HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dexen

5,397 karma · joined April 6, 2009

“namespace resolution and algorithm composition are creative metaoperations

8½

return -ENOCOMPREHEND;

submissionscomments
dexen··on Rules for Intuitive UX
>Why can't native dropdowns have an integrated search?

At least in Firefox, the normal <select> combobox does search by prefix matching the values of <option> tags as you type.

However it's pretty hard -nigh impossible?- to make a good globally generic search widget. Different datasets warrant widely differing matching rules (prefix matching vs. any place matching vs. any word matching; OR search vs AND search; case sensitivity; i18n concerns; non-alphanumeric characters).

dexen··on China Missiles Could Overwhelm U.S. Military in Asia in ‘Hours’, Says Think Tank
>Weapons to defeat US' carrier advantage

Snark first: weapons[1] to defeat rockets and free-falling bombs have been operational for quite a while now. Next gen (laser) is being made operational; both shipboard versions and air versions for the CAP. Next next gen (railgun) is on the horizon, but still uncertain.

Serious reply: a carrier is a highly mobile, flexible airport. Like any other major fleet element, it's a threat in being, and best used that way. Might even be best used by always being held beyond radar horizon, to keep the opposing forces spread thin and deployed overtime, preventing any transports from resupplying the enemy troops deployed to Taiwan.

A carrier is also by its nature an anchor point for a whole battle group, with flexible capabilities of long range detection, jamming, attack, and defense, including major ASW threat. It can also make a 300 mile dash at 30kn to deliver several dozen F35 to an island. An overnight miracle.

[1] anti-rockets and CIWS

dexen··on China Missiles Could Overwhelm U.S. Military in Asia in ‘Hours’, Says Think Tank
The much feared cold-war era 'Missile Gap' turned out to be mostly a myth[1], based off of extrapolation form incomplete data and considering worst case over best.

That's not to disrespect the opponent; both historical USSR and present day China pack quite a punch. It warrants careful approach rather than outright panic.

[1] e.g., https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2011-05/missile-gap-myth-its...

dexen··on China Missiles Could Overwhelm U.S. Military in Asia in ‘Hours’, Says Think Tank
>How well situated is the US to do a cross-Pacific amphibious invasion of Taiwan?

Parking an invasion+battle fleet off of Taiwan's coast would probably lead to huge US ship losses to Chinese missiles.

However, island hopping campaign is a thing. Islands make for good unsinkable carriers.

Assuming war isn't concluded permanently in a couple months[1], the real advantage is self-sufficiency in regards to raw materials (especially oil[2]) and ability to ramp up and then build out military production. High tech is secondary issue, and would be only slightly on the US' side. Probably the most important advantage would be in submarines and to extent in carriers, again as it was historically. Lastly, the presumable advantage in comms crypto protection, and codebreaking/backdooring could make or break any long term war, by repeatedly giving better starting positions before each battle or campaign; again to historical precedent.

All in all, US would do just fine, however the local allies would suffer a lot.

--

[1] i.e. excluding an overwhelmingly effective ABC attack on mainland China or US

[2] both previous and current administration helped ramp it up

dexen··on Cool but obscure X11 tools
>Code which, for most people, does work.

Working is not the problematic part. There are two interrelated problems: how much complexity is introduced, and how to proceed when something is not working, or is flaky.

You, me, and our fellow posters know very well that Lennart's solutions are complex - in fact, more complex than the problem domain. Accordingly, the ability to narrow down, fix, or work around problems suffers. Systemd and PulseAudio aren't UNIX applications [1]; they are entirely new, rather opaque, sub-systems unto themselves. Thus they require separate knowledge, separate intuition, and separate skills.

All so I can seamlessly play music on TWO bluetooth speakers while also browsing logs without learning regex.

>Lennart Poettering is a dev who has contributed MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF CODE

Massive amounts of code is a clear and present problem. Why is the solution more complex than the problem domain? Why is the success being measured by magnitude of effort, rather than by barriers removed, and standards adhered to?

--

[1] what makes an UNIX application? small POSIX applications tied together with shell scripts, communicating via pipes, exposing services as files, following the `Worse is better' and `Do one thing, and do it well' principles.

dexen··on Cool but obscure X11 tools
>XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill.

>An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart”[1] tries to install his malicious init system on various BSD and Linux systems.

>Like in XBill, the player has to hit him and restore infected systems.

