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kbakeron Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2020)

Venture Research Inc. | Software Engineer | Plano, TX (Dallas, TX, DFW) | Onsite Only | http://www.ventureresearch.com

Interested in RFID? In improving inventory and replenishment processes in hospitals, labs, and clinics? In automatically tracking pallets, containers, and other assets around a facility? Come join us!

Venture Research is a leader in the RFID industry and is consistently pushing the leading edge of what is possible using RFID. We have a variety of opportunities available for both fast-paced new product design and development as well as for development on some of our long-term stable products. 20 year old small but growing company, privately held, with excellent benefits, 401K matching, paid health insurance and highly competitive salary and bonus structure.

We do have some 100% work from home employees right now, but do require that you live in the Dallas area.

We are hiring for the following positions:

* Embedded platforms engineer: C, Linux, Android NDK (maybe not all at the same time haha.) Experience with hardware co-design a plus.

* Frontend Web Developer: HTML/CSS/JS, Vue.

* Senior .NET / Backend developer: C#, VB.Net, ASP.NET, MSSQL Server, Oracle, Postgres. .NET MVC a plus.

Please email resumes to hr@ventureresearch.com, or use the email in my profile. Thanks!

kbakeron Save the USPS

He may want to get in touch with the local news, they love investigating stuff like this.

kbakeron Men rescued from Pacific island after writing SOS in sand

Actually, I think that only in cases where you showed extreme lack of preparedness will you get a bill.

Most SAR organizations really don't want to have someone not call them because of the cost. Or worse, delay calling them and end up with a more time-critical or more dangerous rescue situation.

https://www.facebook.com/NoChargeforRescue/

kbakeron US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

> It's not so much loose ends as loose everything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24013070

kbakeron The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys

"The customer is always right".

kbakeron The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys

I don't think any re-wording of your statement was intended by breaking up your sentence, it is pretty common to abbreviate when quoting, even mid-sentence. At least I hope it was not intended... I can see that the quoted part makes it into a different statement.

Personally I appreciate your insight on this topic, I feel it is difficult to have a good discussion on these sorts of topics with all the misinformation going around.

kbakeron The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

I really hope anyone with a genetics background, or the desire to go really in depth about what makes a virus 'Lab-made', read through the above posted first article.

https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throu...

It takes a long time but explains why the source is not very likely to be an evolved combined bat x pangolin virus, and has curious markers similarly used in other gain-of-function research, even similar techniques as used in past research by Dr. Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Natural origin not ruled out as being impossible, but not likely.

Combining it with this possible explanation looking at the possibility of RaTG13 being entirely fabricated altogether by Dr. Shi in January 2020, and you can at least definitely see where the conspiracy arguments come from, and why the CCP has an overwhelming need to create and play up a 'natural origin' argument, along with passing on mountains of misinformation.

https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html

Very convincing articles, scary times if this is actually true.

kbakeron Seoul's mayor found dead, hours after he was reported missing

A bit more information from the NY Times article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/world/asia/seoul-mayor-de...

> His disappearance came a day after a secretary in the mayor’s office told the police that he had been sexually harassing her since 2017, two Seoul television stations reported, attributing the information to unidentified police sources.

> Mr. Park, 64, had canceled his official schedule for Thursday and called in sick to City Hall. His daughter told the police that he had left home after leaving a cryptic, “will-like message,” according to Yonhap, the national news agency, which cited an anonymous police source.

> When Mr. Park had not returned home after five hours, his daughter called the police.

kbakeron Multistate Disagreement over the Length of the Foot to End

Just because I needed to look it up:

- 1 International Foot = 0.3048 m

- 1 US Survey Foot = 1200/3937 m ~= 0.3048006096 m

- 1 light-nanosecond ~= 0.2998 m

kbakeron The surprising persistence of RSA keys in SSH

> Also of note, is Ed25519 does not harden itself with additional "bits" in the normal RSA sense

Yes, it does, it is just not Ed25519 anymore, check out Curve448 and EdDSA-Ed448, same Edwards curve construction, more bits, more security. It's just that Ed25519 is plenty strong for many use cases.

Also, don't confuse the strength of the KDF with the strength of the curve itself as others have noted - Ed25519 is the same strength whether you hash your passphrase 1 or 50000 times. But with the 1 round your key might be easier to brute force if you have a weak passphrase.

kbakeron We built a new GPS receiver engine

Well, $265 (+antenna $60), but I purchased an Emlid Reach M+ [1] for drone RTK experiments, and it has been pretty simple to use... comes with a really nice UI on the device and internal storage in the unit. Also their website has good documentation, which is helpful since there is a lot to learn about how to do RTK.

Found a local NTRIP caster (within 10 km, lucky I am in range of a public RTK2go one) and the Reach uses the mobile hotspot on my phone to connect to the caster. After a couple seconds to minutes, it settles down to a 10-12 mm accurate fix in lat, lon, alt, and is kinematic so it maintains the accuracy as I am flying the drone around. It records the whole thing internally, or you can have various output modes like standard NMEA over serial, or bluetooth to your phone.

