News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

dabiged

The guy was a paedophile and justified it because he was so intelligent he deserved to sleep with children.
Don't forget snap, crackle and pop, and quantum teleportation.

Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.

Re:FreeCAD Version 1.1 Released on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @08:09PM (#47525091)
My goal this year is to finish his 40ish hour course. Excellent quality course at a good pace.
Australia reporting in.

We have private emergency rooms. We call them urgent care and you can go and see a qualified physician with allied health services (radiology, pathology). If they can fix you up they will. If not you get transferred via ambulance to the nearest public hospital and triaged as required.

I took my kid to one last weekend as they had been diagnosed by our family Dr as having pneumonia. The emergency physician ordered chest x-ray and full suite of pathology and we had results in less time than we would have waited in the public hospital waiting room. Yes we paid.

Re:Ask HN: What did you read in 2025? on Saturday December 27, 2025 @03:48AM (#46400261)
I took read it this year and invested about 8 weeks getting through it. I found the story disjointed, repetitive and very hard to follow. It was only after finishing it I discovered I had read the abridged version that cuts out a number of chapters leaving multiple characters without conclusions. No wonder it was difficult to follow.
Re:The $1k AWS Mistake on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @06:00AM (#45978126)
I made the same mistake and blew $60k.

I have never understood why the S3 endpoint isn't deployed by default, except to catch people making this exact mistake.

Re:The Challenge of Large File Checksums on Sunday November 16, 2025 @06:01PM (#45949244)
Why not use a faster hashing algorithm like xxhash?

This code is using sha256 which, whilst cryptography secure, is a massive burden for computation.

Re:AWS in 2025: The Stuff You Think You Know That's Now Wrong on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @09:15PM (#44968136)
As someone who does tape recovery on very very old tape I largely concur with this with a couple of caveats.

1. Do not encrypt your tapes if you want the data back in 30/50 years. We have had so many companies lose encryption keys and turn their tapes into paperweights because the company they bought out 17 years ago had poor key management.

2. The typical failure case on tape is physical damage not bit errors. This can be via blunt force trauma (i.e. dropping, or sometimes crushing) or via poor storage (i.e. mould/mildew).

3. Not all tape formats are created equal. I have seen far higher failure rates on tape formats that are repeatedly accessed, updated, ejected, than your old style write once, read none pattern.

Re:Photon transport through the entire adult human head on Tuesday June 17, 2025 @05:33AM (#44297242)
I suspect they do a radon transform of the paths to determine the infrared transmissibility value. Similar to how CT scans are constructed from 1000's of micro x-rays.
Re:The Secret Formula for Faster Trains on Tuesday April 15, 2025 @12:49AM (#43689074)
Not from North America. But I disagree that the exceptionalism started post WWII.

How do you explain the country's ability to perform civil engineering feats prior to WWII. The Erie Canal, Trans-continental Railway, Panama Canal, Brooklyn Bridge, Empire State Building and Golden Gate Bridge spring to mind as feats of engineering that few other country's (if any) could rival. There are obvious examples post WWII (Manhattan project, Apollo program, Interstate highway system), but for all of the USA's pitfalls, they do have an incredible history of civil engineering projects prior to WWII.

Liquid hydrogen can also cause hydrogen embrittlement. Not ideal in a high performance machine.
Re:Archival Storage on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @07:16AM (#43398071)
Last year my company read in excess of 20,000 tapes from just about every manufacturer and software vendor. For modern, LTO/3592/T10000 era tapes the failure rate we see is around 0.3%.

Most of these failures are due to:

cartridges being dropped or otherwise physically deformed such that they do not fit into the drives anymore.

cartridges getting stuck in drives and destructive extraction being required.

Data was never written correctly in the first place.

The only exception to this rule that we have seen is tapes written with LTFS. These tapes have a 20 fold higher incidence of failure, we believe because reading data back, as if it was a HDD, causes excessive wear.

Anyone claiming 50% failure rates on tapes has no idea what they are talking about, are reading back tapes from the 1970s/80s or have a vested interest in getting people away from tape storage.