[1] https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/poettering.gif

dexen··on Midget submarine
And a complementary video on the neighboring channel Military History Visualized: "Kriegsmarine's Wunderwaffen or Desperation Weapons?" [1]; showing and describing one of Germany's late war midget submarine models.

[meta] The concept of "submarine articles" [2] comes to mind (sorry).

--

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF-bnhgZ_mY.

[2] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

dexen··on Air Force Reveals Tests of Supposed Record-Setting Scramjet from N. Grumman
The aircraft was actively cooled[1], so I suppose they could always force a bit more cooling if needed. My guess is on engines - and not necessarily thermal limitation, probably rather inlet speed.

Funnily enough, having read the Sled Driver[2], I don't remember any clear explainer whether the engine or the airframe was thermally limited. Perhaps it was there and I forgot by now?

[edit] Wikipedia to the rescue, "Maximum flight speed was limited by the temperature of the air entering the engine compressor, which was not certified for temperatures above 800 °F (430 °C)." [3] The inlet air was necessarily heated as side effect of being slowed down to subsonic speeds, necessitated by the nature of the turbine engine.

--

[1] by circulating the JP-7 fuel through critical sections, before sending it off to the engines

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1349004.Sled_Driver

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird#cite_...

dexen··on Tardigrades may now be living on Moon
Cue the "accidental panspermia hypothesis" - the real (messy) world variant of panspermia[1].

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

dexen··on German prosecutors charge ex-Audi boss Stadler over emissions cheating
>presumption of innocence is on the individual, not on whether there was a crime or not

This is still wrong. A crime is an act of a person, which fulfills rather strict criteria. Both the legal theory and typical legislation [1] requires, among other, mens rea - guilty mind. Without a specific person convicted, you can't say with certainty there was a guilty mind. Thus indeed, before conviction we can't tell with certainty that there was a crime committed.

In your example of "murder", all we can say with certainty is that a person is dead. Evidence may establish a 3rd party was involved, which would indicate killing (as opposed to accident, natural causes, or self harm). There still remain three distinct possibilities: criminal murder, or the lower culpability of homicide (for example, a negligent homicide), or justified killing (for example, act of self defense). Those possibilities span the whole gamut from culpability to innocence, and warrant much different end results for the alleged perpetrator.

In case of the DieselGate here, investigating & prosecuting is the correct & practical option. We all suspect there was a crime, but there's a reason justice is dispensed via a deliberative process, rather than via mob rule.

Moreover, white collar crimes like the DieselGate usually don't have evidence as clear cut as an official memo saying, "I, hereby undersigned, order my underlings to break the law by doing X, Y, and Z.". A more realistic scenario is a series of emails & phone calls saying, "make the new engine meet the target parameters by this quarter's end", coupled with tacitly ignoring a footnote in an engineer's memo saying, "However we recommend against leaving the high performance mode enabled for production vehicles", along with a nod to a mid level manager who asks, "should we match the high performance mode to that of our competitors' car models X, Y, and Z?". In which case establishing responsibility & culpability will take some thorough work.

--

[1] aside of the small set of strict liability crimes where the event/fact alone constitutes a crime

dexen··on Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30
>Not scalable

Yes, and that is a rather important advantage in case of news & opinion reporting.

The old system consisted [1] of small number of large, vertically integrated media outlets. Each of the outlets was pretty close to a single point of failure in our democratic processes: each had undue ability to influence popular ideas and opinions, and well understood focal points of partisanship and propaganda [2].

The new model, with distributed funding and distributed production of news content is a much healthier, much more resilient ecosystem, with no single points of failure. From my limited observation it is also less prone to creating two singular focal points of polarization ("left" vs "right"); instead people end up in loose, overlapping circles according to their varying interests, socio-political situation and the likes.

--

[1] started off as small outlets, but the more successful ones quickly accreted into large entities, and the internet era weeded out a lot of the smaller entities.

[2] to the point "FOX" and "CNN" has became pejoratives among politically active people.

dexen··on YouTube faces creator backlash
>It does cost them money when they get it wrong.

Does it tho?

Google has the problem of too much advertising space vs too few advertising clients. Being able to significantly cut down the advertising space means they get better prices across the board.

Demonetizing any singular video (especially if suspect or borderline) is one time loss, long time profit.

dexen··on FTC Imposes $5B Penalty and Sweeping New Privacy Restrictions on Facebook
Put it the other way around:

5B is one time 25% (or 9% of 55.8B revenue) tax. It's a far cry from a joke; certainly it's higher than AZ or other members of FAANG pay, while not outright terrible.

dexen··on America’s Highest Minimum Wage Sparks Fight in Small California City
>anecdotes >guy who sacks over half of his staff

The real question is what the competitors will do.