Also, I have used it to record data internally then post-process it for PPK using the county's publically-available RINEX files [2] and Emlid's RTKLIB fork [3].

[1] https://emlid.com/reach/ [2] https://geodesy.noaa.gov/CORS/standard1.shtml [3] https://docs.emlid.com/reach/common/tutorials/gps-post-proce...

kbakeron Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

Well, since DoorDash is listed as the copyright holder on the bottom of www trycaviar com it looks like DoorDash is just bleeding their $400mm series F out under a different name.

Maybe have them try the arbitrage themselves per the article and put the profit _and_ the booze directly in their pockets... (/s?)

kbakeron What does a Director of Engineering do?

Yeah, L10n actually does stand for localization.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...)

kbakeron A circuit board from the Saturn V rocket, reverse-engineered and explained

You might find this question interesting:

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9243/what-computer...

> The Falcon 9 has 3 dual core x86 processors running an instance of Linux on each core. The flight software is written in C/C++ and runs in the x86 environment.

kbakeron Apple Faceshield

No, they are talking about a top cover like in the NIH-approved design:

https://3dprint.nih.gov/discover/3dpx-013359

kbakeron WireGuard 1.0 for Linux 5.6

It might get 5.4 sometime, but it is probably sticking to the Longterm stable kernel release set like the rest of Debian Buster:

https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

kbakeron Turn a snorkeling mask into a respiratory mask for assisted ventilation [video]

True but the patent is in good faith:

> We clarify that the patent will remain free to use, because it is in our intention that all hospitals in need could use it if necessary.

> We clarify that our initiative is totally non-profit, we will not obtain any royalties on the idea of the link, nor on the sales of Decathlon masks.

kbakeron Starlink Is a Big Deal

I'll allow it... According to this 2018 article even a lot of "Unlimited" plans are actually around a 20 GB/month cap before they start throttling speeds. [0]

- Verizon’s Beyond Unlimited plan is capped at 22GB of high-speed 4G LTE data per month, while the Above Unlimited is curbed at 75GB.

- AT&T caps both unlimited plans at 22GB of data per billing cycle, after which it may slow your speeds down

- Sprint will throttle your speeds if you exceed more than 50GB of data in a month but, as you can see, your speeds are throttled from the get-go for most things anyway.

- T-Mobile One includes 50GB of high-speed 4G LTE data. Once you go above that, as with other carriers, T-Mobile can drop this to slower speeds.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/13/unlimited-data-plan-caps-ver...

kbakeron Uber’s Aerial Rideshare Project ‘Entering the Next Phase’

I think the illegal-per-FAA 'Uber with pilots' part got shut down and now they just link their scheduling system with regular part 135/charter operations.

kbakeron Visa Buys Plaid

Reminder... donate to the Internet Archive!

https://web.archive.org/web/20190510080449/https://github.co...

kbakeron Efficient cache for gigabytes of data written in Go

Ah OK, that's good, just was reading too much into this section in the README:

> BigCache does not handle collisions. When new item is inserted and it's hash collides with previously stored item, new item overwrites previously stored value.

kbakeron Efficient cache for gigabytes of data written in Go

So does it just serve completely incorrect data when a request for the 'old' cache key come in?

Seems like this would always be undesirable behavior for a cache?

It is definitely being advertised as a map-like structure, key goes in, bytes come out...

kbakeron Jetstar pilots forgot to lower the landing gear

In this video from Alaska they land at a roadside gas station and refuel in a fuel emergency. In an in-flight emergency you can deviate from any rule... still poor planning by the pilot.

https://youtu.be/oE8edtEa46o?t=251

Many small piston engines are certified to use mogas (standard automobile gasoline) as well as 100LL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas#Automotive_gasoline

kbakeron Using machine learning to choose compression algorithms

If you can model the domain, then you can achieve very good compression.

See this recent timescaledb post (since you mentioned Postgres) which goes over an array of techniques used in column-store databases that general-purpose compressors on a csv file full of data would not be able to match:

https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-columnar-compressio... discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21412596

kbakeron The next generation of wall chargers

Note that this is Gallium Nitride (GaN,) not Gallium Arsenide (GaAs).

kbakeron The Lost Key of QWERTY (2016)

This had its own discussion a little while ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20627274

kbakeron Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event

It's a lot easier to deal with the existence of political speech when the Great Firewall blocks you altogether.

Both Reddit and HN are blocked in China.

kbakeron D-Link Home Routers Open to Remote Takeover Will Remain Unpatched

> not less than 10 years: they should update it to work

> get dlink to pay your costs

What happens when the company is gone?

kbakeron Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

How does this prevent a Sybil attack or astroturfing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

kbakeron Show HN: pgcmd – An alternative to psql with JSON output

I was sure most of this existed so I looked it up... Mostly centers around adding row_to_json() to the query. Using the example from the github repo:

    $ psql -P pager -nqtc "select row_to_json(pg_database) from pg_database where datname = 'template0'" | jq
    {
      "datname": "template0",
    ...
      "datacl": [
        "=c/postgres",
        "postgres=CTc/postgres"
      ]
    }