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mrbon Eating stinging nettles

Another thing my dad demonstrated to me a few weeks ago: you can grab a nettle by the base, move your hand upward, and as the nettle is sliding through your closed hand, it won't sting at all. This is because the sting cells are oriented perpendicular to the surface of the plant (or pointed slightly upward) so their pointy end doesn't come in contact with the skin at an angle where it would penetrate the skin.

mrbon Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse

What an extremely confusing blog post! I don't understand why it seemingly presents profiles as a new feature? Firefox has had profiles for years. What the heck is new?

I had to click the other link https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management to understand that this is all about simple UI improvements to make it easier to work with existing profiles.

The blog post is more than confusing, it is misleading. HN should link to the support page instead of the blog post.

mrbon UPS plane crashes near Louisville airport

Oh woah, very insightful discussion thread you found there.

So the tl'dr is: the leading very preliminary theory is that the MD-11's left engine fell off the wing just like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191 (a DC-10, the immediate predecessor of the MD-11) which was caused by maintenance errors weakening the pylon structure holding the engine.

mrbon NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware

They should match the acronym and call it No Evil Systems Tolerated, or No Evil, Sane Tech firmware (N.E.S.T)

mrbon Trump pardons convicted Binance founder

It doesn't take $100 to transfer. Fees are currently around $1. You are off by a factor 100!

Also, Bitcoin can process far more than 7 tps through the Lighting network.

I wonder where your misconceptions come from?

mrbon Wireguard FPGA

I agree that if the goal is to be educational, it's an excellent interesting project. But there is no need to make dishonest claims on their web page like "the software performance is far below the speed of wire"

mrbon Wireguard FPGA

You are right. It's amusing how this pattern emerges often: an unoptimized tech stack gives mild performance results. This is "good enough" for most people. Over the years everyone seems to assume that's just the way it is and it will always be because the tech is inherently "complex". Then a competitor comes out of the water and their performance blows everyone out of the water, so everyone realized the tech could have been optimized all this way if anyone had just tried to.

mrbon Wireguard FPGA

I can't think of a scenario where this is useful. They claim "Full-throttle, wire-speed hardware implementation of Wireguard VPN" but then go on implementing this on a board with a puny set of four 1 Gbps ports... The standard software implementation of Wireguard (Linux kernel) can already saturate Gbps links (wirespeed, check) and can even approach 10 Gbps on a mid-range CPU: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42172082

If they had produced a platform with four 10 Gbps ports, then it would become interesting. But the whole hardware and bitstream would have to be redevelopped almost from scratch.

mrbon Packing the world for longest lines of sight

It'd be a pleasure to chat about this! Hit me up by email: m at zorinaq dot com

Actually, to be exact: I just checked my data and I forgot that technically the 2nd and 3rd longest sightlines I discovered are slight variations of the Pik Dankova sightline. 7 km east of this peak is another mountain with two spots from which there are two sightlines of 521.1 and 510.49 km ending in the same mountain range in China (a few hundred km away from the end point of the 1st sightline.)

Then the 4th longest sightline I found is the one that's arguably unique: 510.45 km, fully contained within China in the Kunlun Mountains from 38.614706,75.184529 to 36.517500,80.333333. So that's an interesting find.

Then my 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th longest sightlines are again slight variations of the 1st Pik Dankova sightline.

Then my 9th longest sigthline in the one in Colombia I mentioned.

It's very possible you could find different results and new longest sightlines, so I encourage you to continue your own research.

For starters here is a limitation of my implementation: my heuristic for finding a potential viewpoint (mountain peak or ridge of a plateau) is imperfect: in the DEM, a tile is considered a potential viewpoint if it is higher than or equal to it's 8 neighbors, and if it is strictly higher than at least one neighbor. Think about a group of 3x3 tiles. They are all the same height, except one tile on the edge of the group that is slighly lower than the others. Then in this case, the central tile is a potential viewpoint because we could have a sightline standing on this central tile, looking over the one neighbor tile that is slightly lower. That would be the case when standing on the edge of a plateau right next to the start of a valley.

