Hacker News: Xamayon

New comment by Xamayon in "A room temperature Li2O-based lithium-air battery enabled by a solid electrolyte"

Xamayon — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 21:58:18 +0000

If it can be made small enough for use in mobile devices, I wonder whether the need for air/oxygen might require compromising on water-tightness. Would an oxygen permeable waterproof membrane allow enough through for operation? It would be interesting if instead of just for cooling, future high powered devices might also need a fan to feed the battery!

New comment by Xamayon in "File.haus – Anonymously upload up to 300GB"

Xamayon — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 15:31:27 +0000

That's essentially how mega.io works. The browser encrypts before upload, and the key is added to the download URL. When downloading, the browser uses the key in the URL for local decryption.

The intention is for them to have no access to or knowledge of file contents. Since the key is the URL, and URLs are generally sent to the server by the browser, Mega could (presumably) get the keys when someone follows the download link.

I believe removing the key from the URL still works, the site just prompts for it when needed, but that could also make its way to Mega if they ever decided they wanted it. It seems like a decent approach for ease of use, but has some weaknesses if security is the main goal. Encrypting separately before upload is still a very good idea if it matters for whatever reason.

New comment by Xamayon in "CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops"

Xamayon — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 13:50:04 +0000

Yeah, my guess is that they roll out the updates to every client at the same time, and then have the client implement the n-1/2/whatever part locally. That worked great-ish until they pushed a corrupt (empty) update file which crashed the client when it tried to interpret the contents... Not ideal, and obviously there isn't enough internal testing before sending stuff out to actual clients.

New comment by Xamayon in "Broadcom has willingly dug its VMware hole, says cloud CEO [video]"

Xamayon — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 14:43:54 +0000

Also, screwing over the minnows who are willing to spend some money is a huge gift to the competition. If another product grabs a large portion of the market, and now has more resources to innovate with, the whales may even start to switch over from the now mostly stagnant and overpriced option. I love(d) VMWare, but going forward it will have no place in any environment I control.

New comment by Xamayon in "Wi-Fi jamming to knock out cameras suspected in nine Minnesota burglaries"

Xamayon — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 20:27:49 +0000

Possibly desirable for optimal image quality, sure, but taking pictures is not the only use for a telescope. Many things just require knowing how much light is present, and how that changes over time. Occultations are one such case which I have familiarity with. Objects are often so faint that every little bit of light is essential to improve SNR - https://occultations.org/

IR filters are generally pretty effective too, so just having one anywhere will do the trick unless you're dealing with a lot of light. Cameras which would be undesirably sensitive to IR would usually have the filter built in, basically right on top of the sensor. No need for added coatings on the telescope itself.

New comment by Xamayon in "Wi-Fi jamming to knock out cameras suspected in nine Minnesota burglaries"

Xamayon — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 21:16:23 +0000

For #2 - Assuming it's not a spotting scope or similar, filtering IR wouldn't have much benefit. An IR filter might even hurt for the typical star gazing type usage, depending on the equipment used. Cameras for looking at things in the night sky often explicitly lack IR filters (often at massively increased cost) to increase sensitivity to any available light.

New comment by Xamayon in "A distributed systems reading list"

Xamayon — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 17:42:48 +0000

ESXi needs the RAID to be handled by another device, the simplest case is a hardware RAID card with disks locally attached to it. You can also attach remote disks/volumes from other systems, with or without RAID, over the network/SAN/etc using an HBA, special network card, or the software iscsi initiator stuff in ESXi. You can even have something like a windows server act as the iscsi volume host, and attach to it over the normal network if you don't really care about reliability. The ESXi OS will not appreciate it if you ever turn the remote volume host system off, or if the network drops out. It's really too bad the free and cheap ESXi licenses are going away, it was always so nice to work with...

New comment by Xamayon in "A distributed systems reading list"

Xamayon — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 17:19:58 +0000

It's not as easy as playing with more 'normal' stuff, but I usually use VMs on a local hypervisor like ESXi, or a bunch of old desktop/server hardware if I have enough space/power/cooling at the time. Winter helps, big stuff often runs loud and hot. To get specialized hardware when needed, ebay or 'trash' from work and such can help a lot.

New comment by Xamayon in "Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots: study"

Xamayon — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 22:54:58 +0000

Think of all the monetization possibilities - The AI could secretly teach your parrot to speak about how it would prefer a different (specific) brand of food, or that you should really buy nicer looking clothes from such and such store!

I find it hard to believe companies could resist such temptation for long, but agree that it does sound like it would be great for the birds (and possibly other pets) if done sanely without such contamination~

New comment by Xamayon in "Email obfuscation: What still works in 2023?"

Xamayon — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 17:23:09 +0000

My experience is similar; I have my personal email, which has been in use since the early 00s, in almost plain text (@ replaced with ) on the about page of a fairly popular site which gets several million visits a month. I only get 5-10 spam messages/day, most of which are filtered without issue. I do get a decent amount of email, but not true 'spam'. It's mostly just crap I've signed up for over the years and can't be bothered to get rid of.

I honestly get more at my work email, which has never been posted anywhere... I wonder if spammers have started to assume the easy to get email addresses are suspicious or not valuable for various reasons.

