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xevb3k

670 karma · joined February 4, 2017

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xevb3k··on Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
Thank you for your detailed answer.

I understand the reasons better, it’s unfortunate and slightly depressing to me that the community hasn’t been able to come up with a better solution. Particularly as the google analytics approaches involves giving data up to a 3rd party for processing.

xevb3k··on Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
Yes but you’re saying twitter say their metrics are off by a factor of 5 because it’s not running the GA JS. If you wanted to properly investigate that looking at the server logs would probably give a better idea in this case.

I guess with serverless you should be able to see this either with your own logging or perhaps on AWS with Cloudwatch? (no idea as I’ve not used it).

xevb3k··on Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
Why do you (and why do people in general) not use server logs for analytics of this sort?

Seems like it might show requests that failed to get to the point of processing the analytics JS as well as those running adblockers.

xevb3k··on Can moons have moons?
I’ve not heard it used that way, but I could be wrong. There’s possibly also a historical usage in this sense.
xevb3k··on Can moons have moons?
Right, but the word 地球 can only mean the planet Earth, it’s not synonymous with anything else and there’s no room for confusion.

Soil, or ground (on any planet) is a different word. There’s not much room for confusion.

xevb3k··on Ask HN: I am currently the only developer in a startup. What to expect?
Interesting, it’s always been my assumption, and unless everyone is operating in good faith, if don’t have board control (and/or >50% of equity) it’s a possibility that I might well get diluted to nothing.

As such, unless I’m confident that I trust everyone involved, I would value equity quite low (and I’ve certainly been screwed out of equity in the past...)

xevb3k··on Can moons have moons?
In Japanese there’s 地球 which means Earth (this planet), and 土 which means soil.

地 can also mean soil, but it’s a different word from 地球 meaning the planet earth. I don’t think it’s commonly used by itself to mean soil either, but I could be wrong.

xevb3k··on Ask HN: I am currently the only developer in a startup. What to expect?
While the OP has said they have 20% equity. Given the other two founders have a controlling interest, to what extent could they push the OP out and take/reduce their equity?

I’m not saying they would, but I’m wondering how possible it is. Could they vote to redistribute equity, or massively dilute OPs equity and then distribute more equity to themselves for example?

xevb3k··on Graduate Student Solves Quantum Verification Problem
First author should be the person who did the work, that’s pretty strandard. Corresponding author doesn’t always need to be first author.

Honestly this does sound pretty terrible. The student doesn’t have to publish, and you don’t get to misrepresent yourself as first author if they don’t want to.

Really really want to be first author, redo the work yourself. That’s the only way you can claim credit (and responsibility) for having done the work.

xevb3k··on In few years renewable power may become a better economic option
Can it completely satisfy our current energy requirements?

Last I heard, nuclear was the only non-fossil fuel way of doing that. Is that still the case?

xevb3k··on Bloomberg stands by Chinese chip story as Apple, Amazon ratchet up denials
That’s fair enough, I don’t think that process would work here though?

I also don’t understand why you would do that. Given the ceramic part in question doesn’t look like anything that would be on a motherboard, and has been identified as an RF component.

xevb3k··on California's Unconstitutional Gender Quotas for Corporate Boards
If you find evidence of discrimination, you take action. What action exactly is up for debate. You could even go so far as replacing the board.

But not all, all male boards will be caused by discrimination, and adding a few females members will not solve this problem in many cases.

xevb3k··on Bloomberg stands by Chinese chip story as Apple, Amazon ratchet up denials
No it wasn’t? They used to use gold caps.

You could absolutely use a novel manufacturing technique to make something that looks like the picture in the article.

It wouldn’t make much sense to do so, because that part doesn’t even belong on a computer motherboard, it’s an RF component.

xevb3k··on Bloomberg stands by Chinese chip story as Apple, Amazon ratchet up denials
It’s reasonably clear that the chip shown in the article is very unlikely to be any kind of microcontroller/semiconductor.

It’s embedded in ceramic. Such devices need to be fired at very high temperatures which a semiconductor wouldn’t be able to withstand.

xevb3k··on California's Unconstitutional Gender Quotas for Corporate Boards
If a fence is knocked down you fix the fence.

Quotas suggest an approach that works more like “we know some fences are damaged in various ways, one way many of the fences are damaged is that they have water damage. So we’re going to replace 25% of the poles in all fences, with poles resistant to water damage.”

There’s an argument that if you show that there’s been gender discrimination, you should throw out the entire board and put a new one in place using a process more resistant to all forms of discrimination.

But applying a fix without strong evidence that discrimination has taken place does seem lazy, because you’re attempting to apply a blanket fix. It does nothing to address the underlying issues, and tries to apply a fix in cases where no issue exists.

xevb3k··on California's Unconstitutional Gender Quotas for Corporate Boards
Let’s say you expect boards in general to be 50% male/female.

In case where this is not the case, and where it has not been the case for a number of years you might launch an investigation.