But I can think of at least one case where I would accidentally dismiss potential viewpoints: if, when standing on this ridge, the tile behind us is slightly higher (even if it's just by 1 meter), then my heuristic would dismiss the central tile as a potential viewpoint, because my thought was the tile that is sligthly higher is going to be selected by my heuristic as a (better) potential viewpoint instead. But, in reality, if the tile behind us is only a few meters higher, then it is not high enough to look over our initial tile, then over the start of the valley. In that case the central tile is a viewpoint but would be dismissed by my heuristic. This is a very narrow corner case that probably doesn't affect my results, but I am not 100% sure. If the height difference is about 3 or 4 meters or more, the tile behind us would definitely have a clear and longer sightline, so my heuristic isn't breaking anything.

Anyway my whole project was just a weekend thing so I didn't care to be very precise. But now seeing your effort is renewing my interest in fixing my code. Oh and I should definitely port this to GPU as this workload is 100% compute-bound, mostly, sin, cos, sqrt and divisions.

mrbon Packing the world for longest lines of sight

Nitpick:

"resolution of 3 arc-seconds (~100m²)"

This resolution is equivalent to tiles of 8500 m² not 100 m². I think the author confused tile edge length (92 meters exactly) with tile area.

mrbon Packing the world for longest lines of sight

Oh that project is right up my alley, as I did the same! Back in 2021, for fun, I wrote an algorithm to find the longest sightline on earth. And I did find a previously undiscovered sightline.

My code was relatively unoptimized, it ran for 95 days on an 8-core 16-thread AMD Ryzen 5750G to crunch all the data. I have never published my code or results. I should really do it...

I downloaded a digital earth model of about 30 gigabytes from http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/Coverage%20map%20viewfind... which had a resolution of 3 seconds, so I had the elevation of each 90x90 meters "tile" of land. I wrote a simple algo in C that: finds potential viewpoints (mountain peaks or plateaus above a minimum ), calculates the longest sightline 360° around you, taking into account an atmospheric refraction coefficient (I used 0.13 which seems to be a default used by some panorama tools like https://www.udeuschle.de). It's really basic trigonometry: look one tile ahead of you, and the next one, etc, until you find the one with the highest vertical angle of view. Stop one sightline exploration when reaching a certain maximum distance (750 km in my implementation) when it becomes mathematically impossible to find a visible tile beyond this distance. And I found the longest sightline:

In Kyrgyzstan from Pik Dankova (41.059167,77.683333) which is at 5977.5 meters (in my DEM data), you can see 538.1 km into China if you look toward bearing 169.7° (roughly south) as you see some distant minor peak at 36.295364,78.75593 which is 6444.0 meters high. However this sightline is already known. But it's only theoretical. No one ever encountered good enough atmospheric clear-sky conditions to observe it from Pik Dankova. Using the panorama tool maintained by this cool German guy, you can verify it: https://www.udeuschle.de/panoramas/panqueryfull.aspx?mode=ne...

However one notable finding my tool gave me was it discovered the second longest sightline that is competely unknown up until this day AFAIK:

In Colombia, from Pico Cristóbal Colón (10.838333,-73.687500) which is at 5668.5 meters (in my DEM data), you can see 502.6 km over the plains of the Caribbean region all the way to the Colombian Andes if you look toward bearing 206.2° (roughly south-south-west) as you see some distant peak at 6.777286,-75.692304 which is 3347.0 meters high. Here you can verify it here: https://www.udeuschle.de/panoramas/panqueryfull.aspx?mode=ne...

I am not sure if this Comlombian sighline has ever been observed.

