Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
No - toothpaste is in part an abrasive. If it's wetter, the abrasive is less effective at removing biofilm/plaque, and the chemical components are diluted in situ. Your mouth is plenty wet enough as-is.
Comment · 2 years ago
My experience is that working in an office is _much_ worse for distraction. Even if you're lucky enough not to be in open plan, the shoulder taps and quick chats easily demolish any chance of focus for me. At home I can knuckle down for a few hours and deal with something complex easily.
Comment · 2 years ago
Environment visibility is easy to get. If you pwn a box which has foo.internal, you can now impersonate foo.internal. If you pwn a box which has *.internal, you can now impersonate super-secret.internal and everything else, and now you're a DNS change away from MITM across an entire estate.

Security by obscurity while making the actual security of endpoints weaker is not an argument in favour of wildcards...

Comment · 3 years ago
"You can use adblock" is a pretty chunky benefit over Chrome
Comment · 3 years ago
Trust. OpenAI's ignored everyone's copyright and legal usage terms for the rest of their training data, what lawyer is going to trust them to follow their contractual terms?
Comment · 3 years ago
Doing in-database computation can be very advantageous for some applications, and writing those functions in Rust would be fantastic for some uses, not least for the library ecosystem. I did some work on video similarity search with in-DB search which would've certainly benefited.
Comment · 4 years ago
There were some legal challenges likely for the relevant statute, and doing it this way is much more in keeping with Singapore's approach to keeping politics "in politics".

It's carefully coordinated and done in a way that most conservatives can't really attack. In line with .sg's usual approach to doing things carefully and slowly in a controlled manner.

Comment · 4 years ago
Assa Abloy's eCliq stuff (similar to this) uses asymmetric crypto for some parts and symmetric for short-lived stuff. The lock cylinders in that system are updated with new CRLs when inserting a key which has been updated, and authorisations are typically pretty short-lived (we use 1 day for most stuff - engineers sync up their key via an app in the morning and then they're set - and only 15 minutes for high security things, which is enough to go find signal and get back if you're in an area with spotty 4G). The keys also pull access logs off cylinders whenever they're inserted and sync up to the server next time they're synced with the app.

Dunno if this system works the same way. We went through a few of these sorts of things before settling on the Abloy solution, and most of the stuff we saw was atrocious from an infosec perspective (let alone physical). The Abloy system uses CR2032s in keys, which last a year or two, whereas this seems to do some sort of low-power networking off of mechanical energy harvesting?

Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
QGIS will, for raster basemaps, fetch the detailed version to get you your high DPI detail but this of course involves stitching together lots of tiles from the basemap's lower zoom levels - which then have small labels. For raster maps which are not labelled, it makes complete sense and produces a much better result than the alternative (picking the "scale based" zoom level and interpolating).

This is kind of the only "right" answer when dealing with raster basemaps. It's either pixellated or going to be rendered "too small" for the zoom level.

Vector basemaps don't have this problem, and QGIS supports them, so that's the way to go if you can get data. QGIS can then render at the required DPI in full clarity but with elements scaled/positioned appropriately.

Comment · 4 years ago
We do a huge amount of very complex analysis and entirely run QGIS. Looked at ArcGIS and decided it wasn't anywhere near worth the money, and getting into their ecosystem at all makes it borderline impossible to interop with e.g. QGIS sensibly.
Comment · 4 years ago
The internet basically only works because small entities have as much standing and control as large entities. This is also why things like RPKI are required, to prevent small (and large!) actors causing disruption through malicious or accidental configuration of e.g. BGP.

Whereas in a blockchain, if you assume the participants are the same set of actors - which would make sense - then it would be very easy for a majority of network control to be held by a Google, an AT&T, a China Telecom, etc.

Introducing third-parties who are not neccesarily involved in the operation of networks to said blockchain also opens up BGP operators to a whole new raft of attacks. Want to blackhole an ASN? If you can convince a smart contract that the routing policy for that ASN is "drop all traffic" then you don't even need to compromise people's routers or muck around with all that messy DDoS stuff.

Bad, bad idea. Just like 99% of stuff with the word "blockchain" in it.

Comment · 4 years ago
UK? Pick any county within an hour or so of London. Oxfordshire and Berkshire is full of systems/tech people.
Comment · 4 years ago
The company commissioned to build it were FM Conway. That should have been a bright red flag. FM Conway do roadworks. They fix infrastructure, and rebuild streets. They're a civil engineering firm at best, not structural engineers, nor gardeners; in other words, a deeply inappropriate choice for the company to make it happen. But I would bet good money that WCC have a great relationship with them for other contracts, and I would bet good money that whoever handed out the contract got some great tea money for their site visits.
Comment · 4 years ago
Because we do take people's licenses away if they repeatedly cause accidents?

Treat the Tesla FSD as a human driver and it would've had its license revoked many years ago. It's only through close supervision by humans that accidents have been as infrequent as they have been.

The clip in question, if a human hadn't been paying attention, FSD would've knocked a cyclist over - at best. Do that enough times as a human - not many - and you'll be disqualified from driving pretty promptly in most civilised countries.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton