Hacker News Reader

infineton TSMC expected to announce $100B investment in U.S.

> Imagine at the end of the American Civil War, a confederate army retreated to an island like Cuba or Hawaii, they took it over and have been calling themselves the real America ever since.

It is a great analogy. However, in this case, that small island was taken by China even before the American Civil War. To put it into perspective, it was during the time when Isaac Newton was working on gravity.

And one episode of Open To Debate [1] argued Taiwan is the worst possible place to confront China:

> I used to give battlefield tours at Gettysburg, an extraordinary place. ... a certain cavalry General John Buford ... surveyed the ground and he knew right away he looked at the hills and said, this is good ground, ... The geography favors us. Well, I want to tell you folks, he saved our country that with that appreciation. But this is the opposite. This is bad ground. This is the worst possible place to confront China

[1] https://opentodebate.org/debate/taiwan-indefensible-0/

infineton NASA Successfully Acquires GPS Signals on Moon

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

> Sextants can be read accurately to within 0.1 arcminutes, so the observer's position can be determined within (theoretically) 0.1 nautical miles (185.2 meters, or about 203 yards). Most ocean navigators, measuring from a moving platform under fair conditions, can achieve a practical accuracy of approximately 1.5 nautical miles (2.8 km)

Some napkin math, assuming using a Sextant to achieve similar accuracy of 0.1 arcminutes on the Moon, because Moon is about 3.7 times smaller than Earth, that 0.1 arcminutes is around 50 meters on the Moon. One can expect extremely clear sky and certainly not riding waves on the Moon, so the practical accuracy should be close.

infineton GPT-4.5

They are self-hosted and require campus credentials for access. If you try to chat with the ZJU instance, it will redirect you to a login page. ZJU is unique in that it appears to support access from all higher education institutions in China.

infineton GPT-4.5

> Do you know of any university that host Deepseek?

https://chat.zju.edu.cn

https://chat.sjtu.edu.cn

https://chat.ecnu.edu.cn/html/

To list a few. There are of course many more in China. I won't be surprised if universities in other countries also self-hosting.

infineton GPT-4.5

Can it be self-hosted? Many institutions and organizations are hesitant to use AI because concerns of data leaking over chatbot. Open models, on the other hand, can be self-hosted. There is a deepseek arm race in other part of the world. Universities are racing to host their own deepseek. Hospitals, large businesses, local governments, even courts are deploying or showing interest in self-hosting deepseek.

infineton Update on Staff Hiring

So the plan is to raise endowment tax from 1.4% to 21%.

> raise the excise tax levied on certain private university endowment profits from 1.4% to 21%. [1]

[1] https://nehls.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-troy-e-nehl...

infineton DigiKey's Tariff Resources

> We are inclined to think that if you inherit almost the whole earth, you would be very grateful, kind and compassionate

That, perhaps, is the reason they are so cruel: because they have been so lucky so far, they do not understand human suffering and are incapable of feeling the pain of fellow humans.

infineton The GJK Algorithm: A weird and beautiful way to do a simple thing

Sadly, the site is down. Too much traffic?

https://web.archive.org/web/20240612203731/https://computerw...

infineton Engineering for Slow Internet

I had similar problem on a ship with many users share a 2M VSAT Internet. Few tricks made Internet less painful:

- block windows update by returning DNS query for microsoft update endpoints as NXDOMAIN.

- use a captive portal to limit user session duration, so that unattended devices won't consume bandwidth.

- with freebsd dummynet, pfSense can share bandwidth equally among users. It can also share bandwidth by weight among groups. It helps.

- inside Arctic circle, the geosynchronous satellites are very low on the horizon and were blocked frequently when ship turns. I was able to read the ship's gyro and available satellites from VSAT controller and generate a plot to show the satellite blockage. It was so popular that everyone is using it to forecast next satellite online.

infineton Jim Simons has died

Been a mathematician, he also funds physics. See Simons Observatory that studies Cosmic Microwave Background.

infineton Satellites Are Becoming the New Cellphone Towers

I have lost hope that human can fight totalitarianism, regardless the new technology been used. It is like the low energy state of society, similar to a ball tends roll down the hill, it is easier for a country to enter the totalitarian state and stays there than to get out of it by itself. Imagine a North Korean owns a such cell phone, according to rumors, it is a crime if the spouse, children, or neighbors don’t report to the authorities. Governments can also jam communication, just like they jam radio programs and censor Internet. A more likely scenario would be regimes use new technology, including direct cell phone to satellite communication, to monitor and control people.

infineton Japan: Moon lander Slim comes back to life and resumes mission

This must be a common problem in space travel. The tiny spaceship in Men in black 2 also landed upside-down, but it has movable legs to correct position.

infineton World's deepest, largest underground lab operational

It may sound counter-intuitive, to enter this lab, you are not going down, instead, you enter a 14 km long horizontal tunnel that pass through a mountain, and this deep underground lab sits in the middle of tunnel. That tunnel was built to transport materials to a hydro power plant construction site, later was repurposed for science.

Ancient windows is not uncommon as far as the instrument it controls still works. In fact, since some control software were developed for old windows, there is little reason to upgrade to latest windows.

