News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

k0stas

Sci-hub stopped updating a few years ago due to an ongoing lawsuit in India: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/205911/why-did-...
There is still a DOM hack to allow installation by re-enabling the "Add to Chrome" button on the linked page. See "Download and install uBlock Origin in Chrome" on this page: https://www.neowin.net/guides/google-turned-off-ublock-in-ch...

After the install, Chrome will disable the extension on the next restart but it can be re-enabled .. for now.

Re:Netherlands Daft Visa for Americans on Friday March 07, 2025 @11:25AM (#43291488)
Daft is an unfortunate choice of name.
Beware of talk about benefits without mention of drawbacks.

Connecting grids could significantly increase the fragility of the system resulting in higher risk of large-scale power outages. Some of you might have experienced the 2003 blackout in northeast North American (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003), which luckily happened in the summer. Tail risks should not be swept under the rug.

Even a single widespread event could completely wipe out the benefit gained from connecting grids.

Re:Synology DS923 vs. FreeBSD with ZFS on Thursday December 19, 2024 @06:32PM (#42466854)
If you want to run an up-to-date version of Docker, look into https://github.com/telnetdoogie/synology-docker/. It is a script that will back up the existing docker binaries and replace them with the latest. (Note the "First Time" upgrade information of switching to the "local" logger from "db").

I have forgotten why I originally wanted to update but I have had no issues with the updated system.

> This is bizarre but maybe I see the reason why. If it's to restrain foreign ownership of rental properties.

The reason is that the government wants its tax money. Since the cash flow is coming from the renter they are also responsible for it. There is a similar situation with employers who are responsible for remitting tax withholding even though it is the employee who owes the income tax.

I think this Globe and Mail article about the recently publicized case to be better read: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/article-montreal... (https://archive.is/fPNZT).

The renter in this case was responsible even though he claimed he did not know his landlord was a non-resident since she left Canada during the time that he rented. The Canada Revenue Agency disputed that claim since "[the landlord's] phone number on the lease was an Italian phone number; she had used an Italian e-mail address to correspond with [the renter]." The landlord had also asked the renter to start paying her sister who was still in Canada before she left for Italy.

I am curious about what would happen if the renter could genuinely establish that he did not know their landlord was a non-resident. Based on the defense lawyer's claim that "Whether the CRA could have collected the rent in some other way does not impact his liability under the law. The CRA and the Tax Court have to apply the law as it is written." [Note there is a mistake in this quote the CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) collects taxes not rent].

The reasoning provided by YC is in the subsequent tweet: "It's pretty rare for YC to fund solo founders, because startups take many years to get big and it's very hard to stay motivated for that many years without a cofounder helping."

YC has been reticent to fund solo founders since its inception.

Re:Who killed the network switch? A Hubris Bug Story on Wednesday March 27, 2024 @01:36AM (#39835978)
And the author of the post is named Cliff L. Biffle, which is one of the best names I have ever heard.
Excellent tips. As a corollary to #1, strive to make your own driving predictable to other drivers, e.g., turn signal on before changing lanes or braking to make a turn.
Re:Analyzing the Historical Rate of Catastrophes on Tuesday December 05, 2023 @09:49PM (#38539975)
While it's appealing to believe Pinker, his treatment of statistics and probability of war has been debunked. For a mathematical analysis of the history of war see Cirillo and Taleb's paper "On the statistical properties and tail risk of violent conflict" (https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf).

From the paper: "Accordingly, the public intellectual arena has witnessed active debates, such as the one between Steven Pinker on one side, and John Gray on the other concerning the hypothesis that the long peace was a statistically established phenomenon or a mere statistical sampling error that is characteristic of heavy-tailed processes, 16] and [27]–the latter of which is corroborated by this paper."

Re:Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @12:34PM (#38462347)
I always thought the intention was to get the same deal as Australia: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-56163550. It's not a surprise that Canada's media industry wanted the same deal and the government was willing to go to bat for it.

The BBC article from 2021 linked above even says "The law is seen as a test case for similar regulation around the world."

Re:PCIe for Hackers: The Diffpair Prelude on Thursday March 16, 2023 @10:50PM (#35192336)
I have designed PCIe compatible transceivers and this will be the last comment I make about it because correcting hardware nonsense on HN is only of transient interest to me.

Everything I wrote is 100% correct and in fact incontrovertible. Whether there is a little or a lot of differential capacitance does not change the fact that the differential portion of the capacitance has a 2X effect on the differential signal (as opposed to the common-mode signal, which it has no effect on). This is supported by basic math.

If capacitance is to ground then it is not differential capacitance so it is not relevant to this discussion. It may be true that differential capacitance is not a significant contributor to the impedance of PCB differential traces but that does not change the fundamental result (similarly, the principle of photovoltaic conversion still holds true in the dark even though there is little light to convert). And PCB traces are not the only kinds of differential pairs. Diff pairs exist inside the integrated circuits that drive the PCBs where they operate less like transmission lines and more like lumped capacitances due to the frequencies of interest compared to the dimensions of the conductors. In these circuit and conductor structures, differential capacitance can be significant and this is what OP was talking about since he was talking about the legs of the driver (transistors). OP was just wrong about the differential capacitance being good for speed. It's bad for speed.

