HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

chebucto

121 karma · joined January 23, 2013

submissionscomments
chebucto··on Gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger observed by LIGO and Virgo
What happens to that energy, though? Energy is conserved, even with gravitational waves, correct?

So, what happens to the energy - does some of it get converted into 'normal' potential energy by changing the (amount of gravity? gravitational fields?) of the stuff that it passes through - the weak interaction that you refer to?

And, if it interacts very weakly, does all of the energy eventually get used up this way - do GWs get 'used up' before they travel across the universe?

(Probably a meaningless question): can GWs hit the edge of the universe, and if so, what happens then?

chebucto··on Why are all Windows drivers dated June 21, 2006?
Sign microsoft drivers with the microsoft key. Give MS signed drivers a lower rank than all other drivers.
chebucto··on HTTPS on NYTimes.com
Your mention of how it was 'impossible with HTTPS' to inject ads into web traffic made me recall how, two years ago, Lenovo shipped laptops with software ('Superfish') that injected ads into encrypted webpages:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/19/superfish_lenovo_spy...

Lenovo got approximately $250,000 for installing the malware:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/02/27/lenovo...

chebucto··on The Dropbox hack is real
This problem has been noted for some time. Past articles on the subject have shown how the various requirements for passwords come about through a combination of limitations imposed by the system they're being used on, or through misguided attempts at making things easier for users.

I wonder if there has ever been an attempt through a forum like RFCs or ISO to define a worldwide (or at least latin char set) standard for password requirements. Based on what i've seen in forums like this, there seems to be fairly broad acceptance that allowing a large number of characters from a character set with as few limitations as possible bests serves the interest of security. The thorniest issue would likely be about balancing requirements for increased complexity (eg capitals and lowercase, numbers, etc) with ease of use.

chebucto··on When Disney Got Adult and Trippy
Interstella 5555, an hour-long anime movie made to accompany Daft Punk's excellent album, 'Discovery', fits the bill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hVFTUFSdIs

chebucto··on We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership
Your post was rude, misrepresented GP's argument, and did not contradict any assertion made in GP's post.

GP correctly argued that artists have always created, whether or not they were granted rights under a system of copyright law. He did not focus on or advocate a return to the system of artist patronage from the 16th century.

chebucto··on The problem of fake gold bars (2012)
This same problem happened to the Ethiopian central bank. One batch, which had been bought from a trader, was discovered to be fake fairly quickly; another batch of faked gold, seized from smugglers, had been in their vaults for years.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7294665.stm

chebucto··on Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move
As he said, 'more than Emacs is at stake here.'.[1]

I presume this refers to Bazaar's status as part of the GNU project, and that RMS did not want to write off part of GNU without being certain he needed to.

Regardless, he has since OKd the switch from bzr:

I don't insist that Emacs should stay with bzr. I chose to support bzr because it was still a contender at the time. [2]

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-03/msg00... [2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-01/msg00...

edit: formatting

chebucto··on Canada's top court has overturned all restrictions on prostitution
examples, please
chebucto··on Nmap team releases 5 gigapixel favicon map
Slashdot wouldn't be slashdot if it had kept growing for the past ten years; there are only so many nerds in the world.

Anyway, Slashdot's icon is still bigger than ycombinator.com's. :)

chebucto··on Dinosaur asteroid 'sent life to Mars'
Race to Mars, a 4-part miniseries by the Discovery Channel, is also worth while. The spacecraft and lander are based on existing ideas for trips to Mars. The physics in it are depicted accurately, as far as I could tell. Problems that arise seemed plausible, too. The interactions of the crew are well done, and aren't hammed up for dramatic effect.
chebucto··on Show HN: I made an HN for the financial industry
It is close in pronunciation to 'wanker news'.

Maybe 'Broker News' or 'Teller News'?

chebucto··on The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998
Hand written, with a little comment from the author at the top of each page.

'Model Rocketry is fun and educational.' (http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/tunes/tunes.ht...)

'Oy, am I tired.' (http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/souvenirs/souv...)

chebucto··on The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)
This:

"In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988.

Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it. "

is contradicted by this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz

"... settlement of the lawsuit ... under which ... PKWARE paid SEA to obtain a license that allowed the distribution of PKWARE's ARC-compatible programs until January 31, 1989, after which PKWARE would not license, publish or distribute any ARC compatible programs or utilities that process ARC compatible files.

...

After the lawsuit, PKWARE released one last version of his PKARC and PKXARC utilities under the new names "PKPAK" and "PKUNPAK", and from then on concentrated on developing the separate programs PKZIP and PKUNZIP, which were based on new and different file compression techniques."

Wiki also says

"The SEA vs. PKWARE dispute quickly expanded into one of the largest controversies the BBS world ever saw."

