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barathr

1,435 karma · joined January 12, 2021

invisv.com
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barathr··on Obscura: VPN that can't log your activity
Sounds good.
barathr··on Obscura: VPN that can't log your activity
Happy to discuss further if it's of interest.
barathr··on Obscura: VPN that can't log your activity
As others have pointed out, this is like Apple iCloud Private Relay, and other multi-hop privacy systems that have been built on and off over the last several decades (Tor included).

We wrote a research paper on the general principle a few years ago: https://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2022/papers/hotnets2...

barathr··on The future of solar doesn't track the sun
Tom Murphy shows in his excellent book on energy that over-tilting your solar panels by 15 degrees is a good idea (Table 13.2):

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#section.13.4

Basically take your latitude and add 15 degrees and that'll get you good annual coverage.

barathr··on A Passion for Fruit
People have also been building ingenious systems for growing fruit for a long time:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/fruit-walls-urban-...

barathr··on Trust, 2-Party Relays, and QUIC
We've found that this decoupling (multi-party) approach is a good way to improve privacy in a bunch of networking contexts -- here's a paper we wrote a few years ago with colleagues at Fastly and Cloudflare on the topic:

https://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2022/papers/hotnets2...

barathr··on PeerAuth, TOTP-based peer authentication in the post-truth world
This is really clever and elegant. Thanks for building it.
barathr··on Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for Exploring Scenarios
Sure, here's what Claude generated (all the usual caveats apply): https://pastebin.com/Xbs2qasH
barathr··on Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for Exploring Scenarios
This is a neat idea, and one that I frequently find a need for. (I was curious how it'd work, so I copied and pasted the description and screenshot of the UI into Claude and in two prompts it built a working React app prototype.)
barathr··on Libraries and Well-Being: A Case Study from The New York Public Library
I highly recommend Klinenberg's Palaces for the People, which he named after Carnegie's phrase for libraries. Here's an interview he did on 99% Invisible:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/palaces-for-the-peopl...

barathr··on Threlte 8
Any chance that Threlte makes it easy to do view-independent rendering / ray tracing? Basically if you have many surfaces in your scene and you want to not just visualize the scene but find out how much light is arriving at any surface (even ones the camera currently can't see), is that something Threlte enables?

I'm interested in computing light that trees receive and want to be able to visualize it but also have even leaves that aren't in view to continue to receive light during the simulation.

barathr··on NSA releases 1982 Grace Hopper lecture
Amazing how prescient her talk is on so many levels -- things that in 1982 there were likely few folks really thinking about deeply and holistically.
barathr··on Seeing Like a Data Structure
What we're hoping for (and is the theme of the piece) is that we are and can and should be both and more -- taxable citizens, members of illegible communities, and many more things. It's a both-and perspective -- life is and should be composed of many overlapping systems.
barathr··on Seeing Like a Data Structure
It's a general-audience essay, not one targeted towards the HN community. So unfortunately there's little opportunity to delve any deeper into what specific data structures are involved in holding the data and the difference that might make. There are data structures underneath in the excerpt you pulled out and they're so common in code that we don't even notice it. (Even something as simple as this: certain data structures are better for finding recent / first items and others are better for finding "top" / largest items. That has implications that ripple upward and can skew what users are shown.) It would be nice to consider the differences in how different data structures store data and their broader implications.
barathr··on Seeing Like a Data Structure
We started writing this essay about 3 years ago (and first read Seeing Like a State about 15 years ago -- it's a book that should be read and re-read many times). It takes time to write something this long, and if I could have I would have kept editing it for another year.
barathr··on Seeing Like a Data Structure
I like the idea -- I hope someone gives it a try. Like combining our essay with "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" and CLRS.
barathr··on The United States of Avocado
Yeah, desalination is perfectly aligned with solar energy availability both on a daily and annual cycle: More water needs during the day, more sun during the day. More water needs during the summer, more sun during the summer.
barathr··on The United States of Avocado
GEM isn't worth growing -- it's not that good of a fruit. Hass does just fine even in high heat. Just plant the tree in a spot that gets some afternoon shade.
barathr··on The United States of Avocado
Easy to water a backyard tree with a laundry to landscape greywater setup.
barathr··on The United States of Avocado
They usually flower in Spring, whenever that is for you. It's cultivar and temperature dependent. Some varieties like Carmen will even flower multiple times a year (though Carmen isn't one of the more cold hardy types). Bonny Doon is a good cultivar to consider if you get some mild frost each year. If you go below 20 degrees, though, you'd need to protect the tree during the cold snap.
barathr··on The United States of Avocado
Yeah, that can be a separate issue with any fruit tree. There are a bunch of options, but it depends on how much effort you want to put in. (Though all the options are worth it compared to buying fruit from the store.)
barathr··on The United States of Avocado
I've grown and grafted Avocado trees in both Northern and Southern California. Hass, Reed, and many other good types will fruit well in Redwood City and virtually all of the Bay Area.

