Hacker News Reader

kbakeron 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

There are a bunch of good arguments here: https://www.thirty-thousand.org/

It requires some additional investment on the user's part.

Think of it like opening a secured credit card with cash. Faster and more convenient to use, since you can now use the credit card networks instead of the cash, but requires tying up the funds you want to use to pay with.

Also, the merchant/recipient has to be able to accept the payments, and the software is new / in beta still.

kbakeron First US Patients Treated With CRISPR As Human Gene-Editing Trials Get Underway

<spoiler>The Utopia TV series from BBC channel 4.</spoiler>

Amazing show.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(UK_TV_series)

kbakeron P. gingivalis in Alzheimer's disease brains

This may also help explain why neurosurgeons who operate on Alzheimer's patients are more likely to develop Alzheimer's themselves:

https://alzgerm.org/news/reports-indicate-brain-surgeons-ris...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20170305

kbakeron The FCC has fined robocallers $208M and collected $7k

This is happening, but slowly. It is a huge problem to get all carriers / phone operators to get this installed enough to be useful.

Research SHAKEN/STIR to see more about it.

Here's an example between AT&T and Comcast: https://about.att.com/story/2019/anti_robocall.html

kbakeron How random can you be?

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

kbakeron What is the space overhead of Base64 encoding?

Actually, it is still true. hexdump has some confusing format options... what you were using was converting it to little-endian first before printing the hex representation, which really messed with gzip. Try this:

    $ hexdump -e '"%x"' < american-english | gzip | wc -c
    463871
    $ hexdump -v -e '/1 "%02x"' < american-english | gzip | wc -c
    302515
    $ base64 < american-english | gzip | wc -c
    415737

kbakeron JAB Code – A high-capacity 2D color bar code

I don't think they use the Lab color space, except if you define your own colors to use in the palette, did you see a reference to it?

From their encoding spec: > In order to optimize the decoding of JAB Code, the used colors shall be so distinguishable as possible. Therefore, the used colors shall keep a distance from each other in the RGB color space cube

> In case of 256-color-mode, the color channel R and G take eight values, 0, 36, 73, 109, 146, 182, 219 and 255, and the color channel B takes four values, 0, 85, 170 and 255, which will totally generate 256 colors.

Which is too bad, because your idea of using Lab with ChromaTags to enable quick and accurate finding of the symbol was a really insightful technique. The decoding algorithm they suggest seems like it would be slow, and their use of RGB seems like a whole bunch of issues due to color-selective fading, shadows, damage, lighting, incorrect printer calibration, etc.

kbakeron Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2018)

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. 18 year old small but growing company, privately held, with excellent benefits, 401K matching, paid health insurance and highly competitive salary and bonus structure.

We are hiring for the following positions:

* Embedded platforms engineer: C, Linux, Android NDK. Experience with hardware co-design a plus.

* Frontend Web Developer: HTML/CSS/JS. Django-rest-framework and React.

* Senior .NET / Backend developer: C#, VB.Net, ASP.NET, MSSQL, Oracle, JavaScript and JQuery. .NET MVC a plus.

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

kbakeron WireGuarding the mainline

There's TunSafe, BUT with caveats: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515637

kbakeron The magic of asyncio explained

Isn't Python's async/await syntax an implementation of green threads? I mean using await is almost exactly the cooperative scheduling idea. The article may use Futures and callbacks but you can just as easily do something like:

    result = await fake_network_request('one')

kbakeron Ask HN: How to overcome fear of flying?

Interestingly, that same aircraft you were on 22 years ago is still in service today...

That plane probably has had tens of thousands of flights since then without any incidents.

kbakeron Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides One Every Day

That's such a great talk by Tony Seba. Highly recommended for anyone who hasn't seen it or some of the other ones he's given.

I imagine that the traditional car rental companies will be the first to provide services. They already have fleet maintenance, post-ride clean-up/turnaround, and demand forecasting/repositioning down, all that's left is to setup a subscription model.

Uber could get there but I kinda feel that they will implode if they make an attempt to transition to self-driving cars, from a huge driver backlash or strike.

Though I really want to see most what happens to all the parking lots and parking garages which will slowly disappear. Hopefully they can be transformed into green spaces.

kbakeron Escape Compasses

My Pebble Time watch (sadly, no longer in business) has a compass app that I've used a couple of times. Maybe a smartwatch or phone could do the trick?

https://apps.getpebble.com/en_US/application/540f7cafbc27450...

kbakeron Why you need IPv6

Are you sure your router has PCP or NAT-PMP disabled, which _could_ expose ports on your external IPv4 IP without any interaction? Do you expect the average computer user to configure PCP securely on their router?