Any greybeards care to comment?

chebucto··on NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel
I may have missed it, but I'm still waiting to hear whether the assumption about the 'five eyes' is true: whether the signals intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia & NZ spy on each others' citizens, and share that data with one another, in order to circumvent domestic spying restrictions. That is, whether the NSA spies on Canadians and gives that information to the Canadian government, while at the same time the CSE spies on Americans and gives that information to the American government.
chebucto··on After NSA's XKeyscore, Wikipedia Switches to HTTPS
DDG defaults to HTTPS links wherever possible; its like having HTTPS-everywhere in your search engine.
chebucto··on Show HN: CoreOS, a Linux distro for containers
I had the same question. I was eventually plopped here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system-level_virtual...

"Operating system-level virtualization is a server virtualization method where the kernel of an operating system allows for multiple isolated user-space instances, instead of just one. Such instances (often called containers, VEs, VPSs or jails) may look and feel like a real server, from the point of view of its owner. On Unix systems, this technology can be thought of as an advanced implementation of the standard chroot mechanism. In addition to isolation mechanisms, the kernel often provides resource management features to limit the impact of one container's activities on the other containers."

chebucto··on The Guardian Moves to .com Domain
The UK has a similar privilege with postage stamps. They were the first to use stamps, and because of that they don't need to put the name of their country on their stamps:

"... on May 6, the Penny Black became the world's first postage stamp in use.

The stamp was originally for use only within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and as such was in effect initially a local stamp. For this reason the name of the country was not included within the design, a situation which continued by agreement with foreign post offices, provided the sovereign's effigy appeared on the stamp. Envelopes sold with postage paid did not include this, so were marked with the country's name. In 1951, the special commemorative issue for the Festival of Britain included the name "Britain" incidentally. It could therefore be said that the name of the country then appeared for the first time on a stamp of the UK, although the word "British" had appeared on British Empire Exhibition commemorative stamps of 1924."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postage_stamps_and_postal_hist...

chebucto··on Student says he was unwitting drug mule, sues Ford
Good points, though there should be some steps manufacturers could take. They could check for unusual usage patterns, much like credit card companies do.

The article doesn't specify but does imply that, in this case, the dealer in question made more PIN requests than is normal. If so, Ford should have seen that and investigated.

chebucto··on Ethernet Turns 40
FTFA:

"“In 1973, the Internet [which at that time was basically the ARPANET] on a good day ran at 50 kb/s,” Metcalfe reflected in his oral history. “Ethernet ran at 2.94 megabits per second.” Over the years, people urged Metcalfe to round the number up to 3. He always resisted, as a matter of emphasis: If one rounds 2.94 Mb to 3 Mb, the rounding error is more than 50 kb/s. “Ethernet’s round-off error was bigger than Internet,” said Metcafe. “That’s how fast Ethernet was running.”"

chebucto··on NASA Rejection Letter to Woman in 1962 Was Blunt
Funny story, my grandfather was an engineering grad who joined the RCAF during WW2. He survived the war, and soon afterwards - I presume during the Gemini recruitment drive - heard that NASA was looking for people with, basically, his CV - technical/engineering background with piloting skills.

So, he applied, but was rejected. The reason? He was an alien, and NASA could not hire aliens. Seriously.

chebucto··on Why are underground parking garages hot?
Ventilation is a major factor, at least on hot days.

How does the outside air temperature affect the temperature of underground parking lots? Are they as hot or less hot during the winter?

CO is deadly; air must be recycled very quickly. All else being equal, it seems like ventilation would bring the facility to outside ambient temperature quickly.

http://www.mobilecalibrationservices.com/Ventilation_for_enc...

"For enclosed parking facilities, ANSI/ ASHRAE Standard 62-1989, Ventilation for Acceptable Indoor Air Quality specifies a fixed ventilation rate of below 7.62 L/s·m2 (1.5 cfm/ft2) of gross floor area.2 Therefore, a ventilation flow of about 11.25 air changes per hour is required for garages with 2.5 m (8 ft) ceiling height. However, some of the model code authorities specify an air change rate of four to six air changes per hour. ..."

chebucto··on France Has A PRISM-Like Program With Thousands Of Trillions Of Metadata Elements
Ack, you're right. My French teachers would not be impressed.
chebucto··on France Has A PRISM-Like Program With Thousands Of Trillions Of Metadata Elements
The headline of TFA says "Millions Of Trillions"

The headline of TFA's TFA (the source article) says

"La DGSE collecte ainsi des milliards de milliards de données".

That translates to 'millions of millions' pieces of data, or on the order of 10^12 (trillions in short scale) pieces of data.

chebucto··on Making the web fun again
Easily solved with webrings and pages of links.
chebucto··on This is a web page
Many sites, including most home pages (remember those?) had a page of links, a small curated set of links[1]. Ooh, and guestbooks! Thousands and thousands of guestbooks!

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19991022011955/http://www.geociti...

chebucto··on The Destruction of the Web
Similarly, self-citation is a known issue.

http://www.rogerclarke.com/SOS/SCSP-09.html

chebucto··on Larry Page addresses PRISM
He did not say

"We only give data to the government in response legal requests about named individuals."

chebucto··on Buttons with built-in loading indicators
I love http://hakim.se/experiments/html5/keylight/03/
chebucto··on A new Gmail inbox
Or by size, though I strongly suspect that is by design, to better make you use up your quota.
Page 1 of 2Next →