Hacker News Reader

monopolemagneton Ken Taylor, Legendary Canadian Diplomat, Dies at 81

In America, pernicious, thin-skinned, militant P.C. is widespread. Seinfeld no longer plays American colleges because of it and Bill Mahar opines often as well.

In too many "retail" universities, there needs to be more fracturing of groupthink and expanding of thought and expression, not bikeshedding on edge-case, perceived "offense" to shout down a well-meaning and -intentioned joke.

monopolemagneton Ken Taylor, Legendary Canadian Diplomat, Dies at 81

Sad loss, one of the good ones.

monopolemagneton Secret Code in Color Printers Lets Government Track You (2005)

This has been known for over a decade.

http://seeingyellow.com/

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

Anything printed on most (but not all) color printer can be traced back to the printer on which it was printed (serial number) and often date stamp as well.

https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...

Furthermore, most image editing programs and many scanners and copiers often refuse to capture currency because of microprinted circles.

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/photoshop-and-curr...

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf

http://www.rulesforuse.org/pub/index.php?lang=en

(note: official US currency images have link-rotted away)

monopolemagneton We’re not as selfish as we think we are

Wealth brings power, power brings entitlement.

Data: Stanford prison and the rigged Monopoly / pretzels experiments.

Qualitatively:

- Dbag taking up the entire level ramp in the parking garage with his Tesla so no one else can pass in the opposite direction.

- Folks allergic to using turn signals, wasting everyone else's time and jeopardizing safety.

- Basically empty winter holiday collection containers in tech areas. (Stingy fuckers.)

- Could bitch on and on, but it's banally common in built-up areas.

monopolemagneton Theranos Dials Back Lab Tests at FDA’s Behest

Investments in companies mostly make money evaporate as a standard practice.

Large-scale investors gravitate towards big risk/big reward ventures which require significant capital because it's saves having to make a zillion angel-scale deals. Plus, it seems sexier with extra-awesome brownie points to go after something which may be r/evolutionary.

PS: Color was a snausage clusterfuck of dbag, hubris behaviors that ruined the team (and the venture). Hopefully, that elicited a corrective learning experience.

monopolemagneton Stanford, Michael Bloomberg Now Back Every Y Combinator Startup

Budget and Auxiliaries alum here.

B&A is a boring-sounding organization which is the primary income sheet profit-center, which rakes in slightly more than tuition; SMC is balance sheet (aka investment) management.

Stanford is unlike most other universities in the fact that there is no pretense of firewalling business opportunity development from academic research. I think this pushes away some pure-research, money-is-evil people and attracts more entrepreneurial folks.

monopolemagneton Racial Profiling via Nextdoor.com

People whom get outside and actually examined "suspicious behavior" may be shocked to find normal, harmless people and that it was their own hobgoblins of their minds criminalizing people based on nothing more than their own fears, ignorance and prejudices, probably from watching too much TV and Hollywood movies rather than experiencing the real world.

monopolemagneton Simplifying the Page Security Icon in Chrome

Wow, this is incredibly stupid: conflating http and https with minor errors. It should show half a lock icon and half of a page icon, diagonally-split to indicate mixed/unsecured content. Globbing the two together creates false comfort and hides problems.

monopolemagneton The Carbon3D printer pulls complex shapes out of a dish of plastic

Read the article: looks like a light-curing printer, which prints 2 dimensions at a time instead of 1.

monopolemagneton The Inside Story Behind MS08-067

What kind of NT drivers (USB, Storage, what)? What kind of Linux kernel modules?

I've worked on storage drivers for Linux (2.6), Mac (10.6+ - 10.8) and Windows.

What like Nt vs Zw? Are you fucking serious? Do I need a badge and certification from you too, your majesty? You haven't proven you've done shit either, but it doesn't matter.

You don't have experience with xnu kexts (which make much more sense, at least more so than the Linux model), so I don't see how you can claim, broad pseudo-expert "opinion" on something you know nothing about.

Regardless, these three approaches are still irrelevant because they're critically flawed: granting transfinite trust to the kernel driver developer to not fuck up. A real microkernel model, only a process would likely crash. QNX runs on billions of devices, including now BlackBerry 10 since they acquired it: game, set, match.

That's the boat you've missed trying to go off into the weeds and make it a personal attack, because you have nothing.

monopolemagneton The Carbon3D printer pulls complex shapes out of a dish of plastic

The two current biggest issues with thermoplastic 3D printers are:

- electricity usage: heating a baseplate, feed head and mechanical effort of moving a massive apparatus bazillion^3 times.

- speed (or lack thereof) of moving one or two heads those bz^3 times to get anything made

We're still in the "horse-and-buggy"-days of distributed manufacturing, so one approach or another will eventually find something scalable, Edison-style. More inventions and approaches are definitely a good-thing.

monopolemagneton 90% of People Don't Know How to Use Ctrl+F (2011)

It's the same principle, I tried it.

KeyCue lets you perform the action by interacting with the semi-transparent HUD and has themes to make adjustments. 20 € is crazy high for modern app pricing, definitely not at an optimal supply-demand point.

