Hacker News Reader

opelloon Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock

That's the TSSOP version, while the DIP is $0.92:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-technol...

I'd prefer even the SOIC version which is $0.69 if I'm soldering it:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-technol...

but the author used the DIP in a holder/socket on the perfboard.

opelloon Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

It seems like sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, and I can only imagine popularity is somehow the reason.

opelloon Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

https://community.zyxel.com/en/discussion/23595/why-i-get-bl...

Seems like you or someone upstream of you uses a Zyxel brand device that has some kind of dns content filtering enabled. You should be able to get around this on a given machine by configuring an alternate dns provider (dns over https, cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, google's 8.8.8.8, quad9's 9.9.9.9, etc.) or doing something similar at your own router/dns resolver/dhcp server if it's not the thing doing this.

opelloon CISA’s acting head uploaded sensitive files into public version of ChatGPT

Or at least not readily armed, bullet in the shirt pocket and all.

opelloon Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability

> One way or the other, local culture is to do this. Yes, I agree it’s a negative sum choice. But they like it. It’s the same school of thought where a prison abolitionist didn’t report her gang rape: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/why-i-didnt-report...

How are gangs of thieves reasonably justified as part of culture? Surely civil society frowns on theft?

I read that article and I can (somehow) appreciate an ideal of prison reform so strong that it precluded reporting a crime--I think anyway--however, I did not see an explanation of what sort of remedy or justice this practitioner of a belief "in the abolition of police and prisons" would prefer. What is the appropriate punishment for such a crime? This is missing in the perspective presented. There is a description of a want for the perpetrator to change but no mechanism described for forcing the person to begin to change, just a reconciliation that every situation is different enough to avoid prescribing a template solution.

In the theft context, tolerating people that steal seems to enable theft. Humans can reason and are a product of the choices they've made. One ideal of the courts is exposure to alternatives, in the case of your deadlocked murder case, there are annoying factors from my arm chair: perhaps first-degree was too high a bar, the use of IQ in a legal setting in 2023 is annoying because without knowing how it was measured it should be assumed culturally biased and pointless, what levels of decision making abrogate personal responsibility--in managing a disease or making choices that lead to finding oneself in a particular setting. The resulting life in prison without parole sentence is probably just, but as with the Las Vegas story, I think that's up to those most affected by the crime to decide.

opelloon Heathrow scraps liquid container limit

The surface level answer is "for Ronald Reagan reasons":

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

opelloon Heathrow scraps liquid container limit

You have to be able to fit those 10 100mL bottles into a single 1 quart resealable bag. At most you'd probably get about 9.46 of those 10 bottles in the bag but in practice it's fewer still.

1 US liquid quart is about 946.353 milliliters.

opelloon JuiceSSH – Give me my pro features back

The about link above gave a Cloudfront-looking failure, but the base domain here worked and is where the app help link takes me, albeit to /faq:

https://sonelli.com/

I reactivated my license a few months ago using the in-app functionality but I'm not quite sure when I'm afraid.

opelloon Making Magic Leap past Nvidia's secure bootchain and breaking Tesla Autopilots

There's a popular slide deck[1] with common techniques for paring it back too.

[1] https://bootlin.com/doc/training/boot-time/boot-time-slides....

opelloon Calendar

That was a very nice read, thanks!

> I also removed the background color so we save ink on actual printing.

It seems reasonable to also remove the #post-title border-top:1rem solid var(--accent-dark) for the same reason? That and the padding-top on the same element struck me as unnecessarily moving the printed content down the page.

opelloon Show HN: One clean, developer-focused page for every Unicode symbol

Same here, it is a tool that I reach for infrequently but when I need it it's always proven invaluable.

opelloon Hacking Washing Machines [video]

That's a great example, thanks! I was looking for "LG Smart Diagnostics" and "audio" and then "LG Acoustic Diagnostics" and found TVs calibrating their audio playback but not this. Trying "LG Audible Diagnosis" found a bunch like yours.

opelloon Hacking Washing Machines [video]

That's pretty cool. I found a write-up[1] on it but unfortunately didn't come across any examples of the communication.

[1] https://github.com/kabelincho/LG-Smart-Diagnostics-modem

opelloon Hacking Washing Machines [video]

> I'm assuming it's to prevent moisture from corroding a port of some kind.

The primary value discussed in the talk was electrical isolation since there's mains voltage in the appliance and the potential for shorts or inadequate isolation would require some kind of isolation, so a path that optically isolates the communication makes quite a bit of sense.