HN readers may also be surprised the way physicists work is similar to software developing. Vim, emacs, vscode, git are used everyday. C++, Python, Golang, Postgres, docker to name a few. Almost all the heavy lifting happens on Linux. Debian, Ubuntu, sometimes CentOS, although I don't think people will use CentOS on new machines. Of course it is not just software, there are customized hardware too. From FPGA to huge vessel build with ultra-low radiation stainless steel, not to mention the underground lab itself.

Last time I heard, this lab is not just for China. It is a civilian facility and they welcome collaboration regardless one's origin. Frankly I am very surprise how supportive the Chinese government is to this kind of research. I cannot imagine how they could benefit from it economically or militarily.

infineton JPEG XL: How it started, how it’s going

Image file generated by Zeiss microscope uses JPEG XR.

infineton NASA secures contract with Rocky Enterprise Linux

Almalinux releases faster, and patches faster than Rocky.

infineton The Taliban Government Runs on WhatsApp. There’s Just One Problem

So WhatsApp end-to-end encryption works therefor Taliban uses it in military and non-military operations. However, because it leaks metadata Facebook is able to identify Taliban users and ban them.

infineton International Orange

Are these orange colors easily recognizable by color blindness?

infineton Optimizing Open Addressing

I learned about Open Addressing a long time ago when I was optimizing Dnsmasq. The scenario involved looking up a very large list of domain names to block or combine with ipset in order to customize routing based on domain names. Open addressing worked very well on these large immutable lists.

infineton WHO updates critical medicines list for radiological and nuclear emergencies

Perhaps it doesn't matter whether N95 still function well. Once pass the expire date printed on the package, warehouse has to remove them from inventory.

infineton I almost bought a scanner

Not familiar with Philips, but other microscope scanners I used, Aperio, Leica, Zeiss, all have dedicated computer attach to them, with special, sometimes strange looking interface card. They have precision stage, which holds glass slides, move under lens. USB is becoming common especially for transferring image. The software and driver is part of the scanner. Resolution of these scanner is quite high, but generally their lens (microscope objective) have very short work distance to the slide, usually less than 2mm, sometimes less than 1mm. So need to find a way to keep the film flat on the supporting glass slide while the distance between film and objective is still short. The output is limited to the vendor format. Most of the time is 8bits per RGB channel. An annoying character of the microscope scanners is their color is not accurate. One might get notable different color from the same slide with different scanner model. Therefor they may not suitable for scanning film.

infineton The 6.1 kernel is out

Very excited! I have used the MGLRU patch on a 13 years old iMac with 8GB ram in last 6 months. Have chrome with lots of tabs and heavy use of gimp/ImageJ/libreoffice. MGLRU is such a great improvement, without it the machine frequently ran out of memory.

infineton Fermilab/CERN recommendation for Linux distribution

Alma is not exactly prevalent. It however releases faster than Rocky. Alma's mailing list is also more informative. Its Announce list post security advisory frequently. Rocky's Announce list in comparison is quiet.

infineton Amazon Time Sync is now available over the internet as a public NTP service

> a global fleet of redundant satellite-connected and atomic reference clocks

What does it mean? Is Amazon operating atomic clock or using GPS?

infineton Rakuten Mobile is replacing Red Hat as its Linux OS supplier

Well, I checked again. From CERN Oct 28, 2022 Linux Future Committee meeting [1]:

- Several bugs have been encountered in Stream, which were not present in RHEL.

- Some user communities had previously expressed concerns on the feasibility of using Stream in a production setting. This feeling has also recently been expressed internally by some IT groups.

- CERN is evaluating our original recommendation [0] of utilising CentOS Stream as the default Linux Operating System.

[0] https://linux.web.cern.ch/#update-on-centos-linux-strategy

[1] https://indico.cern.ch/category/13390/

infineton Rakuten Mobile is replacing Red Hat as its Linux OS supplier

CERN was a big user of CentOS. After redhat changed CentOS8 EOL, CERN was allowed to use RHEL. Last time I checked, they suggested others in high energy physics community to use Rocky or Alma if RHEL is not an option.

infineton Rakuten Mobile is replacing Red Hat as its Linux OS supplier

Same here. Probably Rocky spends too many resources in PR. Twitter, mattermost... Meanwhile, Alma just make new releases and patches, quietly.

infineton 4th leak reported on Nord Stream pipelines in Baltic Sea

A dumb way of finding pipeline location is by looking at history AIS data. The pipe laying vessel must broadcasting its position via AIS while in operation. Since the water is only 70 meters deep, it is reasonable to assume the underwater pipeline is directly below pipe laying vessel.

infineton Low-Background Steel (2018)

There are much more radiation from Thorium and Uranium, sometimes K40, than from Co60 in metals, such as stainless steel, nickel and titanium. Copper purified by electroforming is surprisingly clean. It is usually used inside the lead shielding to reduce background further.

infineton Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

Same here. Need its tabs since it is difficult to organize many terminal windows if use rxvt. I also use LXTerminal on the same machine. It's set to dark background to make flask's debug message easier to read. LXTerminal is very lite and adds very little(or no) additional dependence on Debian.

infineton The Speakeasy Economy of WeChat

Some years ago, never mind how long precisely, we were using Skype for group chat and meeting. Then Skype became unstable in China, other messengers, such as Line Telegram, Whatsapp, were also unstable or unavailable. That's why we switched to wechat.