Hacker News: 0xbear

New comment by 0xbear in "Sending a Spacecraft to the Interstellar Asteroid"

0xbear — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 21:25:19 +0000

That was underwhelming. I’d much rather see NASA’s or SpaceX’s or Roskosmos’s take on this. AKA the entities that actually have the means to pull this off.

New comment by 0xbear in "A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm"

0xbear — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 19:06:40 +0000

>> there’s no doubt

There is very much doubt about that. Stanford (IIRC) did a study and no one could tell the difference.

New comment by 0xbear in "New Uber CEO Knew of Hack for Months"

0xbear — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 06:28:00 +0000

Dude has only been the CEO for like 2 months. Give him a break.

New comment by 0xbear in "I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality"

0xbear — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 05:11:38 +0000

Where by “people” you probably mean the lobbyists from Google/Facebook/Netflix and other internet companies who would have to share a fraction of their fat profit margins to deliver their stuff to you.

As the present predicament shows “advice of the people” means jack squat to the FCC, just like it did in 2015.

New comment by 0xbear in "Demystifying Floating Point Precision"

0xbear — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 18:31:41 +0000

Key point that takes some time to sink in: there are only 2^32 32 bit floats in total. Meaning that you can easily enumerate them all.

New comment by 0xbear in "A Nuclear Jet at Chernobyl Around 21:23:45 UTC on April 25, 1986"

0xbear — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 05:26:39 +0000

Proof: Soviet TV as of April 26. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EdubXu5GYxA

“And this is the main building of the station itself. As you can see there is no major destruction incessantly touted by the Western press...”

New comment by 0xbear in "Google will ‘de-rank’ RT articles to make them harder to find – Eric Schmidt"

0xbear — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 04:55:24 +0000

Slippery slope, if I’ve ever seen one.

New comment by 0xbear in "A Nuclear Jet at Chernobyl Around 21:23:45 UTC on April 25, 1986"

0xbear — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 04:34:26 +0000

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...

New comment by 0xbear in "A Nuclear Jet at Chernobyl Around 21:23:45 UTC on April 25, 1986"

0xbear — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 03:37:43 +0000

The accident happened on April 26th, and was acknowledged 36 hours after when they began to evacuate Pripyat, a town in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl. As I said, it took about a day for them to acknowledge it, and it was only acknowledged when it became clear that it could not be swept under the rug. Your video does not contradict that.

New comment by 0xbear in "A Nuclear Jet at Chernobyl Around 21:23:45 UTC on April 25, 1986"

0xbear — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 02:04:13 +0000

That may have been what they said to the Western media. It does not necessarily match what they said to their own government run TV channels and newspapers.

New comment by 0xbear in "A Nuclear Jet at Chernobyl Around 21:23:45 UTC on April 25, 1986"

0xbear — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 01:31:42 +0000

I still remember the reports on TV from there at the time. Initially there was a flat out denial that anything happened at all, but once the scale of the catastrophe became clear (within about a day), and it became clear that it can’t be swept under the rug, we started seeing the coverage of unbelievable heroics that people would demonstrate. I mean literally firefighters pouring water into the molten reactor core by standing at the edge of it, and then dying the same day from radiation poisoning. The radiation was so strong that the TV helicopter filming the reactor from above (which in itself was heroic given the kinds of shit suspended in the air) would show the most radioactive part with sort of a haze. Endless streams of trucks pouring concrete, etc, etc. It was 30 years ago so I don’t remember much, but man to get the Secretary General to admit such a bad fuckup — that was something truly extraordinary.

New comment by 0xbear in "Firefox Private Browsing vs. Chrome Incognito: Which Is Faster?"

0xbear — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 16:53:47 +0000

I know about those, but they are almost the opposite of what I want to have: instead of completely separating the two worlds, they forcibly merge them in the same browser instance (and Sync account).

New comment by 0xbear in "Firefox Private Browsing vs. Chrome Incognito: Which Is Faster?"

0xbear — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 16:24:45 +0000

If someone from Mozilla is reading this: I (and I suspect many other people who prefer to strictly segregate their “work” and “personal” data), would very much prefer if you implemented built-in profile switching a-la Chrome. This shouldn’t even be that hard given that FF already supports profiles. This is, and has always been, an obstacle for me to seriously consider Firefox as my only browser.

New comment by 0xbear in "Intel will ship processors with integrated AMD graphics and memory"

0xbear — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 01:43:33 +0000

So do I. Competition is better for everybody, including the competitors.

New comment by 0xbear in "More Than 100 Universities and Colleges Included in Offshore Leaks Database"

0xbear — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 01:38:33 +0000

Why was it surprising? https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/justin-trudeau-...

New comment by 0xbear in "Intel will ship processors with integrated AMD graphics and memory"

0xbear — Sun, 19 Nov 2017 22:54:57 +0000

Enemy of my enemy is my friend. With this Intel achieves several goals:

1. Stave off the stiff competition from Zen APUs.

2. Support a small competitor to keep the DOJ off their tail.

3. Bankroll an alternative to CUDA which they could piggyback on later when their own stuff is shipping.

New comment by 0xbear in "Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]"

0xbear — Sun, 19 Nov 2017 20:29:53 +0000

The difference here is that you can buy everything shown in that video (except the explosive) on Amazon. The drone can even be bought pre-made, all you need to do is implement a more capable system for autonomous control, which is also doable for simpler scenarios.

This is in comparison to the significant difficulty of making a barrel or any of the mechanical parts for an AK-47.

New comment by 0xbear in "Hotshot Tech Founders Face a Dilemma: Lie Low or Live Large"

0xbear — Sun, 19 Nov 2017 02:55:12 +0000

They already “give money to those who need it”, by buying all those expensive things. I want the opposite. I want them to spend every dollar they have on the most ridiculous bullshit and thus move the economy forward.

New comment by 0xbear in "Amazon’s Cashierless Store Is Almost Ready for Prime Time"

0xbear — Sun, 19 Nov 2017 00:22:47 +0000

It’ll be “almost ready” for prime time once it undergoes extensive adversarial “testing” by Seattle bums. Until then it’s a PR exercise.

New comment by 0xbear in "US committee votes $30,000 increase in minimum salary of H1B visa workers"

0xbear — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 23:28:55 +0000

Set the minimum to 100k at least. Help US grads get started in the field.