Every change in economic policy, and in market situation, causes some participants to benefit, and others to be hindered [1].

When a business fires some of the staff, it may either end up improving efficiency (good for the business and the customers), or may open up a part of the market for competitors (good for the competitors and the customers). Watch the trend: if the competitors step up, build out, service more customers, perhaps even hire more staff, then the increase of minimum wage was good for the economy as whole. It would indicate the change closed up an existing inefficiency - people's effort, money, resources was being used suboptimally.

However if you notice the trend of the competitors not expanding out, or perhaps even undergoing the same contraction, then you read it as a signal of the economy being hindered by the change. It would indicate the change increased inefficiency - people's effort, money, resources starts being wasted.

I'm gonna preemptively note that the later scenario[2] would be consistent with the theory of several competing schools of economy.

--

[1] Obviously it's not a zero-sum game, but there is always a degree of give-and-take.

[2] It gets even more complex when businesses skirt the legally mandated minimum wage. Some work lines are partially exempt, like waiters. Some businesses hire undocumented workers, exploiting their aversion towards going to authorities.

dexen··on Forget Windows, Linux or macOS: Try These Alternative Operating Systems
Enable all filters (except the "uBlock filters – Experimental "). My uBlock Origin blocked 58/38% and I got not a single annoyance on this article.
dexen··on What a Newfound Kingdom Means for the Tree of Life (2018)
>composition

I know it's not what you are asking, but... the mitochondria are example of biological composition. They are organisms that (d)evolved to live exclusively inside eukaryotic cells, in tight symbiotic relationship.

Viral genetic inserts in our genome are another kind of composition. And then there's the gut microbiome, without which we couldn't live off of the diets we do.

Nonetheless, the inheritance aspect still is, and will remain, practical and worth taking about; saying "human IS-A mammal" is valid and useful.

There may be a hint here, regarding the current trend away from inheritance.

dexen··on America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
You described effect observed in population that grew up in, and descended exclusively from generations living in singular over-crowded space with full living necessities supplies.

Humans out in the real world aren't like that. Some live in the crowded city, some live in the open regions. Some hunt for best deals in the mall, others hunt for the game for lunch. There's a constant trickle of cultural & genetic mixing, and there's a lot of small towns etc. that are somewhere in-between on the scale of self-reliance.

If the city populations were to crash, we the humans wouldn't really suffer all that much. Perhaps less new entertainment content would be produced, but the necessities would be taken care of as per the usual, knowledge would be preserved, and communication & trade would go on. In due time, cities would be re-populated.

dexen··on America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
>Not sure what comes after step 3

The steps 1...3 you described are literally "the demand for housing will gradually fall". What follows is, naturally, gradual lowering of the prices, with subsequent stabilization and rebirth.

Curiously enough we observe the same patterns in nature: a species out-grows its prime ecological niche; the population starts falling down (usually without outright crashing), and then stabilizes at the optimum point. The cycle repeats.

The only possible source of instability in the whole housing/population cycle would be the government trying to prop up the house prices once the price correction starts. Some people have this misbegotten idea that real estate has to be a magical kind of investment that always appreciates in value.

dexen··on Facebook is embedding tracking data inside the photos you download
There was a response here (sadly since deleted), that said something to the effect,

>What makes you think this was designed as tracking system rather than anti-abuse feature?

Which goes to the crux of the problem: the way "online abuse" is defined presently, it enables platforms to introduce virtually any measures in the name of preventing abuse[1], and people gobble that up, heck, even cheer for it. "Think of the children" got an internet-era make-over, and it seems to be working.

--

[1] off of the top of my head: requiring real names & verifying them via governmental ID; automatic take-downs upon automated requests from 3rd party; automated limiting of posts' reach based on language analysis; requiring posting under your own login; pervasive tracking that jeopardizes people under repressive governmetns.

dexen··on Instagram's War on Bullying
>Seems these days the second option is always the preferred one.

Not on the internet, no. The 2/4/8/whatever-chans are alive and kicking. Ditto the good old IRC. There's plenty of other services that are more rough-and-tumble than milktoasty. Any of the new social media like Mastodon, Minds, BitChute have rather hands-off moderation - any lawfull content has rather good chances of staying there undisturbed.