The only areas that can't grow Avocados are the Sierras. It's even possible to grow them in Humboldt:

https://www.epicenteravocados.com/varieties/version-2-2/

barathr··on The United States of Avocado
Most folks who live in California can grow more avocados than they can possibly eat. If you don't have a tree, you should get one. I would highly recommend against any of the varieties listed in this article. Your best bet is Hass -- grown at home it's way better than what you get at the store -- or Reed. Check out your local California Rare Fruit Growers chapter for more rare varieties that do well in your area.
barathr··on ResearchAgent: Iterative Research Idea Generation Using LLMs
This strikes me as similar to Cargo Cult Science.

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

https://metarationality.com/upgrade-your-cargo-cult

barathr··on Hacking a CTF: Do not use ECB mode for encryption
Exciting to hear that about OCB -- I hadn't been keeping track of the expiration. It's great that there's now a widely-usable, single-pass, block-cipher-only authenticated encryption mode.
barathr··on Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput (L4S) Internet Service: RFC 9330
Bob Briscoe has been on this line of thought for a long time. I'd recommend reading a couple of his classics on the topic, including:

http://www.sigcomm.org/sites/default/files/ccr/papers/2007/A...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1080091.1080124

barathr··on AI and Trust
That's a different use and meaning of the word trust. The essay is specifically talking about the difference between interpersonal trust (the sort of trust that might be captured by a poll about whether people trust businesses vs. government) and societal trust (which is almost invisible -- it's what makes for a "high trust" or "low trust" society, where things just work vs. every impersonal interaction is fraught with complications).
barathr··on Need a PRNG? Use a CSPRNG
Even simpler than implementing a cryptographic PRNG yourself, just use /dev/urandom, which will provide an infinite, non-blocking stream of cryptographically-strong pseudorandom bytes. All platforms currently have known-good implementations of /dev/urandom -- Linux uses ChaCha and MacOS and BSDs use Bruce Schneier's Fortuna.
barathr··on Show HN: ChatGPT for Med-School and Healthcare
Nope:

> Q: Red right eye in the afternoon

In the text, it is mentioned that the symptoms and findings that can lead to the diagnosis of acute appendicitis include:

    Abdominal pain, initially in the periumbilical area and then migrating to the right lower quadrant
    Nausea and vomiting
    Anorexia
    Low-grade fever
    Pain with abdominal palpation and rebound tenderness in the right lower quadrant
    Increased white blood cell count with increased neutrophils and C-reactive protein
These symptoms and findings, along with diagnostic tests such as abdominal ultrasound or CT scans, can help confirm the diagnosis of acute appendicitis.
barathr··on Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model
We might ask ourselves at some point: if the point of simple text prediction is to speed up text entry, and not generate large amounts of text from scratch, then that's a sign the input interfaces are the bottleneck. If we had a way to get text from our brains to the computer faster, we wouldn't need this kind of prediction.
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