As I said I should really publish my code and results. And at some point I would like to optimize it and re-run it using a higher-precision DEM with 30x30 meters tiles instead of 90x90 meters. I think there are a few 30-meter DEMs available but I need to find the highest-quality one.

mrbon The least amount of CSS for a decent looking site (2023)

  font-family: System UI;

That's incorrect. It should be:

  font-family: system-ui;

Author has it right in some CSS examples, but not the first one.

mrbon How I block all 26M of your curl requests

He does use it (I verified it from curl on a recent Linux distro). But he probably blocked only some fingerprints. And the fingerprint depends on the exact OpenSSL and curl versions, as different version combinations will send different TLS ciphers and extensions.

mrbon How I block all 26M of your curl requests

"There’s ways to get around TLS signatures but it’s much harder and requires a lot more legwork to get working"

I wouldn't call it "much harder". All you need to bypass the signature is to choose random ciphers (list at https://curl.se/docs/ssl-ciphers.html) and you mash them up in a random order separated by colons in curl's --ciphers option. If you pick 15 different ciphers in a random order, there are over a trillion signatures possible, which he couldn't block. For example this works:

  $ curl --ciphers AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-SHA:... https://foxmoss.com/blog/packet-filtering/

But, yes, most bots don't bother randomizing ciphers so most will be blocked.

mrbon That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

They do this so they are harder to track & block. If they were sending over Wifi then they have to hide the IP, so they have to use VPNs, which are often blocked, etc. But with their solution they have a standard SIM on the standard cellular network, so it's nearly indistinquishable from a regular cellphone.

mrbon OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

Bitcoin mining consumes about 25 GW: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci so this single deal amounts to about 40% of that.

To be clear, I am comparing power consumption only. In terms of mining power, all these GPUs could only mine a negligible fraction of what all specialized Bitcoin ASIC mine.

Edit: some math I did out of sheer curiosity: a modern top-of-the-line GPU would mine BTC at about 10 Ghash/s (I don't think anyone tried but I wrote GPU mining software back in the day, and that is my estimate). Nvidia is on track to sell 50 million GPUs in 2025. If they were all mining, their combined compute power would be 500 Phash/s, which is 0.05% of Bitcoin's global mining capacity.

mrbon Privacy and Security Risks in the eSIM Ecosystem [pdf]

They used cool hardware to do this research: the sysmoEUICC1 (https://shop.sysmocom.de/sysmoEUICC1-eUICC-for-consumer-eSIM...) which is a physical SIM card onto which one can load an eSIM, and they put it in a SIMtrace 2 device (https://osmocom.org/projects/simtrace2/wiki) to trace the data packets to/from the eSIM profile, which is normally not easily doable as modern phones load the eSIM on a chip soldered onto the phone's motherboard. So you end up with a goofy contraption (see figure 4 on page 8) but you have full visibility into the communications to/from the eSIM profile. Fun!

mrbon Images over DNS

Oh, this reminds me of a Chrome extension I wrote to distribute Web content (images, html, js, anything) over DNS: https://blog.zorinaq.com/cdn53-a-super-distributed-cdn/ It implements the fake TLD .cdn53: when visiting http://zorinaq.com.cdn53 the extension intercepts the request, sends a DNS query for the TXT record for "_cdn53.zorinaq.com" and the response contains the HTML content, or any content, and it can be up to ~65 kb in size. It's super-distributed as it will naturally be cached by all DNS resolvers worldwide that hit the domain...

mrbon Why our website looks like an operating system

I think this is a terrible idea from a usability standpoint. Why reinvent windows in CSS? Desktop browsers can already open multiple pages in multiple windows. And it's all neatly integrated in my OS where I can use keyboard shortcuts to maximize, minimize, close, move windows, or place the windows on multiple monitors, etc.

