packet_nerd

They use wood construction because of fire codes? How does that work?

> VPNs do help maintain one small level of privacy (namely from your ISP)

I never really saw that as a VPN's main purpose. Far from cutting out the ISP, you now have 2 ISPs. One that can see "everything" and another that can make inferences about your habits by analyzing your encrypted traffic.

The job a VPN actually does really well is hide your IP from sites and services that you visit which reduces the information they have available with which to track you.

> I also think there should be a similar file for the regular expression that expresses a site’s allowable passwords.

I disagree. Password "complexity" requirements need to die and instead every site's password regex should be `.{12,64}` and then verify it's not in the dictionary or a list of leaked passwords.

It starts with an oscillator circuit producing an alternating current sine wave at the desired frequency. The oscillator circuit often involves a crystal in order to generate an accurate and stable frequency.

The alternating current is then feed down a transmission line, which in the most basic case is just 2 wires side by side. Being side-by-side, the current going "up" in one wire is balanced by the current coming "down" in the other so that at a distance from the transmission line, the radiation from the two wires (mostly) cancel each other out. Often instead of side-by-side, one wire is often wrapped around the other with an insulator separating them (coax), but the same principal applies.

The transmission line then feeds into the antenna. A basic antenna is a piece of wire exactly 1/2 wavelength long. Electric pulses "bounce" off the wire's ends, sort of like how if you tether one end of a rope and then shake the other, the "waves" going down the rope will "bounce". The length of the wire being 1/2 wavelength is key because it takes a wave exactly one cycle to start from one end, bounce off the other, and return to the start. Just as the first wave is bouncing off the start end, it gets a new "bump" from the transmission line. This allows a lot of current to build up in the antenna, sort of like how a kid on a swing can use several small well timed kicks to swing himself much higher than just a single big one could. Of course, antennas can be much more complicated than just a dipole, for example, you could place several dipoles in a row and feed them in phase so that their transmitted signals add together at points perpendicular to the row, and cancel each other at points in line with the row. Or, you could use a parabolic dish to concentrate the signals in one direction.

In radar, the radio waves travel out, bounce off objects in the their path, and a small fraction of the original signal comes back to the antenna. Depending on the design the radar might have a separate receiving antenna, or it might receive on the same antenna it used for transmitting. From a radio perspective, a receiving antenna is exactly the same as a transmitting antenna, only, it's the radio waves coming in through space that cause it to resonate instead of the other way around in a transmitting antenna.

Finally, the signal comes down the transmission line and into a receiver circuit which analyzes and extracts whatever data (in the radar case, it deduces distance and speed by looking at the elapsed time and frequency shifts).

I didn't see addressed in the article, what about the ground? What keeps air from leaking out through porous sand and rock?

I want a browser extension (or native feature) that searches several engines at once and display's the results side-by-side. Sort of like this:

    +-------------------------------+
    | Search string                 |
    +---------+----------+----------+
    |         |          |          |
    | Bing    | DDG      | Google   |
    |         |          |          |
    | Hit 1   | Hit 1    | Hit 1    |
    |         |          |          |
    | Hit 2   | Hit 2    | Hit 2    |
    |         |          |          |
    | Hit 3   | Hit 3    | Hit 3    |
    |         |          |          |
    +---------+----------+----------+

And I want to be able to pull it up instantly with a keyboard shortcut.

The extension would need to be smart enough to de-duplicate hits across the different engines.

Finally, I really REALLY want to pay for the search engines themselves (make it a subscription at $50/m or something), because then I know their incentives are aligned with my needs rather than with their ad business's needs.

I don't think any of the search engines have search API's? Maybe they could make API access a paid feature.

I know it's a minor annoyance, but it's something that jades me every single day and gets really old after a while. I feel companies and websites should do a better job of being respectful. A "what should we call you" field is simple and easy, would make the service much more friendly to some people.

It's not something Burmese women are used to doing, and if you think about it it's kind of a weird holdover from a much more patriarchal time. But, if she'd known how difficult it would be I think she would have anyway.

> There are people who only have one name

My wife for one. At the very least make the last name field optional.

Myanmar is another one, almost everyone has just one given name unless they are specifically following the western or some other style (and that's rare in my experience). The last name field should always be optional at a minimum.

My wife is from Myanmar, where most people only have one name (no first, last, etc.) and has experienced endless frustration since immigrating here to the US. It's been quite difficult for her and even limiting in some ways and she's broken down in tears more than once.

Some places just put a few letters into each field (like say for the name Jessica, first: Jes, middle: si, last: ca, or something like that). The DMV did that, and then listed her name on her license as <last>\<first> <middle initial>. Others have insisted on putting "nosurname" in the last name field. The immigration people put "FNU" as first name, and her given name in the last. At some places she's put her name twice, once in the first, and once in the last.

Not anything close to what she's had to endure, but my name doesn't fit the standard mold either. I prefer to use my middle name and really dislike using my first name (shared whith my dad, who I don't have a good relationship with). I'm endlessly having to explain every single stinking time I interact with pretty much anyone.

Anyway, the take away is, please please please (!!!) don't make assumptions about people's names! Ideally just one field labeled "name", and let the user interpret that as they see fit. If you need to collect a legal name then you need to validate it anyway. If you really must do first name / last name then at least make the last optional and also include a field for "what should we call you" or "nick name" or something.

Great ted talk about Myanmar names: https://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_ma_shwe_sin_win_not_good_w...

Not the parent, but true in a sense. Communication is the act of conveying information from one person's consciousness to another. In the usual encrypted chat scenario, that path is unencrypted at two points (plaintext input, and plaintext output at the far end).