Here's the zillions of options, which vary widely in usefulness:

http://content.screencast.com/users/xzxzxzxx/folders/Jing/me...

Plus, you're buying support and sustainability (unless someone were to torrent it, which risks malware and reduces support & sustainability).

Cheat is very limited. It won't show modifier-only keys as KeyCue does, and it won't even let me take a screenshot of it (because that involves Shift).

Minimal and free, or expensive, pretty with features: pick one. ;)

monopolemagneton 90% of People Don't Know How to Use Ctrl+F (2011)

A designer failed if help is needed. usually holds for relatively-straightforward apps and real-world designs.

The issue where clear, succinct documentation is needed is complicated, enterprise applications which have expert interfaces.

monopolemagneton 90% of People Don't Know How to Use Ctrl+F (2011)

Or hold Command (⌘) if they have a Mac and KeyCue.

(It uses the accessibility information for the visually-impaired to construct an exhaustive list of every possible key-binding in the current application context. Another example of many of designing for accessibility paying dividends for beneficial, unintended uses.)

Screenshot: http://content.screencast.com/users/xzxzxzxx/folders/Jing/me...

KeyCue: http://www.ergonis.com/products/keycue/

monopolemagneton Show HN: Cancel your Comcast in 5 minutes

Visa to China sounds like a winner: Never had to do that myself, but it seems arcane, shady magic that some friends from Hong Kong know how to perform whenever we needed to go.

There are plenty of these infrequent, but non-zero, official, lifestyle and corporate customer processes that are PITAs, for a variety of reasons. People would gladly pay to avoid the hassle themselves, where cost-efficient, eventually-expert, standardized "schlepping" can make a good business model or 10. Relieve pain for $; enough people will gladly hand you $ to make it happen.

monopolemagneton Birds that fear death

Crows went into my mechanics shop, got up on a toolbox and stole a recently opened bag of in-shell sunflower seeds, without being seen, and had a sunflower seed-opening party in the back parking lot. (I arrived to pick up a vehicle to find the bag of nuts on the ground next to it and hundreds of empty shells all over the area, and the service writer laughing at finding someone's snack being snacked on elsewhere.)

Whether that implies some crows are smart or I should find another mechanic, is debatable.

monopolemagneton Why are little kids in Japan so independent?

Move? Sister-in-law and husband homeschooled their kids on a crop produce ranch they rented in north/central California.

And there's always the Appalachia's. ;)

monopolemagneton How Much Power Does the Volkswagen TDI Lose in “Cheater” Mode?

Both CAFE and Smog Check-style programs are gamed terribly, across multiple manufacturers... but VW gets the blame, which it rightly deserves.

Testing of emissions needs to happen at the tailpipe while driving with mobile equipment in the real-world with certain types of traffic / road conditions.

Mileage needs to be calculated by metered fuel measurement on a test track with both highway- and (stop-and-go traffic) city-driving.

In addition to either two, Tesla vehicles and other full electric vehicles cannot come quickly enough to supplant gasoline/diesel/CNG/LNG/flex fuel/etc.

PS: I just California Smog Check'ed my '85 Vanagon, which has direct-port fuel injection, mass-airflow sensor and rudimentary "computer" (Digijet) after replacing the catalytic converter, O2 sensor and having a VW specialist shop tune it up. NOx (nitrous oxides) went from barely failing 15 and 25 mph limits to near zero. HC (hydrocarbons) and CO were also barely detectible. Emissions on it (a 90 hp motor) are currently at the levels of a PZEV or a new vehicle, and it gets 24 (real-world) MPG (9.8 L/100km).

Already, CA Smog Check station owners are foreseeing additional mandated equipment investments to perform tests on modern vehicles not just via the OBDII port under the steering wheel. This is a good thing but it's hard to sell small-business owners on capital and labor expenses up against the status quo/sunk costs fallacy.

monopolemagneton Opinion HN: Fortran 90 (F90) doesn't look terrible

Oh god. Reminds me of simulated processor pipeline stages (VHDL, etc.), which tend of have a huge amount of state.

I'm no Fortran expert. Were there no composite types (i.e., structures or tuples) at the time or other reasons to do that (i.e., code testing tools)?

Edit: Last q: Yes, as a vendor extension

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/STRUCTURE-and-RECORD...

monopolemagneton Opinion HN: Fortran 90 (F90) doesn't look terrible

I am. The point is to show Fortran 90 evolved a lot, which is indeed, a good thing. Remember, F66 was influenced by Speedcoding which was, in turn, influenced by assembly, because practical, high-level languages were still in the learning phase. In other words, early Fortran (e.g., FORTRAN for the IBM 704 on punchcards, which my mom coded in at NUQ) was just barely higher level than assembly, but later versions improved to gain additional features which made coding in it less onerous and more productive.

Age is an irrelevant, consumerism fallacy; the contextual history including the players involved, machines available, problems to solve and lessons learned, is far more important.