It's as much a bad idea as websites trying to reinvent scrollbars. No thanks. I prefer to use my native windows and scrollbars.

mrbon U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

Real assets like precious metals, commodities, real estate should do well during stagflation. I think crypto (mainstream ones, not fringe) should be doing well too IMHO, despite the skeptics.

mrbon The Synology End Game

For the last 20+ years I have always built my own home NAS. 6 to 8 drives. ZFS. Initially OpenSolaris, then FreeBSD, and nowadays Debian. I would hate to use a proprietary solution like Synology. I'm generally very happy with my builds, hardware-wise and software-wise. Surprisingly the most annoying thing of a custom build is that there aren't many choices of decent compact 8-drive NAS chassis (it's a small market after all). By compact, I mean micro-ATX or smaller. Because there is no standard placement of SATA ports on a motherboard, sometimes depending on the combination of motherboard and chassis, it's physically impossible to plug in all cables in the ports. Even when using a combination of straight and right-angle cables. Currently I'm using https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/MATX-ITX-mainboard-8-... (many Chinese companies sell similar clones) It's not as compact as an 8-drive Synology NAS chassis but it's compact enough for me.

mrbon Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

In my experience, in China as of 2016, "ssh -D" vasn't reliable at all, I wrote more details at https://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewa... (see "idea 1")

mrbon GMP damaging Zen 5 CPUs?

You are correct. In fact these guys measured a maximum socket power consumption of 240 watt using a 9950X at stock settings, running prime95. So far above the "170 watt" TDP:

https://hwbusters.com/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-9950x-cpu-review-perfo...

mrbon Pixel 10 Phones

This must be a glitch particular to Samsung phones. I use flagship Google Pixel phones and have NEVER witnessed such a lag. I tap on an input field with my left thumb, immediately the keyboard shows up, and I immediately smash any letter with my right thumb and it does register it. So, blame Samsung, not Android.

I am not too surprised though. Samsung has a reputation for bloating their Android stack with junk.

mrbon [dead]

Easier clue that it's AI-generated: the store names are gibberish.

mrbon It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

SPA = single page app

mrbon TSMC to start building four new plants with 1.4nm technology

I know and acknowledged it: GH100 gates are 100nm wide despite the "5nm" process. We all know about this discrepancy.

"Moore's Law is already dead"

That's clearly false, have a quick look at this chart: https://semiconductor.substack.com/p/the-relentless-pursuit-...

mrbon Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

Exactly! So many ways to make PM2.5 spike. I didn't even know about shampoo and sunblock. I assume for sunblock it's the spray kind?

mrbon TSMC to start building four new plants with 1.4nm technology

"The smallest gate was built with an AFM out ~7 atoms; that's about 8 orders of magnitude smaller than a transistor"

I was thrown off by your statement, so here are some numbers: a modern chip like Nvidia's GH100 manufactured at a 5 nm process is 80 billion gates in 814 mm². That means a gate is 100 nm wide which is the width of 500 silicon atoms. On a 2D area that's 250k atoms. I don't know the thickness but assuming it's also 500 atoms then a gate has a volume of 125 million atoms.

So I guess you get your "8 orders of magnitude" difference if you compare the three-dimensional volume (7 atoms vs 125 million). But on one dimension it's only 2 orders of magnitude (7 atoms vs 500). And the semiconductor industry measures progress on one dimension so to me the "2 orders of magnitude" seems the more relevant comparison to make.

mrbon Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

Given that this image: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/653a9fbd1075088b6c8f8bd3/... shows PM2.5 and CO2(ppm) it may imply they monitor particles and CO2 levels. My guess is it also monitors humidity, and temperature. Humidity helps distinguish smoke from water vapor (eg. steaming shower).

CO2 sensors are generally pretty accurate, but PM2.5 sensors are notoriously prone to false spikes usually caused by dust in or around the sensor: https://www.reddit.com/r/Awair/comments/10r1uyo/inaccurate_p... or https://forum.airgradient.com/t/unusual-pm2-5-readings-on-ne... or https://community.purpleair.com/t/what-to-do-about-incorrect...

My guess is it's likely a sensor in a hotel room accumulates dust over time, leading to high PM2.5 measurements maybe when something (eg. suitcase) bumps against the case, shaking the accumulated dust and releasing it around the sensor.