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nmc

1,639 karma · joined June 13, 2013

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nmc··on Failure analysis of the Arecibo 305 meter telescope collapse
Direct PDF download: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/cart/download.cgi?record_i...
nmc··on Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
You cannot make the cost-efficiency argument without acknowledging all the costs which aviation and automotive travel externalize: air and water pollution, damage to wildlife, global warming, lack of walking/cycling infrastructure, rising sea levels... a disproportionate part of which are born by poor or faraway people who have no choice in all this.

Edit: forgot about noise pollution and about flooding risks (due to impervious surfaces like runways and parking lots).

I also doubt airfields and planes require significantly less maintenance than trains and tracks, but I have not researched that.

nmc··on Bollards: Why and What
Bollards are good at preventing the inconsiderate from parking on the sidewalk. For fewer people to be killed by cars, however, you want transportation infrastructure which does not rely on having fast metal boxes in close proximity to pedestrians (or cyclists, wheelchair users, etc).
nmc··on French govt. says users of uBlock Origin, Signal etc. are potential terrorists
The investigation partly relies on notes seized from the defendants which mention various privacy tools: GrapheneOS, LineageOS, Signal, Silence, Jitsi, OnionShare, F-Droid, Tor, RiseupVPN, Orbot, uBlock Origin…

According to investigators: "these elements confirm they were willing to live clandestinely".

According to the prosecution: "these notes consituted a real playbook allowing anonymous use of a phone, showing the person was willing to live in secrecy and hide their activities".

nmc··on Ask HN: Have you ever heard of users demonstrating against software?
Students in France protested multiple times at least partly against Parcoursup, the government software where high school students enter their choices for higher education and get selected by universities.

https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20181204-high-school-protests-c...

> In the past few months, several high school student unions have called for protests against recent reforms in France's education system.

> They have also been protesting against 'Parcoursup', an online government platform designed for selecting students for university.

nmc··on Louvre makes its entire collection available online
See the first item in this post: https://auntymuriel.com/2012/12/23/asterix-in-translation-th...

Was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22678816

nmc··on Man connected to IP address heist running for position at European IP org
Wow that is amazing! His proposal for "IPv4+" is... I have no words. Thanks for the laugh.
nmc··on Boiling the machines when they needed to just chill
As soon as you start having you own server/network rooms, yes.

You will have to monitor your HVAC systems, your fire extinguisher systems, your alarm systems (for smoke and water leak detection), your electrical systems... You will need to make decisions about which type of system to install. You will have to set up maintenance and repair of these systems and interact with the specialized technicians who come to service them.

Not saying you have to become an HVAC expert, but you will definitely learn some stuff outside of computing/networking.

nmc··on textfiles.com
FYI, your webserver sets the ContentType header based on the file extension, which is probably not what you want.

For example: http://textfiles.com/100/black.box gave me "application/vnd.previewsystems.box".

nmc··on Is it hubris for HN to routinely change published titles of articles?
There are a few guidelines about titles:

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is.

> If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.

> If you submit a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title.

> If the title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

nmc··on Google doesn’t want you using RCS in unsupported regions
Took me a while to figure out why I was not able to pull MMS over WiFi anymore!

(My "hack" was to have a SIM from a country where RCS/Chat is enabled, but actually using it in a country where RCS is not yet supported.)

nmc··on Don't touch my clipboard
You want dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled set to false
nmc··on Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally
https://archive.is/2f9pz
nmc··on This little-known inventor has probably saved your life
Non-clickbait: "History of the invention of the black box (in-flight recorder)"
nmc··on Interactive Lorenz Attractor
Excellent!

Just one thing: on a touchscreen interface with Firefox, zooming out works well but zooming in is sometimes jittery or not registering at all. (Panning and rotating work fine.)

nmc··on Cyclist Deaths in New York City: Accident or Crime?
Article was updated:

> Mr. Baig, 18, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with manslaughter.

nmc··on [dead]
What is this title? The page is named "PHP Sucks" and the heading also says "PHP Sucks".
nmc··on Cyclist Deaths in New York City: Accident or Crime?
> Umar Baig barreled through a red light at a terrifying speed and T-boned an S.U.V., sending it flying across the street into José Alzorriz, a cyclist,(...) killing him instantly.

