HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

almostnormal

1,065 karma · joined February 26, 2022

submissionscomments
almostnormal··on The unstallable plane that stalled
CS-SC251c in the EU.
almostnormal··on [dead]
> start by saying "PAN PAN" or MAYDAY (depends on the country).

In which country are those not priority 2 and priority 1 messages? Or is a non-pilot flying is a different problem depending on the country?

almostnormal··on When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
The market does. New stuff needs to be sold every year, and needs to be some amount faster to find a buyer. The cost of development is minimized while still reaching that goal, limiting the gain to no more than necessary.
almostnormal··on Some Fritz!Box modems might have been hijacked
FritzBoxes are used as voip server/bpx, printer server, nas, and home automation. And probably more. (German) telcos provide specific FritzBox configuation instructions (select correct sub-branch of provider and contract kind), adding the quest to get real connection data to the attempt to migrate to anything standardized.

Switching to something else is not as easy as buying a new modem for most normal people.

almostnormal··on All web browsers on iOS are just Safari with different design
Enforcing webkit prevents websites from going back to "best viewed with internet explorer" today just with IE replaced by "any broweser using chromium".

I don't use apple, but I do appreciate the suffering of limited choice their users endure for the effect of higher diversity. Thank you, iphone users.

almostnormal··on The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists
> This post is an introduction to the idea and then as a Part 2 for actions to take.

Thanks for mentioning it, I missed the link to part 2.

I don't think I can see the connection between the two parts though. Part 1 places people on two axis "cares" and "conflicts", with the largest number high on "cares" and low on "conflict". It seemed high on "cares" is desirable, and that getting more people to voice their oppinions (higher on "conflict") would be an improvement.

Part 2 puts people on a single axis of how likely they are going to embed clean-up changes in their PRs. This is unlikely to be the "conflict" axis from part 1. If it is the "cares" axis, 75% would already show the desired behavior, with not much untapped potential remaining. Part 2 then continues by asking people about their oppinions. With most people on the lower half of the part 1 "conflict" axis it is surprising that everyone does even have an oppinion.

I'll place myself high on the "conflict" axis with this: Clean-up should not be hidden in other PRs. It increases time needed for review and risk for collisions. It also increases the effort required for an analysis of the history in a distant future. Separate PRs for clean-up.

almostnormal··on Thermoelectric Cooling
> But if you were to heat the PV cell to that same temperature as the surface of the sun [...]

Much easier to replace the sun by some other source of EM-waves of suitable wave length and put it into a freezer, below the temperature of the cell.

How does the wave poking some electron to a higher state remember the temperature of its source?

almostnormal··on Dune ornithopters flap their blades in the wrong plane for vertical takeoff
The forward wings produce forward-high to rear-low airflow, while the rear wing produces a rear-high to forward-low flow. Those join in the middle to a top-down flow.
almostnormal··on Device stopped working because your medical prescription has expired
Website has stopped working... because it has been posted on HN?
almostnormal··on XZ backdoor story – Initial analysis
> Here’s what I don’t get: why the many layers of obfuscation in the build phase?

For a one of its kind deployment it would probably not matter. However, deploying to multiple targets using the same basic approach would allow all of them to be found once one was discovered. With some mildly confsing but different scripting for each target systematic detection of others becomes more difficult.

almostnormal··on Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness
> US companies have a qualified right to free speech

There doesn't even seem to be much speech of the companies running the platforms on their own platforms. All they do is quote their users.

almostnormal··on How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
The solution is easy: Create a small company to own the property. That company can be sold much more easily than the property itself. It also avoids the tax on propery purchase.
almostnormal··on The xz sshd backdoor rabbithole goes quite a bit deeper
Maybe something could be built to put more eyeballs on things.

A kind of online-tool that collects the sources to build some relevant distributions, a web front-end to show a random piece of code (filtered by language, probability to show inreasing by less-recently/frequently/qualified viewed) to a volunteering visitor to review. The reviewer leaves a self assesment about their own skills (feed back into selection probability) and any potential findings. Tool-staff double-checks findings (so that the tool does not create too much noise) and forwards to the original authors (bugs) or elsewhere (backdoors).

