Hacker News Reader

anthony_ron DRAM thermal issues reach crisis point

we're lucky that this happens at 360 Kelvin and not at 200 Kelvin or even lower.

anthony_ron Largest airship built in United States since 1930s to take shape soon

I do not know what your point is.

But there are lots of cases where people fly cheap commercial drones around an airport, and that is completely unacceptable. It could easily result in a criminal charge and even prison time.

anthony_ron Largest airship built in United States since 1930s to take shape soon

Lol, indeed.

Imagine that you have to explain to drone pilots that even a very small drone is completely unacceptable in an airport vicinity. Yes, your 0.5kg drone can seriously damage the compressor of an engine!

anthony_ron Apple, Google and Microsoft Commit to Expanded Support for FIDO Standard

> Which is rather likely, because why else would big tech companies push this if it didn't benefit them in some way?

They switched to this internally a long time ago which basically eliminated phishing attacks against employees. There are security teams inside those megacorps that have a general objective of reducing the number of account takeovers, and non trivial resources to accomplish that. Not everything is a conspiracy.

Also, I am sure you will be able to stick to just passwords for a pretty long time while the world moves on to cryptographic authentication. I'm not being sarcastic here.

anthony_ron Apple, Google and Microsoft Commit to Expanded Support for FIDO Standard

It's literally the opposite. You "must" have a cryptographic device (a dongle) that is only doing that one thing, authentication. Doesn't have a built in radio (unless for NFC, if you want it), doesn't have any microphone or camera, doesn't store any data beyond what's needed to authenticate, doesn't communicate except to authenticate - bi-directionally, so phishing is no longer a thing, or at least it's a lot harder.

It's very hard to make a privacy case against FIDO. Practically speaking it's one of the best things that happened to privacy&security since the invention of asymmetric cryptography. The deployment of this tech reduces phishing effectiveness to near zero, or in many cases literally zero.

anthony_ron Ask HN: When will car prices normalize?

FWIW: the gas price is about the same in Germany, which has a median yearly income of about $45k.

anthony_ron Ask HN: When will car prices normalize?

LPG powered SUVs are the future.

anthony_ron Ask HN: When will car prices normalize?

Yup. Converted to gallons and the US dollar in Switzerland you have to pay $9.35 for gas (CHF2.3 per liter). Yet there's no shortage of cars on the highways here.

anthony_ron Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

Have you seen what happened in the finance world with respect to Russia recently? Feels to me like it is perfectly possible with the right Zeitgeist. Pretty much all the on/off ramps for Russian money are gone at the moment.

anthony_ron Russian firms rush to open Chinese bank accounts

This.

I don't understand how more people are not catching up to this simple fact that central bank "digital currencies" are nothing more than a by-pass of distributed private banking (brick and mortar + online banks). It's just moving more levers closer to central authorities.

anthony_ron Confessions of a Bitcoin Widow

And, so what?

anthony_ron Peloton – A call for action [pdf]

Half-joking, but yeah. "Managing the board of directors" of course means keeping the board happy, which is done by what ansible wrote. Not just directly trying to talk them out of firing the CEO.

anthony_ron Peloton – A call for action [pdf]

The main job of the CEO is to manage the board of directors (i.e. the shareholders). And the main job of the board of directors is to decide when to fire the CEO.

anthony_ron The dangers of high status, low wage jobs

This is exactly what YouTube does already. In fact I see no reason why Twitter couldn't spill ad money to the content (tweet) creators within the next year or two, creating a similar ecosystem. Maybe the value attributable to individual creators would be too small? Videos are quite a bit bigger than tweets (in terms of what matters most, the eyeball time), after all.

anthony_ron Why are mathematicians so bad at arithmetic? (2017)

Because arithmetic is completely solved and boring, duh.

There was a time when it was at least a little bit interesting, and many mathematicians were actually quite good at it.

anthony_ron Common Jobs in a Medieval City

anthony_ron The Fastest FizzBuzz Implementation

> I'm talking about having a compiler which could produce more optimal code in any given case, or most given cases

Funny coincidence, that's exactly what the vast majority of compiler code is for, with tens (or hundreds) of thousands of man-years of work spent on that.

anthony_ron The Fastest FizzBuzz Implementation

Yeah you could optimize GCC to work really well for those problems, there's a great ROI for the "write something trivial really quickly into /dev/null" class of problems.

Let us know how this goes if you embark on this adventure.

anthony_ron The Fastest FizzBuzz Implementation

You can create an operating system that just displays a static image within milliseconds yourself (shouldn't take you more than a few weeks), it would work even when compiled at -O0.

anthony_ron The Fastest FizzBuzz Implementation

This is a very specific problem that lends itself to some fantastically cpu-friendly optimizations. Doing a single hash-map lookup here on the hot path would kill performance, and let's not even get started on any serious I/O (disk or network) as that would be multiple orders of magnitude slower. Not many problems are just "cat something extremely predictable into /dev/null".

anthony_ron How not to sort by average rating (2009)

And the distance between the two, specifically formula - x/(x+y+1):

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot++-x+%2F%28x+%2B+y...

anthony_ron How not to sort by average rating (2009)

This is cool. But what I usually do is replace x/y with x/(y+5), and hope for the best :). The 5 can be replaced by 3 or 50, depending on what I'm dealing with.

(in less important areas than sorting things by ratings to directly rank things for users; mentally bookmarked this idea for the next time I need something better, as this clearly looks better)

anthony_ron Google Outage in Europe

Indeed. People do not realize just how advanced the reliability infrastructure of those services is. Things like diesel power generators have been baked into cloud datacenters for what, a decade now? Probably longer. Show me your alternative power source when the power goes out (and power does disappear, everywhere, eventually).

anthony_ron Moon’s top layer has enough oxygen to sustain 8B people for 100k years

Yeah, that's what I don't get: if you're going to invest effort and energy into reversing the oxidation of some element, why not choose carbon and decompose CO2? It will require non trivial amounts of energy either way.

anthony_ron US Series I Savings Bonds Now Yielding 7.12%

FYI, normal TIPS have the fixed rate well below zero (which makes the total yield add up to close to where the fixed rates bonds trade at, around 1-2%). These retail instruments are kind of no brainers if their fixed rate is artificially not allowed to drop below zero.

anthony_ron [dead]

> As an expert on the Chinese real estate market (I first heard of Evergrande 3 days ago), I can tell you the situation is very bad.

https://twitter.com/Cokedupoptions/status/143980011582110105...

anthony_ron Are random trading strategies more successful than technical ones?

Win % is a really useless metric in this business, try computing win % for something like long vol strategies (for example things like what Taleb did back in the day), it might come out to 5% or lower and still make money. And because every trade has a counterparty there's plenty of strategies that win 95% or more of the time but eventually lead to ruin. Returns pretty much never have a symmetric distribution.

Computing win % is akin to measuring software quality in terms of number of lines of code - only someone who has no first-hand experience would ever attempt to do that.

anthony_ron The traceroute hand is stealing your data

I would classify it under "art" rather than "shitpost", but yeah.

anthony_ron List of Lists of Lists

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.

https://www.wyliecomm.com/2016/08/quotes-on-list-writing/

https://www.quotetab.com/quotes/about-lists

anthony_ron Gitlab S-1

So what? Most, or at least a lot of, Web documents are pretty much static, but they don't load nearly as fast.

(static, except for the tracking scripts and ads :))