> Mr. Baig, 18, has not been charged.

> Running a red light alone is almost never considered reckless driving, even though in Mr. Alzorriz’s case, it had fatal consequences.

Not being a US resident, this is unbelievable to me. Is this only NY or all states?

Compare with France:

- A person who kills someone while driving a car is automatically charged with involuntary manslaughter: the killing implies the driver's recklessness

- The penalty for involuntary manslaughter is up to three years in prison; if the driver was willingly reckless (for instance, deliberately ran a red light), the penalty is upgraded to five years

- The only way to exoneration is proving that the victim was blatantly reckless themself or suicidal: if someone jumps right in front of your moving car, for instance

nmc··on Google Employee Writes Memo About ‘The Burden of Being Black at Google’
The Memo [PDF] itself: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6278613/The-Weigh...
nmc··on Russian 'Sully' lands plane on corn field after bird strike
Reuters news flash: https://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKCN1V50DQ (has picture!)
nmc··on You Might Want to Uninstall VLC. – Immediately
No No No

There Is No Vulnerability In VLC

From the bug tracker:

> Issue is too old libebml in Ubuntu 18.04: libebml 1.3.6 fixes this issue. End of story: VLC is not vulnerable, whether this is 3.0.7.1 or even 3.0.4. The issue is in a 3rd party library, and it was fixed in VLC binaries version 3.0.3, out more than one year ago...

Cheers to Gizmodo journalists not even reading the pages they link to...

nmc··on All the Ways You Can Dispose of a Dead Body
Title feels clickbaity because it is missing "(Legally)" between "Can" and "Dispose"

dang (admin) or lecarore (submitter) could you please edit?

nmc··on A once-classified anomaly nearly killed NASA's first moon astronauts
TL;DR

After being jettisoned, the Service Module remained dangerously close to the Command Module during re-entry, so there was a risk that the two could have collided

nmc··on Climate protesters storm Garzweiler coal mine in Germany
Why would they storm a mine where poor people work in hazardous and exhausting conditions? Do they not know that the company owning the mine is headquartered in Essen, where the top-level managers responsible for this actually work? (The company, RWE AG, has a 14 billion euros market cap and is not even mentionned in the article, good reporting BBC!)
nmc··on Apollo 11 in Real Time
Awesome website!

I have two remarks about the speed units displayed on the dashboard:

• Why is the Mach number showed while out of the atmosphere? It depends on the local speed of sound which is not really definable there

• Why is the speed not shown International System units? As a Kerbal enthusiast, I would love to see metres per second

nmc··on Disney's Park Rules Text Can't Be Selected by Mouse
The page is setting the CSS user-select properties to "none". You can unset it using you browser's dev tools.

See https://www.w3schools.com/cssreF/css3_pr_user-select.asp

nmc··on Photos of the Eiffel Tower at night are restricted due to copyright (2017)
Classic urban legend.

> Views of the Eiffel Tower taken by private individuals for private use do not require prior agreement. However, professionals must contact our teams, who will inform them of the conditions of use governing images.

https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/business/use-image-of-eiffel...

EDIT:

Just to be clear: copyright DOES NOT PREVENT ANYONE from PHOTOGRAPHING the tower at night. It only prevents you from profiting from a photograph that you took of the illuminated tower (and then only if the tower is the main feature of the photograph) without a license agreement from the copyright holder.

This is not supporting either the principle or the consequences of copyright, simply debunking the idea that photographing the tower at night is illegal.

nmc··on 6x Space does not show up as pwned password
You could ask the maintainer: https://www.troyhunt.com/contact/
nmc··on US Cities Are Becoming More Dangerous for Cyclists and Pedestrians
Wow! OK so Today I Learned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on_red

Turning right on a red light is prohibited in many countries, unless indicated by a separate, arrow-shaped (green or orange) light. Surprised to learn that it is however allowed in most of the USA.

nmc··on Ask HN: What's your funniest hiring interview story?
Funny :) I would have hired the candidate who would have told me the difference is 7 bits!

Still a failure because the ratio is actually 0.125, but I kept going for a few questions, I stopped when they could not explain the difference between a thread and a process...

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