The difference is one of perception - namely, which ones get favorable opinions in the media as family safe, and which ones get condemned as the seedy, scary underbelly.

dexen··on Fooling Production-Grade Classification Systems with Adversarial Traffic Signs [pdf]
The XKCD you linked is reasonable on the surface of it, but if you mull over it a bit more, you'll see the three glaring omissions:

1) people care much, much less about "hurting" automated systems, and

2) people feel much less responsibility for accidents & failures if they are separated by a level of indirection of automation

3) people feel much less responsible for mass actions that affect anonymous people far away

Together, those three factors will indeed cause more incidents of people attempting to fool the self-driving cars. Especially if done by displaying malicious images via mass devices, like the light-up info boards, electronic billboards etc.. I don't expect much more actual accidents, tho.

dexen··on Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow?
>Is this a correct place to use 'GET'?

Not at all; GET requests are specified [0] to not cause any modifications to the resources (aside of meta-data like logging etc.). It should also be 100% safe for web spiders to issue any GET at any time [1], server overload aside.

I presume it's an artifact of earlier implementation -or just an idea- to have the collapse work without JavaScript. It would be doable with a normal A HREF with the current link format of https://news.ycombinator.com/collapse?id=20336970

--

[0] "In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval." - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-9.1.1

[1] in the early day of the internet, a friend lost most of his CRM's content because he had record deletes implemented as A HREF issuing GET requests. Having learned the lesson, he instead turned to JavaScript code issuing GETs...

dexen··on Cloudflare Network Performance Issues
Turtles all the way down.

But in all frankness, if Cloudflare's own site did not run off of Cloudflare's infrastructure, why would anybody trust them with their websites?

dexen··on The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design
Physics is on the airplane's side [0]. The drag of rolling over rails, and of going through the dense air at ground level pressure is naturally much worse than that of flying up high for any non-trivial speeds.

Right now the trains may be ahead in some regions thanks to their slow speeds, and thanks to the electrification - with the assumption electricity is generated from sources other than fossil fuel.

But if you tried to set up railway at travel time comparable to airways, you'd quickly find yourself doing away with rolling in favor of maglev or maybe air cushion, and also trying to lower the air drag as much as possible. Both are non-trivial engineering challenges - cue the Hyperloop languishing in protracted development. Both have been solved by air travel decades ago.

Meanwhile electrification of the air travel is already underway. Quiet SSTs[1] are up next. And yes, SSTs are rather fuel efficient, thanks to the even higher operating altitude, and also the natural efficiency of the jets at high speeds.

I will miss the railways. It used to be a great adventure back when I was a kid.

[0] well if you disregard travel time, then the sailing ships would be the kings

[1] relevant: the X-59, and the Boom

dexen··on The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design
Air travel is comparable in fuel usage to trains [1]. Which surprised me a bit, as I expected much better mileage for the air travel, thanks to the exceptionally low drag of the rarified air up there as compared to wheels on rails.

However the railway ought to be more expensive overall due to the other costs: requires build-out and maintenance of extensive ground based network, including some prime real estate; requires much longer occupancy of vehicles; requires much more man-hours for each vehicle crew. Sadly in most settings (like continental Europe) the fixed costs of rail are barely visible to our considerations due to the governmental funding. Meanwhile airplanes only require build-out of the end-points, and the crew required is minimal.

The only meaningful way of fixing the problems with rail is 1) high speed (Mach 0.5 ... 1); 2) de-coupling from wheels-on-rails as the source of noise, drag and speed limitation; 3) de-coupling from expensive on-the-ground infrastructure as cause of high costs and NIMBYism; 4) high automation, little to no amenities; 5) smaller vehicles, more frequent departures. All in all, going in the airplane-like direction. Hyperloop may just be the thing, if it ever becomes large scale commercial.

[1] per passenger * km. Example: https://www.theprch.com/this-vs-that/fuel-efficiency-planes-...

dexen··on A Teenager's IoT worm is bricking thousands of devices
>IoT vendors are causing a tragedy of the commons, inflicting quite a lot of damage

It's an interesting problem in that the value of hackale/wormable IoT devices stems from their sheer number. In a way the culpability of any singular vendor for any singular sale is low by and of itself; it's only large in aggregate of all the vendors' products ever sold & still deployed.

This is a reverse of, but comparable to, the low value of personal data being gathered&processed (or stolen) - for every singular individual, the value/loss is exceedingly low. The value lies in the aggregate of the data; the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Thus the prosecution of things like the Equifax hack, or the insecure IoT devices is pretty spotty at best.