It might be that there are reasonable reasons in this instance. For example, the company was cofounded by two women or men, it’s a small company, and the composition of the board has never changed etc.

It might be that the company has a board with frequently changing members, but always selects male members. In that case, it’s easier to argue that discrimination has taken place. At which point you might launch an investigation and apply penalties etc.

xevb3k··on California's Unconstitutional Gender Quotas for Corporate Boards
I find quotas in bad taste, and somewhat lazy.

There is clearly an issue, but if we attempt to fix it with positive discrimination, we just create more issues.

A better way to approach the problem might be increased scrutiny (for discrimination) on boards/companies with significant gender bias, and increased penalties.

This would be harder to implement of course, but might go further to actually solving the issue.

xevb3k··on Supply Chain Security Is the Whole Enchilada, but Who’s Willing to Pay for It?
How much comes from China or Russia?
xevb3k··on Supply Chain Security Is the Whole Enchilada, but Who’s Willing to Pay for It?
I don’t understand this comment.

The USA has a strong semiconductor industry. Probably stronger than China’s. China is traditionally not very strong an semiconductor fabrication.

What they are strong at is PCB assembly. Or rather cheap PCB assembly. You can do that in the USA too, it’s just not as cheap.

I’d guess most military stuff is done in the USA of domestic and mostly non-China made parts.

xevb3k··on 5G Got me Fired
It’s not how things work everywhere I’m sure. But it seems likely in this case. As such, the content doesn’t surprise me, and I would put the blame solely on the author in this case.
xevb3k··on 5G Got me Fired
That maybe the case, but bad enough to get fired over? That’s not clear to me.

The way modern writing works, I would expect he got paid very little for writing this. You’re kind of asked to push out X many blog posts a day, there’s not a huge amount of time for research... or even re-reading/thinking over the implications of your work.

xevb3k··on 5G Got me Fired
I guess we read the article differently. Because he didn’t seem to be saying 5G was dangerous, more that this was the public perception, and that vendors are doing little to manage the PR around this.
xevb3k··on Apple Insiders Say Nobody Knows What’s Going on with Bloomberg's Hack Story
Given the size estimation, it wouldn’t cover the whole footprint.

But... why put it on an unpopulated footprint. Why not just replace the original Quad SPI IC with a backdoored device?

xevb3k··on An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby’s
If that’s the case, I guess Banksy will be laughing even harder...
xevb3k··on Apple Insiders Say Nobody Knows What’s Going on with Bloomberg's Hack Story
I’m mean they could do that too... but why do this weirdly awkward thing described by Bloomberg at all?

It’s not like doing both is extra sure, it’s just weirdly difficult and more easily detectable to do it in the way described.

xevb3k··on An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby’s
I assume they won’t actually have to pay? I’d guess whatever contract their is with the seller also requires that the art is delivered safely to the purchaser.

I wonder what the message is here, or if there is a message beyond the publicity. I guess something about the art having no inherent value...

xevb3k··on Apple Insiders Say Nobody Knows What’s Going on with Bloomberg's Hack Story
Or just replace an existing chip, which is the most logical way to do it...
xevb3k··on Bloomberg’s chip story reveals murky world of national security reporting
And is there anything in that denial that has been shown to be technically incorrect?

My understanding is that there wasn’t involvement from google, that data was extracted without their knowledge from links between data centers.

xevb3k··on Bloomberg’s chip story reveals murky world of national security reporting
Two different stories, about two very different situations. There’s not really much equivalence.

The report contains elements are are near impossible, and has other aspects that are very unlikely.

It has also been denied far more strongly than the Snowden leaks were.

The biggest problem is really why would you do this? Either the report is wrong in significant ways, or it’s not true at all.

The chip they show in the article, is a ceramic package which it would be really hard to embed a semiconductor in (because of the temperatures required to fire the ceramic). It looks like it probably would sit on an alternate footprint for the BCM flash. A ceramic part like that (which they say is for signal conditioning) doesn’t belong at that location anyway.

If your going to develop some weird SMD capacitor sized package for a microcontroller... why not just develop a new BCM serial flash chip embedding the same functionally? At least that way the boards would look visually similar.

So much just doesn’t make sense to me.

xevb3k··on The Big Hack: Statements From Amazon, Apple, Supermicro, Chinese Government
I also feel that the hack described is only borderline technically feasible.

They describe a microcontroller the size of a decoupling capacitor that is installed between the main CPU and main memory (as far as I can tell from the vague description).

I assume this would have to be done without layout changes. On a part of the board that is quite sensitive to layout changes. It just doesn’t seem likely that you’d do a hack like this. You’d need a micro controller or ASIC that was running as fast as main memory. You’d need to make it cope with different kernels... and edit memory such that remote servers could reliablely be contacted.

Why not just swap out some other part? Like the IPMI controller? Or the Ethernet controller? Something that has access to main memory, that would hide the functionality even better, and that would give the attacker more space to work with?

I don’t get it.

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