Hacker News Reader

tdonson Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

Ben Eater has a fantastic series of videos where he builds a hello world program on the 6502

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnzuMJLZRdU&list=PLowKtXNTBy...

tdonson Night train connecting Amsterdam to Scandinavian capitals under consideration

Yes, please. I fondly remember taking trips on the night train to France when I was little.

Rail is a great semi-long distance (<= 500mi/800km) mode of transportation in general. It's unfortunate that it's so expensive to construct (high speed) railways.

tdonson Man diagnosed with coronavirus near Seattle is being treated largely by a robot

Society as a whole benefits from an infected person being quarantined so therefore society should also pay for it.

Is that not the case?

I'd assume the US has programs/budgets for this sort of contingency funded at the federal level?

tdonson NOAA Satellites Helped Save a Record 421 Lives in 2019

This website cost me a weekend once :-)

tdonson Browse good first issues to start contributing to open source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

tdonson LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them

This used to be my approach, but it prevented grepping through my password store (you have to touch the yubikey to decrypt each password separately)

I since switched to a separate on-device key for "low value" passwords and keep the interesting stuff (e-mail pwds) under the yubikey protected key (which does requires touch).

Did you find a better solution?

tdonson FreeNAS

Is there anyone here who prefers FreeNAS over vanilla FreeBSD+zfs and would like to share their experience?

I've been running FreeBSD with zfs for many years. I'm unsure if it was the right decision, but I did learn a lot and it's been extremely stable after the initial setup :-)

tdonson Stroom – a scalable data storage, processing and analysis platform

"Stroom" is a Dutch word meaning either (electrical) "power" or, more likely in this case, "flow".

tdonson Visual Studio Code repository is open again

Original ticket: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268

tdonson Show HN: A small bootstrapped independent VPN company in the Netherlands

Yes.

Our intelligence agency (AIVD) allegedly facilitated the planting of stuxnet (they had a guy in there or something)

So it'd be reasonable to say that "we're not uncooperative"

tdonson Yield Curves Invert in U.S., U.K

You're not alone, I did this as well.

tdonson A Peculiarly Dutch Summer Rite: Children Abandoned in the Night Woods

Don't think of this as dropping your kids in say, the High Sierras or Death Valley ;-)

This is actually an extremely safe thing, nothing much can go wrong. Some supporting facts:

Our entire country (The Netherlands) measures roughly 161mi by 93mi and is densely populated. There's always a dwelling nearby. Consequently it's impossible to get really lost.

We also have no natural dangers to speak of, no deadly animals, no dangerous terrain, no raging rivers (we don't have mountains).

tdonson Netherlands National Airline Encourages People Not to Fly

Call me a cynic, but this is nothing more than an advert for their CO2ZERO programme:

https://flyresponsibly.klm.com/en#keypoints?article=WhatYoud...

tdonson The Cassowary: World’s most dangerous bird (2016)

In Brisbane right? That's where I took this picture:

https://www.thomasdons.nl/pht/original/australia-new-zealand...

tdonson Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2015)

Last time this site was posted I spent a saturday reading it. Very interesting and gripping stuff on there.

tdonson Mars One, which offered 1-way trips to Mars, declared bankrupt

The writing has been on the wall for a while now.

Even Gerard 't Hooft, famous physics nobel prize winner and one of the ambassadors of Mars One said the schedule and budget were off by a factor of 10. [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/23/mars-one-pla...

tdonson How the Netherlands Feeds the World (2017)

It's in Dutch buy you can read about that here:

http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/publication/?PA=7100oogs

Few examples (2017 data):

  Potatoes    36 900 kg/ha
  Sugar beets 93 300 kg/ha
  Wheat        9 100 kg/ha
  Rye          3 200 kg/ha
  Corn        13 500 kg/ha - 48 900 kg/ha (different kinds)
  Onions      55 700 kg/ha

tdonson Guitarist Has Brain Surgery, and Strums All the Way Through

This reminds me of a video I saw of an opera singer performing whilst being operated on (brain surgery).

Right at the 2:45 mark his singing becomes garbled because (I presume) the surgeon 'touches' a part of the brain involved in singing. His singing recovers later on in the video.

Have a look for yourselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j70on4v3M4E&feature=youtu.be...

tdonson Was the Antikythera Mechanism the world’s first computer? (2007)

YouTube channel of a guy recreating the mechanism:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...

tdonson Crazy Work Hours and Lots of Cameras: a group from Silicon Valley visits China

Fragmented European market; the culture and language differences.

tdonson What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?

On most days toilet paper helps you smear more than it helps you wipe.

For those wanting to try out the bidet without buying one there's always the backcountry bidet [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2x-G7sXVs4

tdonson Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

Your IP Address is Blocked from www.gutenberg.org

We apologize for this inconvenience. Your IP address has been automatically blocked from the address you tried to visit at www.gutenberg.org. This is because the geoIP database shows your address is in the country of Germany.

Diagnostic information:

Your IP address: <redacted>

Referrer URL (if available): http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/latest-covers

Time (GMT): Saturday, 03-Mar-2018 21:19:12 GMT

Why did this block occur?

A Court in Germany ordered that access to certain items in the Project Gutenberg collection are blocked from Germany. Project Gutenberg believes the Court has no jurisdiction over the matter, but until the issue is resolved during appeal, it will comply.

For more information about the German court case, visit PGLAF's information page about the German lawsuit.

For more information about the legal advice Project Gutenberg has received concerning international issues, visit PGLAF's International Copyright Guidance for Project Gutenberg

How can I get unblocked?

All IP addresses in Germany are blocked. This block will remain in place until legal guidance changes.

If your IP address lookup is incorrect

Use the Maxmind GeoIP demo to verify status of your IP address. Project Gutenberg updates its listing of IP addresses approximately monthly.