More (salient links from various sources):

Generally

- https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortranStandards

F60

- https://www.fortran.com/FortranForTheIBM704.pdf

F66

- ftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/ARCHIVE/Fortran66.pdf

F77

- http://web.stanford.edu/class/me200c/tutorial_77/

- http://www.fortran.com/fortran/F77_std/rjcnf.html

F90

- http://www.nccs.nasa.gov/tutorials/f90studentnotes.pdf

- ftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/N1801-N1850/N1830.pdf

- http://www.j3-fortran.org/doc/year/10/10-007.pdf

- http://www.fortran90.org/

F95

- http://www.j3-fortran.org/doc/year/04/04-007.pdf

F2003

- http://www.j3-fortran.org/doc/year/04/04-007.pdf

F2008

- http://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/Fortran+2008

monopolemagneton Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Dude! You did already all that hard work; make some $$, gain more freedom, while it's hot.

If the cost of making another example (parts, time, skill) can be made sufficiently below (say 30-50%) of a reasonable sale price, it may be business. The real "hacking" done by contract manufacturers is cutting corners to make something beautiful, functional and inexpensive to manufacture.

Challenge, should you choose to accept it, if not already:

Try to assemble a similar example with mostly scrap, for the least budget imaginable. (Penny wise & pound wise.)

Another possible path:

Patenting and licensing to boutique clock makers / electronics firms, which frees you from nearly all the headaches of dealing with advertising, manufacturing and distribution (after negotiations, assuming one would usually seek advice/assistance of trustworthy, relevant partners). Also, people may not like patents, but it's a double-edge sword necessary to create a survivable business... without that, the newbie wantrepreneur is often shoot themselves, in not just one foot, but reloads to see if that stops the fail. It's nice to broadly claim "patents are evil," but good luck making money sustainably in an environment where anything & everything is knocked off, without recourse (usually legal) of any measurable kind.

monopolemagneton The Inside Story Behind MS08-067

You missed the boat and went off on a strawman fallacy based on a fundamental misunderstanding: Microsoft OS code and libraries, are implemented not just in C/C++/some asm but are also implemented in CLR languages. All that legacy crap in a variety of languages is a huge attack surface. Demanding pointing to closed source proof is an impossible, specious fools' errand.

Have you ever done any Windows NT kernel driver development? Compared to OS X (xnu) kexts or Linux, it's a disaster. XNU and Linux extensions are also not that great because it follows the same, flawed insecure methodology of allowing kernel extensions to modify the kernel, which OpenBSD wisely eliminated.

The other strawman you raise, trying put the wrong words in my mouth, rewriting a massive legacy codebase does not throw everything away. The lessons learned are the most important. Instead, OS and app virtualization can be used to run prior OS/apps while new apps can run in a new environment, sharing a filesystem as needed. That doesn't start over "from scratch, with inexperienced people", which is your incorrect presumption because that would be foolish. Otherwise, the Microsoft ecosystem will continue to accrue technical debt and job security which can never be paid off, because it's stuck in 1993.

The kernel should be the kernel.. a tiny, mostly immutable thing which does just enough to provide process/thread isolation, IPC and such. Even better is capabilities-granted privilege requests to perform unsafe operations, so that drivers are demoted to least-privilege processes. QNX and MINIX loosely follow this, and it's a far more secure and robust benefits of reasonable microkernel architecture approaches.

monopolemagneton Opinion HN: Fortran 90 (F90) doesn't look terrible

As opposed to this F66 example:

http://www.fortran.bcs.org/2005/fortran/img10.html

monopolemagneton The Inside Story Behind MS08-067

Having supported Windows in production in wild, real world environments and worked in security research....

Windows has a giant attack surface because of the sheer indefinitely-legacy-compatible, multiverse-sized codebases of unsafe, unprovable, low-level code in C/C#(CLR)/asm.

The last beta copy of Windows code I reviewed looked like it was maintained by thousands of contract programmers and interns on artificial deadlines whom can't spare a second to clean up nasty technical debt.

With Russinovich and Azure's leader promoted now, I hope they're gonna nut up to take a stab at incurring temporary customer wrath by remaking Windows from (mostly) scratch with less duct tape and more lessons learned. It could even go full open source (for core OS, Visual Studio and shared libs) to dig at Apple (whom is already semi-open source). Given their resources, they could do a modern, nearly ground-up, respectable-as-OpenBSD OS in a combination of functional/multiparadigm languages and not fail too terribly at it if it's previewed/seeks feedback early-and-often. Maintaining marketshare is about taking-on hard-but-necessary choices for long-term gain, not seemingly safe moves of tacking on some tweaks and security add-ons to the overall status quo.

monopolemagneton Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

Higher viscosity filler fluid and/or a ferro-binding compound to dampen the "springy" vibrations and ferro "spikes"?

Btw: Comes off a labor of love and insanely-awesome attention to design and detail. Outstanding. Kickstarter/indiegogo/lockitron selfstarter page yet? :)

monopolemagneton The seL4 microkernel

seL4 is really cool; I was just looking at and the other L4 family / derivatives for µkernel ideas and trends.