A bit like wikipedias show random page.

almostnormal··on Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images
Do car insurances pay the full price for crashed old cars? If roofs are designed with a similarly limited expected useful life lower payout would make sense like for cars?
almostnormal··on Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media
I do remember YT video responses did exist, but I haven't seen any in a long time. Google found this [0] 15 years old video explaining how to do it. According to the comment section it is historical. Video replies no longer exist.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93Q5ChkkCnc

almostnormal··on Botswana threatens to deport 20k elephants to Germany
Part of the "offer" is that they must live their own lives freely in nature. I guess that implies that there's no maintenance cost for them. Cost to maintain nature on the other hand...
almostnormal··on Daylight Saving Time is a perfect test for UI designer
In the EU the grid prioritizes frequency over voltage. If production is slightly below load, voltage is decreased, not frequency. If things go really bad and frequency drops, too, they'll fix that by running at a slighly higher frequency later. Clocks that have been fixed in the meantime require to be fixed a second time.

A deviation of 6 minutes was reached and fixed in 2018.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/european-grid-di...

I have no idea if that kind of strategy is applied elsewhere in the world.

almostnormal··on Daylight Saving Time is a perfect test for UI designer
Kitchen appliances don't contain real clocks that keep time autonomously, but simply use the frequency of the power grid. So the solution is not to change the time but the frequency.

During some hours of the night increase/decrease the frequency to let the "clocks" run faster/slower, so they gradually adjust for the next day.

That could even be stretched out over multiple days, maybe two weeks, which would it make much easier for humans to adjust, too.

almostnormal··on Daylight Saving Time is a perfect test for UI designer
Use case: Please cook my food for 12 minutes at 600W to be ready to eat at 12:30.

An alternative could be to let the user do the math, and change it to "Please start cooking in 3h27min for 12min at 600W".

almostnormal··on Meta's Onavo VPN removed SSL encryption of competitor's analytics traffic
Oftentimes, it's not about security but about circumventing censorship. A cheap VPS comes with a fixed IP located in one fixed part of the world. Many VPN providers allow switching.
almostnormal··on Xz: Can you spot the single character that disabled Linux landlock?
Does autotools compile only, or try to link? There's no main().
almostnormal··on XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
Why did they decide to create a backdoor, instead of using a zeroday like everyone else?

Why did they implement a fully-featured backdoor and attempted to hide the way it is deployed, instead of deploying something innocent-looking that might as well be a bug if detected?

These must have been conscious decisions. The reasons might provide a hint what the goals might have been.

almostnormal··on Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
It is not about third party or not, but what it is used for. Consent may be required even if there are no cookies at all.
almostnormal··on Debloat non-rooted Android devices
Enterprise edition, maybe? The keyboard itself does not seem to have a privacy policy ("about" shows intellectual properties and open source licenses), but the voice-input has. Third-party options are disabled by default.

But even with everything disabled (predictive text, spell checker (as may be obvious reading this), ...), it does cause network traffic.

Any login-data ever used can now be considered leaked. Great.

almostnormal··on How the biggest plane would supersize wind energy
GGGP was suggesting use of an airship.
almostnormal··on How the biggest plane would supersize wind energy
The outer half is just a giant wing-tip, increasing efficiency but not producing lift.

It would need half the turbines to turn the other way around to have left/right wings, doubling tooling cost for production.

And it would need a runway of appropriate width, but maybe they could be mounted at significant v-shape.

Return trip not on the ground. The fuselage, engines, ... would still be massive, but with a set of small "normal" wings.

almostnormal··on How the biggest plane would supersize wind energy
> Second problem landing strips, which also are limited (limited length, limited width).

Direct-to-tower delivery. Removes the need for transport on the ground for the last miles and the need for a crane.

almostnormal··on Harvard concluded that a dishonesty expert committed misconduct
> As they say, "Dog bites man isn't a story; man bites dog is."

The headline is just making fun of theory and practice. If some is a murder expert, is that some one who understands murder or someone highly qualified to kill people?

Therefore, the title is about a "dishonesty expert" matching the practice, not about a "honesty expert", which could be replaced by any other field.

almostnormal··on 3D printed titanium structure shows supernatural strength
From a certain point of view repairing is fixing things that are literally broken, which involves glueing, welding, screwing, ...

Replacing parts is not repairing from that point of view, even if at a macroscopic level it returns something back to working condition.

almostnormal··on I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18
It has std in the comment if the code it generates.

It doesn't like to talk about concepts, confusing them with conception (biology).

← PreviousPage 3 of 9Next →