Re:PCIe for Hackers: The Diffpair Prelude on Thursday March 16, 2023 @10:04AM (#35182129)
> Their point about diff pairs being more resistant to noise is correct, but it’s not the primary reason for using diff pairs.

The article is correct. This comment is wrong.

> Differential signals, at a physical layer level, are faster than single ended IO. It’s because you have double the current drive/sinking capability with two drivers.

The load is also double in a diff pair compared to a single wire, so the net effect is a wash compared to a single wire.

> You’re also getting capacitive coupling between each leg of the pair working in your favor, which keeps your edge transition nice and fast.

The opposite is true. Differential capacitance effectively appears 2X higher than the nominal capacitance to differential signals, making it a drawback of differential signaling rather than a benefit.

Re:Meetings *Are* the Work on Sunday February 26, 2023 @12:18PM (#34947241)
> The problem is that engineers like to work in silos and they do not communicate well with other engineers.

This is organizational problem that should be solved so that meetings are avoided as much as possible. The main way I have seen this solved is by engineering teams having clear APIs between. I use the term API loosely. This may be a software API between software teams but it may be a document, hardware interface or other sort of interface.

Without this sort of structure, communication requirements grow quadratically with each additional person, i.e., n*(n-1)/2 where n is the # of people.

I got obsessed with this paper recently, to the point where I have read most of the "Unknown Air Force Document" that Thompson references with giving him the idea of Trojan horse. The document was later identified and is declassified and publicly available [1].

> If one reads the original paper, one only finds a description of this attack as a thought experiment, leading one to conclude that any claim of a real-world attack by Thompson was an urban myth due to exaggeration.

This is true although Thompson gives some tantalizing hints in the paper.

In the introduction, he writes " I would like to present to you the cutest program I ever wrote." So he definitely wrote it and at least played around with it.

Later on in the "Moral" section, he writes "The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.)"

This appears to be an admission but not quite strong or direct enough to validate he implemented and used the Trojan horse so it is great to read this post.

[1] https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/publications/conference-pap...

Re:NextDNS API on Thursday June 16, 2022 @10:45AM (#31766661)
I was just trying out the API and noticed the same thing. I found the API key near the bottom on my https://my.nextdns.io/account page.
Re:Bringing Klimt Back to Life with Machine Learning on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @04:35PM (#29800873)
More information available at https://artsandculture.google.com/story/SQWxuZfE5ki3mQ.

I am curious if any art-inclined people on HN can comment on how close they believe the results to be to the original.

Re:Three sins of authors in computer science and math (1997) on Wednesday November 17, 2021 @02:55PM (#29258098)
> I agree these are annoying patterns, but I honestly don’t notice them. I don’t read research papers like a book, front to back.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. The articles "sins" don't matter because experts skip over these parts. And this is the reason they are not a focus of the authors.

I still think the article points out things that can be improved but the benefit is taking a good paper and making it more palatable to people who are not experts or on-the-way to being experts, thus expanding the population of people who might cite the paper.

I was wondering how efficiency is defined for a port.

I found what I think is a more original post related to the list: https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/new-global-container...

Inferring from the description in the link, it seems like the overall ranking is based on a combined metric. They do mention "minutes per container move" as a key metric ranging from Yokohama's 1.1 minutes to Africa's average 3.6 minutes.

From a high-level perspective, and in analogy with computer systems, it makes sense that time efficiency is the most critical metric.

Re:Samsung Foundry Forum announcements on Thursday October 07, 2021 @09:56PM (#28794814)
It already has been a problem in terms of gate leakage, although largely mitigated by material improvements.

Gate leakage is the phenomenon of quantum tunneling through the gate dielectric barrier and started appearing as gate dielectrics became thinner and thinner. Gate leakage was mitigated by moving to higher k dielectrics (from silicon dioxide, SiO2, to more exotic materials that include other elements such as Hafnium).

Higher k dielectrics allow for the same capacitance per unit area and channel control with a thicker physical gate compared to plain SiO2, reducing gate leakage. This technology change came along with metal gates (which used to be polysilicon) and were a combined advance that Intel incorporated a few years before before TSMC, IIRC circa 2008.

This is a circuit designer's perspective. Someone who actually understands device physics and material properties can chime in to correct me.

Re:Norm Macdonald has died on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @02:55PM (#28529271)
Re:Lawrence Livermore claims a milestone in laser fusion on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @02:23PM (#28213143)
For context, in wired chip-to-chip communication electronics, femtosecond variations are (statistically) measurable. Picoseconds are rather pedestrian. A 56 Gbaud signal has a single-symbol duration of about 18 picoseconds and perturbations on the order of 1 picosecond are rather large 5.6%.

Not to downplay the achievement of the article or the innovation in fusion physics and engineering in general, just a bit of context for the timescales.

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