New comment by Xamayon in "Googlers told to avoid words like ‘share’ and ‘bundle,’ US says"

Xamayon — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 00:21:36 +0000

The $30-50 zenni glasses/lenses in my experience are actually substantially clearer than the (absolute ripoff) $400-500 rayban ones. Same prescription, and the zenni ones even arrived quicker! Frame consistency is a bit of an issue though, I bought a few more cheap pairs with the 'same' frame a few years later and they changed the design subtly which made them fit worse.

New comment by Xamayon in "Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, locking out some users"

Xamayon — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 19:00:54 +0000

Haven't looked into it, but it sounds like it would work similarly (with some nice benefits such as also being able to easily store other metadata/etc). Feasibility would depend on how quickly the indexes and such load, and the resource consumption associated with opening/closing dozens of them at a time 24/7. In my screwy case there are hundreds of thousands of zip files which are randomly accessed on the fly to grab one or two thumbnails at a time. The random access speed on unloaded files is critical, and for zip files it's extremely quick.

New comment by Xamayon in "Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, locking out some users"

Xamayon — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 14:19:14 +0000

I do exactly that for storing the result thumbnails for some of the dbs in my reverse image search engine (SauceNAO). Non compressed zip files allow quickly/easily seeking to and accessing component files without extraction. A few tens to hundreds of thousands per zip file works great. Millions would probably not be too different, but would use more resources/take more time when loading the zip file index.

New comment by Xamayon in "This site was styled by YouTube comments"

Xamayon — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 17:05:34 +0000

May be more directly related to the CPU/etc load and HW age rather than software. If the phone's battery is older, it may not be able to keep up with the bursty power draw, which can cause the phone to crash.

New comment by Xamayon in "Bitrex – the brand name of the bitterest substance in the world"

Xamayon — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 23:29:16 +0000

From what I understand, there is significant variance in how bitter it is to different people. As an example, I can lick a switch cartridge and just get a slight tingly sensation, it's not particularly bitter or unpleasant. I have also tasted the denatured alcohol used in some decorative tabletop burners (mainly because, hey, it says 100% non toxic - can't be THAT Bad!). It had a similar tingly taste, and reminded me a bit of gin...

New comment by Xamayon in "The Peking Duck Exemption"

Xamayon — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 17:41:13 +0000

In the case of botulism toxin, it's actually the opposite. The spores are extremely resistant to temperature, but the toxin can be destroyed by boiling at normal temp/pressure until all parts have been fully exposed to those temps. Other toxins are still an issue though, and many are heat resistant, so not a good idea to eat potentially contaminated foods.

New comment by Xamayon in "A crash dummy aimed at protecting women drivers"

Xamayon — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 16:42:38 +0000

Just 'spitballing', but if the restraints are adequate, the compression of flesh may act to slow down and spread out the force of the accident to a certain degree. Bruising may be more likely, and the increased overall force might break ribs and such, but increased weight may have some benefits at some speeds/in some scenarios.

Some possible downsides would be overwhelming the airbags capacity, and larger overall volume of space which needs to be protected from intrusion/crushing/etc. I Wonder how much this has been studied, hard rubber and steel dummies probably don't reflect conditions at the extremes very well...

New comment by Xamayon in "Caffeine and Exercise Performance"

Xamayon — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 11:02:50 +0000

I know mine was chronically low in Magnesium. The first indicator which got my attention and pointed to a potential problem was that taking a multi vitamin would make me feel _much_ better than normal the next day.

New comment by Xamayon in "Ask HN: I want to dive into how to make search engines"

Xamayon — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 16:45:53 +0000

Getting and storing the content is one of the main challenges, and it's getting harder by the day with more and more sites using anti bot stuff from companies like Cloudflare. With the SauceNAO.com image search engine I tried to tailor it to my own needs, taking a slow and steady semi-curated approach. To keep things sane and costs low I went after specific sites (and other resources) which have high signal to noise, and highly desirable content. I add a couple at a time, finding and fixing bottlenecks as they come up. Nothing is perfect from the start, so I mainly focus on environment simplicity and getting the minimum viable setup working as quickly as possible. This has caused some problems to be sure, and led to the site looking and feeling less than awesome in many ways, but at least it (mostly) works... Over time I have had to rewrite everything - the crawling software, search algorithms, back-end database, and front-end when it became apparent things could be done more efficiently to deal with the ever increasing usage and scale. Having the content stored to enable re-generating indexes quickly has been very important long term! It has taken many years (started in 2008), but in its art/entertainment niche, it has really started to take off usage wise. My advice would be to start semi-small, throwing things at the wall and see if anything works. Try to keep the initial setup as simple and affordable as possible unless you have serious funding available. Building even a small search engine can take a lot of resources and time, but it can also be an amazingly fun hobby.

New comment by Xamayon in "Tempest LCD: Playing songs from your LCD monitor with a radio"

Xamayon — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 14:32:13 +0000

It's far worse than just being able to listen to music, with the right receiver and software you can decode the image from the monitor. Here's a quick overview. https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/tempest-comes-to-gnu-radio/

I have verified that it works with my equipment (alarmingly well), though higher resolutions are harder to get a clear image out of. It even works with multiple monitors in close proximity, you just have to select the right parameters. Having an appropriate antenna helps avoid interference and improve the quality.