "crush depth", which is the depth at which the submarine will actually fail, and is hopefully substantially deeper than the test depth.

knuteon Surgeons urge people to throw out bristle BBQ brushes (2016)

Grill stones: https://smile.amazon.com/Grillstone-Grill-Cleaning-Refill-Pa...