I'm also curious if other devices have gone this route.

opelloon My insulin pump controller uses the Linux kernel. It also violates the GPL

I agree that a front-line CSR or even engineer is not likely the right person, but surely then the responsible action is to redirect the request to the responsible department or person?

opelloon The First Photographs of Snowflakes Discover the Groundbreaking Microphotography (2017)

Also worth checking out the Veritasium video on snowflakes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao2Jfm35XeE

opelloon Tell HN: Merry Christmas

Glad I could share it!

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc says:

> Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)

I assume that's how the top level comment posted the tree which is in a <pre><code> structure.

opelloon Tell HN: Merry Christmas

Just because old ASCII and ANSI art is often signed by the author, which is something fun I appreciate, see also:

https://oldcompcz.github.io/jgs/joan_stark/xmas.html#treewit...

And of course, the BBS Documentary: Artscene episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQrBbm5ZMlo&list=PL7nj3G6Jpv...

opelloon X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents

So what is the state of the art in redaction? Re-publish the document with an insert that says [redaction] so that no (or maybe minimal) length side-channel exists? I imagine someone thinks about clever ideas and it would be fun to read about them and the trade-offs.

opelloon Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8881#section-6.2.1

I see what I misunderstood, even in the presence of an ALLOW entry, a DENY entry would prohibit access. I am familiar with that on the Windows side but haven't really dug into Linux ACLs. The ACCESS CHECK ALGORITHM[1] section of the acl(5) man page was pretty clear, I think.

[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/acl.5.html#ACCESS_CHEC...

opelloon I didn't realize my LG TV was spying on me until I turned off Live Plus

I too am on the "wrong" side. I just hope that the choice to be on that side continues.

opelloon Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

> Each of these characters is replaced by the - character to denote that a permission is absent in the ACL entry.

Wouldn't the o::--- default ACL, like mode o-rwx, deny others access in the way you're describing?

opelloon Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

My only experience with non-UAC endpoint privilege management was BeyondTrust and it seemed to try to do what UAC did but with a worse user experience. It looks like the Intune EPM offering also doesn't present as clear a delineation as UAC, which seems like a missed opportunity.

opelloon Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]

> The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?

The analysis shows another way in which the government is trying to be secretive about how it's treating people that were within its borders and subject to its laws and protections. I can only hope someone pointed this out because the question suggests a baffling level of ignorance despite the message overall sounding like some reasonable feedback on the story, despite coming far too late in the process to be considered reasonable.

opelloon US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

That makes sense but my first thoughts were that panels wouldn't be oriented so that the majority of that flat surface was perpendicular to the radar but instead much closer to parallel, and that aviation radar would be higher up than a house roof to avoid ground clutter.

opelloon US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

I'm surprised residential PV even interacts with radar -- or is that the other signal intelligence part?

opelloon NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut

In your stereo camera example, are these like USB webcams or something like MIPI CSI attached devices?

opelloon NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut

The 5us inaccuracy is basically irrelevant to NTP users, from the second update to the Internet Time Service mailing list[1]:

To put a deviation of a few microseconds in context, the NIST time scale usually performs about five thousand times better than this at the nanosecond scale by composing a special statistical average of many clocks. Such precision is important for scientific applications, telecommunications, critical infrastructure, and integrity monitoring of positioning systems. But this precision is not achievable with time transfer over the public Internet; uncertainties on the order of 1 millisecond (one thousandth of one second) are more typical due to asymmetry and fluctuations in packet delay.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/internet-time-se...

opelloon 8-bit Boléro

Wow, there are multiple things like that!

Qweremin: C64 Theremin: https://linusakesson.net/hardware/theremin/index.php

Qwertar: C64 Keytar: https://linusakesson.net/music/glyptodont-live/index.php

Very neat!

opelloon TP-Link Tapo C200: Hardcoded Keys, Buffer Overflows and Privacy

I think it fails to be objective because of the repetition. It's an open S3 bucket. No need to state that no authentication was required, it's already open. It's not about economy of writing but the repetition emphasizes the point, elevating the perceived significance to the author or that the author wants the reader to take away.

Furthermore, the repeated use of every when discussing the breadth of access seems like it would easily fall into the "absolutes are absolutely wrong" way of thinking. At least without some careful auditing it seems like another narrative flourish to marvel at this treasure trove (candy store) of firmware images that has been left without adequate protection. But it seems like most here agree that such protection is without merit, so why does it warrant this emphasis? I'm only left with the possible thought that the author considered it significant.