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throwaway812

98 karma · joined September 15, 2013

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throwaway812··on Terra Bella
> Are there any resources that talk about what is a safe number of satellites for different altitudes and the effects of space pollution?

Lots. It tracks radius squared, if not cubed. As altitude gets large (which you need for orbit anyway), you can fit a ton of small satellites safely.

throwaway812··on Unblock US Netflix, absolutely free
The words you are looking for are "losing" and "rogue."
throwaway812··on Introducing Pseudo IPv4
Given that protecting the source IP is not a goal (keyspace is far too small for that), why use something like MD5 when something like CityHash or MurmurHash3 would do?
throwaway812··on Xwayland
Competition with what? Windows, OS X? Xorg?

Edit: Can't seem to reply to child, but Mir isn't really a credible competitor (See: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/03/more-on-why-display-serve... . Unfortunately Mir seems to be mostly NIH; everyone else is cooperating on Wayland.)

throwaway812··on The Next Mission
Tarsnap?
throwaway812··on Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps
Maybe OP means the C# standard library is richer... I'd believe that.
throwaway812··on Coinbase user emails and full names leaked
Presumably the person dumping names and emails (PII/PID) on pastebin has little regard for gag orders. (And no motivation not to reveal such an order, if proof were readily available.)
throwaway812··on Show HN: ffjson: faster json serialization in Go
Awesome, looking forward to that day :). Keep up the great work.
throwaway812··on Coinbase user emails and full names leaked
If they had evidence of that, why wouldn't they have pasted it as well? I'm assuming it's baseless speculation.

Btw, has anyone actually confirmed any of these emails / names are real? I have a coinbase account and am not mentioned in the leak.

throwaway812··on How Everyone Got the Top 1% Wrong
How? They still have gobs of principal lying around making gains. Unless you mean it will help enable more progressive taxation and income redistribution via the federal government?
throwaway812··on Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS: 2nd edition available for preorder
GPLv3 doesn't see very widespread use.

Fedora tracks licenses on a package by package basis. You can fairly easily determine what the license of a library you use is, and recursively examine dependencies to see if there is something objectionable in there.

FreeBSD ships GPLv3 ports (gcc47, ...). So... it's not just smooth sailing there, either.

No need to hate on either platform.

throwaway812··on Show HN: ffjson: faster json serialization in Go
The last time I looked at upb, it only supported parsing, which was a deal-breaker. Have you implemented serializing since then? It's hard to tell from the git log, which is mostly "dump from google internal sources XX-YY-ZZZZ".

I'm very excited about upb! Thanks for your work on it over the years. Do you have any tasks that an outside contributor could help with?

Thanks!

throwaway812··on Pyringe: Debugger capable of attaching to and injecting into Python processes
Yes, sure. GDB-level debugging of Python programs, without something like Pyringe, is pretty useless. So I am excited for the Python-level tool for debugging Python.
throwaway812··on Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS: 2nd edition available for preorder
> The ports selection in FreeBSD is second to none. Linux has nothing close.

[citation needed].

If you mean Linux-just-the-kernel, sure? But that's not really comparable.

Every Linux distro has a collection of 3rd-party packages; neither FreeBSD's 3rd party package integration (ports) nor breadth of software is particularly exceptional in this space.

And FreeBSD doesn't seem to attract as many volunteers to keep its port collection up to date, or at least that has been my experience.

> Lots of imbedded projects are based on BSD and always will be. The insanity of GPL licensing.

Sure. I work on a BSD-derived embedded system at $DAYJOB. But the GPL doesn't prevent Linux use in lots of spaces.

throwaway812··on The Eight Hour Burn (2013)
As long as we're talking about professionals, Usain Bolt can sprint at 27 mph, well above 10 mph :).
throwaway812··on Pyringe: Debugger capable of attaching to and injecting into Python processes
This is super cool. With C programs, you can already attach gdb to a running program and start debugging, without starting the program under the debugger. Before pyringe, you couldn't do the same with Python. This will be very helpful for me at work.
throwaway812··on Linux: Difference between /dev/console , /dev/tty and /dev/tty0
If you try to work on a console in such a mode, it's really spammy and interferes with ... everything. I bet you could get something similar with /dev/console and minicom, or something similar.
throwaway812··on Did an F-15 airplane successfully land with just one wing?
Thanks for explaining, this is new to me. Sounds like the situation was just less bad than the video makes it out to be :).
throwaway812··on Did an F-15 airplane successfully land with just one wing?
Why doesn't the pilot eject and let the plane crash? Is the plane more valuable than the pilot's life? (A damaged plane, no less.)
throwaway812··on Downloading Software Safely Is Nearly Impossible
If you think you're safe: it's the same thing with Linux. Yes, good distros sign their blobs and you can probably verify that with builtin tools.

However, consider how distros generate their signed binaries:

1) A packager downloads a random tarball off the internet, often over HTTP and/or unsigned and unverified.

2) The packager uploads the same tarball to the distro build system (you trust them, right?)

3) The packager's script for building the program or library is executed by the build server (you trust all of the packagers, right? they have implicit root access to your machine during pkg install.)

4) The packager's script likely invokes `./configure` or similar. Now even if you trust the packager, the downloaded source has arbitrary code execution. You verified it, right???

(Not trying to advocate for webcrypto. And I'm a Linux user. But I'm also a packager, and I have some awareness as to how one would go about pwning all users of my distro.)

throwaway812··on A brief history of one line fixes
The logic at the end is still in parody mode. Flawed is the point.
throwaway812··on We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It
I agree with the sentiment, but I think your facts are a bit off and reflect HN insularity. The median 33% household income ("middle class") in the US is $30,000 to $62,500 (household).

Even if you are the sole earner in your household, it is still unlikely that you make less than $62,500. If you do make less than that, ask for a raise. If you don't make less than that, or your combined household income is more than that, you are a member of the upper class, and you should try and remember your privilege. (Hey, life's not so bad.)

throwaway812··on CDC Threat Report: ‘We Will Soon Be in a Post-Antibiotic Era’
GP made no claims about antibiotics and viruses. (S)he was simply going on a tangent about the problems with the anti-vaxx folks.
throwaway812··on LibPhenom, a high-performance C eventing framework from Facebook
Yes, so there's absolutely no reason to use it if you're primarily targeting Linux.
throwaway812··on LibPhenom, a high-performance C eventing framework from Facebook
The library may work, but Grand Central Dispatch, which is the whole point, is really an OS X thing. BSD may have adopted it, not sure. I'm pretty that confident Linux has not.
throwaway812··on This 4×6 index card has all the financial advice you’ll ever need
Yes, >20% is viable for Software Devs. Ask someone making minimum wage with no benefits to save more than 20% of their income and they will laugh at you.
throwaway812··on LibPhenom, a high-performance C eventing framework from Facebook
Functionality: Well, libdispatch doesn't really work outside of OS X, and this is primarily targeted at Linux server apps.

I can't comment on performance.

throwaway812··on Z3: A high-performance theorem prover from Microsoft Research
Did you publish the source anywhere, and if not, are you willing and able to? I'd love to see it.
throwaway812··on Ask HN: What's the most secure cross-platform RNG option?
Just read from `/dev/urandom` (free Unices). It doesn't require any 3rd party libraries, always exists, and has a great track record compared to e.g. OpenSSL.

<editorializing>On Windows (or proprietary Unix), you can't verify the implementation of any option for randomness.</editorializing>