Re:Archival Storage on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @07:06AM (#43397988)
Curious to hear more details about your previous job? What were you doing to require 100k tapes?
> breaking the forever chemicals down into harmless, inorganic fluorine.

It's sentences like this that make me question if the author has even a basic grasp of chemistry.

Re:Don't Be Frupid on Monday February 10, 2025 @12:38AM (#42997271)
There was a large company in my city that had around 30 floors of staff and a dedicated full time contractor managing the expensive coffee machines on each floor (running dishwashers, restocking beans/milk, cleaning/servicing the machines etc). Management decided to do away with this role and get rid of the coffee machines to save 1 Full time salary + change.

The next week there were 40 staff queuing for coffee at every cafe within a 10 minute walk. Coffee breaks went from 3-4 minutes (walk to kitchen on your floor, press 'latte', walk to desk) to a minimum of 45 minutes (elevator to ground floor, walk to cafe, queue with everyone else, wait with everyone else, elevator back up). These were staff on high six figure salaries.

Definitely the Frupidiest decision I have ever seen.

Re:Through-the-Earth Mine Communications on Saturday December 14, 2024 @07:38PM (#42420557)
> Radio communication within caves is problematic because rock is a conductor and therefore absorbs radio waves.

It's funny, I would have bet my house that rock is an insulator.

Re:Using an 8K TV as a Monitor on Thursday October 31, 2024 @03:56AM (#42004400)
Thanks for taking the time to write this.

I was under the incorrect impression the power consumption would related to the rendering of the image (ala CPU/GPU work). Having it related to brightness makes much more sense.

Re:Using an 8K TV as a Monitor on Tuesday October 29, 2024 @08:48PM (#41990944)
> RTINGS measured the Samsung QN800A as consuming 139W typical, with a peak of 429W.

Can you explain why does a TV's power fluctuate so much? What does peak load look like for a TV? Does watching NFL draw more power than playing Factorio?

I have to respectfully disagree here. You place far too much stead in "individuals freely interacting" and none in "micromanaging bosses constantly hassling you at ridiculous hours for pissant assignments that can wait until the morning".

My experience in working at Australian businesses, especially as an IC, is that there is far too much of the latter, and far to little of the former. This is especially true the younger the reporting staff member is.

Re:How old is your globe? [pdf] on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @07:58AM (#41169988)
Clearly this pdf is a couple of years old. It is missing

Turkey -> Türkiye (2022)

Year of the Linux desktop at last!
> We baselessly claim a log-normal makes sense...

I personally loved the semi cropped ChatGPT screen shot in figure 8 that has "Can you write me a paper on the game theory of names".

The best bit: They recursively reference the paper to provide proof that too many parents choose the same common names:

> For instance, a parent might anticipate the name “Kate” would be a pleasantly traditional yet unique name with only moderate popularity. They would be wrong [6].

Reference 6 is the paper.

Re:S3 Is Showing Its Age on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @11:52PM (#40450284)
They don't exist in the bucket name space, but they sure as hell exist in the bucket bill!
Re:Can a pill prevent deaths from venomous snakebites? on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:26PM (#38849558)
> he was administered 28 vials of antivenom intravenously at a cost of $3,400 per vial.

As someone who lives in Australia, who grew up with aggressive and deadly snakes, what the actual hell? Nobody is out of pocket in Australia following a snake bite and we have many more species and all of the geographic remoteness of the South Western US. Is this just another case of a side effect of the state of the USA healthcare system?

Re:A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32 on Sunday December 10, 2023 @02:39AM (#38589859)
QANTAS has, for the last 10+, had a CEO who was not part of this culture and did everything he could to drive costs down. He laid off huge swaths of engineers, outsourced key maintenance contracts to the lowest bidder and left the airline with an aging fleet that needs billions spent to replenish. He was recently fired by the board for essentially destroying the reputation of the airline within Australia, with their practice of cancelling flights at short notice, illegally sacking thousands of staff during COVID and taking 100's of millions of dollars from the Australian government to keep staff employed during the airline's grounding during COVID and handing it all to shareholders.

It is a situation very similar to the downfall of Boeing.

Older »