Perhaps we need a new, specialized legislation & judiciary for cases where network effects dominate.

dexen··on I Shouldn’t Have to Publish This in The New York Times
>The internet is still an open place, and there are plenty of venues

You are absolutely right that putting all the eggs in one basket is a textbook mistake, and one should diversify communication channels & sources of income.

>nor the right to publish using someone else's equipment

Two legal cases come to mind:

the recent decision that POTUS twitter feed is a public space (https://theconversation.com/federal-judge-rules-trumps-twitt...)

and the 1980 decision in Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins where, based on Californian law, private property of the shoping mall was deemed open to political speech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...).

It's perfectly fine for FB, Twitter, Google & friends to declare themselves editorial organizations rather than open platforms. However it's worth noting Section 230 protections hinge on being a platform.

dexen··on A Message from the Billionaire’s Club: Tax Us
"Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them"

The proposal by the billionaire to tax themselves more becomes an efficient and pragmatic tactics when considered as closing up the path for the next batch of wannabe-billionaires.

dexen··on The C standard library function atexit is broken
A modest proposal: let's use only static libraries (plugins aside). Let's help KSM efficiently merge the R/X, and the R/O memory pages of the static libraries of running processes. To maintain the current performance, let's give KSM a hint: the hint would be a string of standardized, canonical library pathname, including name and version number.

During the (static) linking of libraries, an extra metadata item would be stored in the ELF file: the canonical pathnames of all the static libraries used, along with base addresses of R/X segments (code) and R/O segments (r/o data). Upon forking a process, the information would be provided to kernel, and passed over to the KSM, to use as basis of same-page lookup and possible merging of the pages.

This effectively inverts the current mechanism. Currently when libraries are dynamically loaded, the dynloader uses actual file pathname of the shlib as the key for operation opposite to "merging" - i.e., re-uses the already loaded R/X and R/O pages, by adding proper memory mapping.

The proposed change is three-fold:

  1) extend the linker to add the metadata to ELF,

  2) extend in-kernel ELF interpreter to extract the info upon exec() and friends,

  3a) extend the KSM with a limited mode, where it would look up & merge only the hinted memory regions, in linear fashion, right after an exec() & friends.
An alternative to 3a), to avoid fussing about with KSM:

  3b) modify the VM subsystem to extend current swap/SHM so it provides an unique address range for each static lib canonical pathname. Requesting pages from this address range would map from the shared pages, if any process already loaded one such.
To handle adversarial processes on single machine, a further extension where crypto signatures are checked is possible.
dexen··on Hypersonic Missiles Are Unstoppable. And They’re Starting a New Arms Race
As salawat stated in the excellent parent post, >The key is really about detection

A cursory search indicates ICBMs have terminal velocity comparable to, or higher than, of hypersonic missiles, at about 16...34'000 km/h. The key difference is that a ballistic missile has recognizable launch signature -you can detect it via satellites- and coasts high above the atmosphere for several minutes, during which it's readily detectable by radar. We already have tech that reliably intercepts & destroys ICBMs - counter-rockets like Sprint/HIBEX [1], lasers, and even small nukes.

A hypersonic missile could fly low-ish [2], perhaps even "on the deck", thus evading long range radar detection. Still we could probably detect, from satellites, the heat signature of super-heated plasma around the missile.

I think the most stealthy -and dangerous- scenario would be a slow (trans-sonic, or maybe Mach 2) low-level cruise to mask the heat signature, followed up by a hypersonic dash to the target. Essentially leaving very little time to make decisions and launch counter-measures.

>If you are talking about putting the debris in its path after observing the incoming missile, how can it be stationary?

Relatively stationary. Dispersing several tens (or perhaps hundreds) of kilograms worth of small metal cubes or balls in area of a few hundred meters ought to be enough to hit a hypersonic missile with reasonably high kill probability. Basically old-fashioned flak, except delivered by a small rocket. The missiles own high speed would be enough to cause destructive damage upon hitting even small piece. This photo [3] shows effects of impact of tiny 7 gram particle at comparable velocities - some 25'000 km/h. A gaping hole like that in the heat shield would quickly lead to further damage in a hypersonic flight regime [4], perhaps also aerodynamic instability. And that's if the initial shock doesn't disable the mechanisms right away.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZTjA44T6tY&feature=youtu.be...

[2] however low level hypersonic flight is very fuel-hungry, and causes tremendous heating; both significantly limit endurance

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SDIO_KEW_Lexan_projectile...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste... was triggered by a small-ish hole of some 15...25cm in thermal protection

← PreviousPage 12 of 34Next →