It is entirely possible though to have a true end-to-end encrypted channel if both parties are able to do the encryption in their heads without the plain text message ever being visible. A trivial practical example would be a single bit message with a single bit one time pad (agree ahead of time that if I say yes on the phone, it means no and vice versa).

> Few companies survive pissing off the nerds

I wish this sage advice was part of every business executive's education. :-)

It's interesting to me to think, compared to our evolutionary history, schools are really really foreign and unnatural. Until relatively recently, the average kid would have grown up in a small community surrounded by her parents, relatives, and other adults. At toddler age she would play with other kids or find ways to amuse herself, later like 5, 6 and up, she'd start to help out with chores.

Whereas at a school kids are cooped up in a high pressure environment, with other kids who are all just as immature, and a few adults to supervise.

My parents homeschooled my brothers and I. I'm really torn as to whether I want to do the same for my kids some day. One the one hand, I feel like it was a good healthy environment to learn and grow up. On the other, I've always felt like I don't fit into society and sometimes am jealous of "normal" people.

My Kindle's never been connected to the network (always in flight mode) since I got it and I haven't had issues. I use Calibri and a USB cable to load ebooks. Not sure, would it be possible for it to call home through the USB cable?

It should be about learning. I think finding exploits should be encouraged and rewarded.

Singapore and South Korea?

Agreed. However, in terms of perverse economic incentives I think the private for-profit prisons are a much much larger problem than prison work programs. They are not bringing in anything on the scale of what private prison systems bring in from the government. Also, least a few people claim to have benefited personally from the work programs.

> Illegal drugs channel money into large organized crime syndicates

An excellent argument for decriminalizing them.

> All drug offenses are violent. Illegal...

First you say "all", then "illegal". Which is it?

Don't even get me started....

In many countries it's hard or near impossible for US citizens to get bank accounts and other financial services, I guess due to them not wanting to deal with reporting requirements? Europeans, Aussies, and pretty much everyone have it way easier. Makes me so mad.

I haven't tried it yet, but Peertube looks like an interesting alternative to Youtube. Mastadon and Matrix are similar exciting projects too. I host a Matrix instance that I and my extended family use to keep in touch, and we can seamlessly interoperate with anyone on any other Matrix instance. A few kinks to work out still (I wish the server software was way less bloated) but overall I think it's a really promising approach.

My instance is completely ad-free, I might add.

Slack excels? In my experience it's really slow and clunky and consumes way more memory than it should.

As the sysadmin at my company I ban all electron apps unless it's clear they are exceptionally well written and/or there are absolutely no alternatives. VSCode is really good and one of my few exceptions. I strongly suspect it would have been even better if they had developed with a more performant platform, but who knows.

Edit: To expand on my reasoning:

Say an operation on a well built performant application is 5 seconds faster than the electron (or otherwise bloated) version. Say employees do that operation on average 20 times a day. Say I have 2500 employees who work 246 days a year and get payed $25/h on average. The slow version will cost the company $427,083 every year. That's the amount of money I'd be willing to spend per year for the fast version of this hypothetical application.

A company like Slack has hundreds of thousands of users and the poor performance must be costing someone millions. It boggles my mind that with all that money, they still can't find the resources to make a performant application?

And that's the naive calculation, there's also the administrative aspect of installing, upgrading, and supporting the application. (The worse the applications quality, the more time I, who am payed a lot more than $25/h, spend supporting it.) While there are multiple variables here, a development team that prioritizes "easy and fast" development doesn't inspire me with confidence they have also prioritized building a quality product.

> It works by pushing against the surrounding medium.

Not really. If a fan was able to blow air in a vacuum it would produce thrust as well. Basically a rocket does that. It's just blowing gasses out the back.

It's Newton's law of motion, "every action has an equal and opposite reaction".

It really should not be acceptable for financial contracts either.

Consumers lost more than 16B to fraud in 2016:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/01/consumers-lost-more-than-16b...

The Equifax breach lost data of 145 million Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#May%E2%80%93July_2017_...

Passwords are still the norm for online authentication, despite providing terrible user-hostile security. The US social security number is used both as an identifier, and as a static never-changing password.

The identification part is the key.

The federal government should issue a nationally recognized identity card to every person which contains a digital certificate around which anyone (especially government services) can build their authentication & authorization systems.

It's not hard to imagine him snapping a picture with his phone.. you know, just in case.

Besides acceleration at the moon side, wouldn't there need to be deceleration before entering the atmosphere? I'm thinking an IPBM traveling that fast would rip apart in the upper atmosphere and/or explode too high to cause any real damage.

This is awesome and helped me find it again! Thank you!

Someone linked to an interesting site talking about how to make homemade hot sauce here on HNs. I partly read it and thought it was a great clean site and something I wanted to try. Later going back to find it again I literally spent hours searching, even though I'm pretty sure I remembered some of the exact phrases. For some reason recipe related search results are really really terrible on both Google and Bing.

I get what your saying, that the personal risk is low, especially compared with say driving or heart disease. Heck, I'm a middle aged heavy guy and couldn't care less who sees my nudes.

But, I believe we (as technologists) have a responsibility to use and push for strong security practices. I don't want my kids to grow up in a world where creeps blackmailing them through their webcams is a possibility, or where a rogue politician has all the tools of absolute authoritarianism already set up and waiting for him.

A camera cover is a huge win. It's super easy and cheap (a piece of plastic), it's easy to understand (entirely mechanical), it works 100% when used, and it's failure modes are obvious. Not all security controls are cheap, easy, and 100% effective, but this one is. And if you don't bother to use it in your bedroom, then that's fine, but every webcam should have one.