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steckerbrett

523 karma · joined May 12, 2015

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steckerbrett··on IPFS Pics
I bet strongly against that. "Decentralized" systems do not scale, and are impossible to keep clear of spam.
steckerbrett··on IPFS Pics
It's just POSTing the image to a web server running from something else.

I don't understand why they are doing dumb things like passing everything to a shell when PHP has curl support of its own, and imagemagick.

steckerbrett··on Yahoo Logo ASCII Animation in 462 bytes of C (2011)

    for(i=0;i<4;i++)
This is three lines?
steckerbrett··on DNSSEC is Open for Beta
Cloudflare-ternet.
steckerbrett··on After 8 years and $128M raised, the clock is ticking for men's retailer Bonobos
I doubt any of the higher price of clothes goes towards them not being made in sweatshops.
steckerbrett··on Laser Razor suspended by Kickstarter
They do additionally claim a 10 year battery life.
steckerbrett··on Laser Razor suspended by Kickstarter
Perhaps a little exaggeration, agreed. The wavelengths you want are in the UV end of things, which I assumed would be mostly clumsy CO2 tubes. Just the concept of giving a consumer a high power laser they can't even see makes me extremely uncomfortable regardless of how plausible the rest of it is. Mistakes with that sort of thing are permanent, you don't get any second chances if you blast out your retina.
steckerbrett··on Laser Razor suspended by Kickstarter
I doubt you could get more than a watt out of a AAA anyway.
steckerbrett··on Laser Razor suspended by Kickstarter
I don't agree, their demonstration video is enough without further domain experience to see that it is at a minimum ineffective at what it claims. If it was really supposed to be able to give you the smoothest shave ever, they would at least have a video without the participant flinching every time they burned themselves with the hot wire.
steckerbrett··on Laser Razor suspended by Kickstarter
Light has a fun property of being bent when it passes through substances that have different optical densities. With some combinations of material and process we can exploit this property to achieve total internal reflection[0]. With a cylindrical glass rod we can fire light down it in such a way that it bounces off the walls and makes it to the far end without ever exiting through the sides. This is used in fiber optic communications to achieve low levels of loss transmitting light very large distances.

However, the total internal reflection can partly break down if we apply something to the side of the glass tube, like touching it with a finger. The laser will strike through the glass cylinder and onto whatever is touching it, this is known as frustrated total internal reflection. What's supposedly happening in this product is the razor blade has a fiber with a laser being shone through it, when the fiber comes into the contact with a hair the laser exits the fiber and the thermal energy burns the hair.

The problems here are pretty severe.

• If such a fiber did exist it would give you severe burns on contact with your skin (a very close shave indeed). It would be like trying to shave with a red hot block of steel held up to your face.

• Ever burnt some hair? It smells ghastly. I burned my beard once and the nauseating smell didn't go away for hours. Trying to convince consumers to go on a date while smelling like burning keratin would near impossible.

• The amount of laser power going through the fiber would have the potential to remove your eyesight if you broke it. If you wanted to use this you would need to be wearing eye protection (sealed goggles), skin protection like welding gear, have signage and locks on your bathroom to prevent anybody unprotected from entering.

• The amount of energy required for this sort of effect would be colossal, lasers are inefficient and need a lot of cooling (high power ones are often water cooled). If this existed just the hand piece would be something like a petrol pump nozzle leading to a massive cooling system and power supply.

• Any slight impurity in the fiber would cause it to instantly melt when the laser was turned on. Unless something is perfectly optically clear there is some loss to heat as light passes through it. Glass fibers made for telecommunications are incredibly clear, but they still have enough loss that repeaters are needed on long runs due to losses.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_internal_reflection

steckerbrett··on Laser Razor suspended by Kickstarter
There's no laser there. If there was a laser there it would be a significant hazard to everybody in the room, so it's good it's completely fake. With the sort of power you would need to be cutting hairs in any capacity simply looking at diffuse reflections (think a laser dot at a wall) would have the ability to permanently damage your vision. The video is someone fooling around with a piece of aluminum and a hot wire[0]. It's a testament to human stupidity that something this blatant managed to get $4M.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-wire_foam_cutter

steckerbrett··on Apple: Magic Accessories
The new trackpads don't click at all, they "click" is an actuator underneath striking up at your finger when you press down.
steckerbrett··on Just Enough Bitcoin for Ethereum
Why does Ethereum help, and why do you believe Ethereum is invulnerable to the law?
steckerbrett··on Just Enough Bitcoin for Ethereum
What did you expect to be able to do with it, exactly?
steckerbrett··on Things men have actually said to me at tech events
Yes. In my place of work that sort of behavior towards anybody would see you instantly excluded from every social circle, not by regulation just because we have some moral core and empathy. If people are being made uncomfortable by others for any reason, that's a problem.
steckerbrett··on Things men have actually said to me at tech events
That's going to be problematic, lots of people at conferences talk in low voice about confidential things. Surely there's better ways to combat harassment than pervasive surveillance.
steckerbrett··on Estonia Wants to Collect the DNA of All Its Citizens
Looks like they screwed up the DER encoding more than the actual cryptography, incredibly stupid but understandable.
steckerbrett··on ARM server market
Just general feeling compiling some packages and messing with 'openssl speed'.
steckerbrett··on Global coalition tells Facebook to kill its Real Names policy
I know someone with the surname "body" who has never been able to make an account because it sounds like "No Body".
steckerbrett··on Global coalition tells Facebook to kill its Real Names policy
I don't think that's an issue, they have enough data that as soon as you can find one person they can probably extrapolate the rest of them. It's kind of creepy but whatever.
steckerbrett··on ARM server market
Digital Ocean claims to meter bandwidth but they don't.
steckerbrett··on ARM server market
My comparison was between the C1 offering from Scaleway and the lowest DigitalOcean package. Scaleway has far larger disk and memory, but the disk is remote over the network link and the 4 ARM cores are 32bit and terribly slow. I really like Scaleways configuration and control panel but the performance just isn't there. It's likely better for a lot of things other people are doing but I needed the IO and CPu performance.
steckerbrett··on ARM server market
It's approximately the same price as Digital Oceans lowest offering, which has significantly higher performance in every area.
steckerbrett··on ARM server market
I thought ARM servers might be nice on scaleway but was quite disappointed in the performance. 32bit and all disk IO over a network connection is really not a good start. Maybe that will improve when we see more ARM64 around.
steckerbrett··on Learn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL
Is google trends really how you should be choosing your stack?
steckerbrett··on Mercury Spill
It's essentially a pressure regulator I think.
steckerbrett··on Mercury Spill
Here's an EPA document which shows some pictures, look at page 2 for the unit the OP has.

http://www.epa.gov/mercury/pdfs/EPA-905-F-11-008.pdf

steckerbrett··on Mercury Spill
I would definitely be very uncomfortable with my health had I been living there, balls of mercury in the bathroom seem to suggest that there was quite a high degree of exposure.
steckerbrett··on The Light L16 – a multi-aperture computational camera
https://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_05.jpg

You're right, that's like no lens blur I've ever seen.

steckerbrett··on The Light L16 – a multi-aperture computational camera
In their examples there's a macro photo of a chess board.
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