Various NAT traversal options are already pretty widespread. Having only a firewall keeps things much simpler.

kbakeron Launch HN: Necto (YC W18) – ISP Starter Kit

Interesting project. With ARIN effectively out of IPv4 space, where do you get IPs from for a new ISP? Does it have to be transferred/purchased from an existing block? I am assuming you are setting up IPv6 as well for your customers, are you deploying some sort of CGNAT?

kbakeron A serious security vulnerability has been found in 7-Zip

Release notes for version 18.05, 2018-04-30 include:

> CVE-2018-10115 - Incorrect initialization logic of RAR decoder objects in 7-Zip 18.03 and before can lead to usage of uninitialized memory, allowing remote attackers to cause a denial of service (segmentation fault) or execute arbitrary code via a crafted RAR archive.

Excellent article from the bug discoverer here: https://landave.io/2018/05/7-zip-from-uninitialized-memory-t...

Some good discussion in the linked HN discussion from a couple of days ago.

kbakeron AT&T updates firmware to block access to 1.1.1.1

IPv6 Unique Local Addressing is made for this scenario, with a low chance of collisions. fd: + 40 random bits, becomes your new /48.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4193

kbakeron Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2018)

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

We are hiring for the following positions:

* Embedded platforms engineer: C, Linux, Android NDK. Experience with hardware co-design a plus.

* Frontend Web Developer: HTML/CSS/JS. Django-rest-framework and React.

* Senior .NET / Backend developer: C#, VB.Net, ASP.NET, MSSQL, Oracle, JavaScript and JQuery. .NET MVC a plus.

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

kbakeron 1.1.1.1 Cloudflare DNS Resolver Soon to Be Announced?

It's because just having a pricing page doesn't give any feedback as to whether the price is correct or not.

A salesperson could at least ask 'what is a better price we can shoot for?' or 'what features do you really need?' whereas a visitor to a pricing page just disappears.

kbakeron FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services

Also, remote LTE towers could provide cellular connectivity anywhere.

kbakeron Ask HN: What obstacles stand in the way for a “bar exam” for programming jobs?

The membership revocation is key - the fact that you could lose your professional license for ethics violations is enough to keep everything above board. Also, the NSPE would provide support for an individual engineer in the dissident/whistleblower case.

As an Electrical Engineer, we went over this in school, as ethics is one of the cornerstones of the Professional Engineer license. (Though, personally I am not professionally licensed.)

See here for what it covers: https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics

kbakeron IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

Also https://bitcoin.tax, does everything for you pretty much.

kbakeron Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google?

The one time Betteridge's Law fails us.

> Chollet bristled at this. “This is the laziest kind of thinking—just because two things share some superficial similarity (they’re large tech [companies]) doesn’t mean they’re equivalent,” he said.

But... the article is just a riff off of Chollet's tweets about working for Alphabet. Mostly about Facebook anyways.

kbakeron Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

Yes, I think it's more the "of every single adult in the United States of America" that is the disturbing part.

kbakeron Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

Did you watch the video? They claimed real results helping Ted Cruz in the primaries with this sort of hyper-targeted advertising.

The access they have to online data sources would absolutely be enough to start correlating things to build an individual profile. Say you can link someone's FB, Twitter, (HN?!) account posts, likes, shares, to credit card data, maybe even search keywords from shady advertisers, to vehicle registration records, tax records, census data, etc.

Do you really think this profiling is that far-fetched that they need to BS everyone? It doesn't have to be perfect to be many times more effective than untargeted ads...

kbakeron Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

I urge everyone to watch this video from Cambridge Analytica about their techniques with big data and psychographic profiling leading up to the 2016 election. Very dystopian, it almost feels like a seminar with a Bond villain. Quote from the video:

> "we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America."

https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc

Edit: also this article is a good read about how they used Facebook likes to build up profiles. Also contains a summary of the video: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-li...

kbakeron Guido van Rossum: Python 2 end-of-life will be on January 1st, 2020

The 'wall of superpowers' looks much better than last time I looked. Almost all done!

https://python3wos.appspot.com/

kbakeron Quasistatic Cavity Resonance for Ubiquitous Wireless Power Transfer

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13663193

kbakeron SpaceX hits two milestones in plan for low-latency satellite broadband

Anyone know what the downlink bandwidth might be for this system (i.e. not to the user, but to the Internet backbone?)

Seems like only a few customers at 1 Gb/s could saturate the network pretty quickly. Especially if the coverage area is a few hundred square miles.