Hacker News Reader

Mindless2112on ZFS won’t save you: fancy filesystem fanatics need to get a clue about bit rot

As someone who has lost some files to a silently malfunctioning hard disk in the past, I think I'll stick with ZFS. Checksumming, RAID-Z, and periodic scrubbing would have saved my files. Even having backups did not -- after all, what good is a bit-for-bit copy of a corrupted file?

(On a side note, ZFS -- at least OpenZFS -- doesn't support any CRC algorithms for use as its checksum.)

Mindless2112on China holds drill to shut down 'harmful' websites

In the US, if you don't like some company's content policies, you can, with a bit of effort, start your own company. (Whether it can generate revenue enough to support itself is a separate problem.)

In China, if you don't like the government's policies, you can try starting your own government. Good luck.

Mindless2112on Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture

An example of speech that is actually illegal in the U.S. -- saying "[The President] ought to be killed. It is a wonder some one has not done it already. If I had an opportunity, I would do it myself." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threatening_the_President_of_t...

Mindless2112on The rise of passive investors

Vanguard is structured as a mutual company; it is owned by funds managed by the company, and is therefore owned by its customers. [1] So its owners have no incentive to increase fees in order to increase profits.

Actually, Vanguard has been sued over this [2][3] -- the claim essentially being that Vanguard ought to owe taxes on those profits that it didn't earn from fees that it didn't charge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanguard_Group [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/your-money/vanguard-a-cha... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11081550

Mindless2112on FCC Takes Stronger Aim at Robocalls

Somebody should rent one of these robocalling centers and give them a list that consists entirely of phone numbers of US congress members. They'd find effective regulation in a hurry.

Mindless2112on Why market competition has not brought down health care costs

> Try having a pre-existing condition before ACA - no one will insure you because you're too expensive, or your premiums go ridiculously high.

Insurance is paying someone (the insurer) to take ownership of a risk from you (the insured) by compensating you if the risk is realized. If the risk has already been realized then, of course, no insurer will be willing to take ownership of it for less than the cost of the compensation.

The system we have today can hardly be considered "insurance".

Mindless2112on A parametric version of the Spectral font

Not font related, but I'm imagining this -- http://hackaday.com/2010/10/15/window-curtain-moves-to-scree...

Mindless2112on Casper, Mattress Maker, Raises $170M and Plans I.P.O

That's irritating. I bought a Hyphen mattress based primarily on a comparison of the mattress reviews on Sleepopolis. Kudos to him for fighting the lawsuit.

Mindless2112on What made Bell Labs special? (2012) [pdf]

I think the explanation of the ideal funding philosophy that I've seen here before is "Fund people, not projects."

Mindless2112on Photos from Inside North Korea (2014)

The cigarettes section of the "Privileged Store" [1]. At least Kim Jong-un cares about your lungs. (Also, the electricity goes off and nobody bats an eye [2]. They must have the POS computer on a battery.)

[1] https://youtu.be/uLvJgOgW4hk?t=245 [2] https://youtu.be/uLvJgOgW4hk?t=505

Mindless2112on Photos from Inside North Korea (2014)

> Virtually no one is walking with anyone else.

They're walking for transportation. Consider that in the US most cars on the road have only one occupant.

Mindless2112on Why I moved from Rust to simpler, cleaner C

Also, an issue created today "Rewrite Lily in Rust" [1]. Not sure if it's just the other half of the joke or not.

[1] https://github.com/FascinatedBox/lily/issues/294

Mindless2112on 16-bit math look-up tables – the unexpected power of scaled-integer math

> In real analysis, the projectively extended real line [...] is the extension of the number line by a point denoted ∞.

> The extended complex numbers consist of the complex numbers C together with ∞.

It may be an "extended number", but it is not a number.

Mindless2112on 16-bit math look-up tables – the unexpected power of scaled-integer math

I think I would probably choose to have one NaN rather than +/-Infinity. Infinity itself is not a number -- it's just a special NaN.

Mindless2112on 16-bit math look-up tables – the unexpected power of scaled-integer math

Unums are unlikely to gain much usage. Posits[1][2], also by Gustafson, are a more reasonable alternative to IEEE-754 floating point (but will still have a difficult time displacing IEEE-754, if they can at all).

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/170201-slides.... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0Y1uAA-2Y

Mindless2112on Gcam, the computational photography project that powers the Google Pixel camera

Marc Levoy (who the article is about) gave a lecture series [1] at Google about digital photography.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7ddpXYvFXspUN0N-gObF...

Mindless2112on Why WebAssembly Is Faster Than Asm.js

> indexes are LEB128s

This article is promoting how fast WebAssembly is to parse (and no doubt it is faster than JS), and yet LEB128 is a slower-to-parse representation than "prefix varint" with the same cost in bits [1][2]. It seems the designers didn't actually care what was faster. [3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263378 [2] https://github.com/stoklund/varint [3] https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/601

Mindless2112on In the Future, We’ll All Wear Spider Silk

> North Face Will Start Selling Parkas Made from Fake Spider Silk for $1,000 [1]

...a bit pricey at this point. Maybe spider-silk-enhanced fabrics would be more reasonable.

[1] http://fortune.com/2016/05/11/north-face-fake-spider-silk/

Mindless2112on Andy Weir’s Best Seller ‘The Martian’ Gets a Classroom-Friendly Makeover

Kids need models of appropriate behavior. They don't need models of inappropriate behavior -- they've already got it.

Mindless2112on SHA-1 collider: Make your own colliding PDFs

> PDF and JPEG

Add ELF [1] and Zip [2] to the list. Many common file formats have areas where you can insert an arbitrary chunk of data without significant side effects.

[1] ELF allows for a very flexible layout, and is almost certainly vulnerable to this length-extension-based attack.

[2] Zip allows a comment at the end of the central directory. Since the central directory is at the end of the file, I don't know if it's vulnerable to this exact attack.

Mindless2112on HTTPS adoption has reached the tipping point

I'll believe we've hit the tipping point when I type "example.com" into the browser address bar and it takes me to https://example.com rather than http://example.com.

Mindless2112on What’s up with Firefox?

Google suggests that the correct term is "numeronym" [1].

> According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was "S12n", the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. By 1985, colleagues who found Jan's name unpronounceable often referred to him verbally as "S12n" (ess-twelve-en). The use of such numeronyms became part of DEC corporate culture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym

Mindless2112on Updates to our Google Voice apps

When Google does these rollouts, you can usually find the new APK on APKMirror [1]. (If you sideload the APK and it ask you if you want to upgrade the app then you can be sure that the signature matches the one used to sign the previous version.)

[1] http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/google-voice/google-...

Mindless2112on Affordable Care

True, but establishing residency is at least some barrier against exploitation. I suppose it sorta breaks down when you try to determine whether a homeless person is a resident of the state. :/

Mindless2112on Affordable Care

I'm sure there are bright enough legal minds in California to construct something that both legal and effectively equivalent for healthcare.

Mindless2112on Affordable Care

As far as I can tell, this only addresses benefits based on length of residency. What about immediate residency?

Mindless2112on Affordable Care

Just charge out-of-state patients the difference -- like how out-of-state tuition is more than in-state tuition at state-run universities.