Hacker News: azalemeth

New comment by azalemeth in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)"

azalemeth — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:19:03 +0000

I'm someone with an academic background who is always interested in new collaborations and interesting problems to explore.

Location: Mostly in Oxford, UK Remote: Yes Willing: no Technologies: Prize-winning physicist and physical scientist. Deeply familiar with maths and physics and statistical inference, in a biomedical context. I've worked on everything from pythons to potatoes (and from assembly code to, well, python). Google Scholar is probably a better judge of my outputs than a strict CV; https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=LhYjunkAAA... Email: in profile.

New comment by azalemeth in "AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes"

azalemeth — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:24:22 +0000

I have specifically chosen AMD _many_ times in the past precisely because of their better linux support and more open toolchain.

This is an absolute foot-gun moment. And the gaslighting PR responses are just unacceptable. I'm very disappointed in them.

GSM, UMTS, LTE and 5G Standard Protocols and Procedures for Lawful Interception [pdf]

azalemeth — Wed, 27 May 2026 10:52:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/133100_133199/133128/16.19.00_60/ts_133128v161900p.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48292284

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Today is the last day of the UK's consultation on social media and VPNs

azalemeth — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:12:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-the-online-world-a-national-consultation

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48279377

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by azalemeth in "Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers"

azalemeth — Sat, 23 May 2026 09:20:20 +0000

My local library has some dead tree format books with a 500 year support window. Or dead animal or dead reed format books with more like a 2000-year support window.

Planned obsolescence is always bad.

New comment by azalemeth in "Flipper One – we need your help"

azalemeth — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:15:01 +0000

Exactly. A decent digital communication, spectrum or vector network analyser from the likes of Keysight (AKA HP or Agilent) or R&S is crazy money – many thousands.

Compared to any piece of "proper" test and measurement equipment even if Flipper 1 is $1k it's a steal, for example. Heck, the last thing I put on a grant application was a 220 GHz AWG that was something like $1.5m. Admittedly quite different from a single m2 plugin socket but a 1 GHz spectrum analyser starts at $2.4k and everything fancier is "price on application" [0].

I realise this is not the same piece of kit as Flipper One, but with the right daughter boards, hackability, and ~~graduate student~~ labour I imagine you could do a lot (I am interested in RF at <1 GHz for NMR reasons as well as electronic Larmor frequencies at ~100 GHz frequencies). Their SDR daughter boards are designed for communication but there's a whole world of academic nerds who do weird things and would love a genuinely open, hackable broadband SDR (they exist, with limitations! I have a lime SDR somewhere…)

[0] https://www.rohde-schwarz.com/us/products/test-and-measureme...

New comment by azalemeth in "Flipper One – we need your help"

azalemeth — Thu, 21 May 2026 11:43:51 +0000

This looks flippin' amazing, but also like the definition of project scope creep. I imagine it will be brilliant, unaffordable, surprisingly cheap, terrible and awesome (in both senses of the word) all at the same time. 3GPP really needs a light shining through it.

I sincerely hope I work out a way of getting someone else to buy the thing for me. And the push towards all in-tree source is fantastic. Genuinely impressed.

New comment by azalemeth in "Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools"

azalemeth — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:31:55 +0000

It is perhaps worth highlighting that Mozilla has done this in response to a specific UK government consultation [1] all about "growing up in the online world", which has, buried about 30 pages deep, a specific question about age-gating VPNs and similar technologies.

As far as I can tell, there is no requirement to be a UK citizen to answer this – if you are, were, or could be resident in the UK I urge you to fill it out and help provide a voice of reason...

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...

New comment by azalemeth in "Mullvad exit IPs are surprisingly identifying"

azalemeth — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:08:54 +0000

You really do provide a reassuring, good service -- thank you.

It's also worth stating that the client (including the cli client -- which, with a bit of work, you can get running in most situations where you'd use native wireguard) by default has a key rotation interval of I think 72 hours.

`mullvad tunnel get` will show it and `mullvad tunnel set rotation-interval ` will change it. This is the preferred mitigation method of the post.

I personally don't mind having a pseudo-static IP (some other suppliers offer a static IPv4 as a feature!) as I wish to prevent network-level snooping from my ISP and governments. It's also worth stating that I think having a smaller IP space is an advantage for a privacy VPN: there are more potential users acting behind any given externally visible IP. Combined with technologies like DAITA (which effectively adds chaff to the tunnel) and multi-hop entrances and I personally think that this service really does plausibly make harder the life of those who snoop netflows all day.

New comment by azalemeth in "Closure of Radio 4 on Long Wave (LW)"

azalemeth — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:17:26 +0000

I really have an odd nostalgia for longwave. I grew up listening to radio 4 lw in the middle of nowhere and it was the only station that had consistently good signal. The fact that it carried somewhere out into the Atlantic blew my mind!

I understand it's closing because some insanely high powered, insanely expensive valve or thyristor or triac or generic high power "niche" component is reaching the end of its life, but I will be sad nevertheless when this goes.

DAB doesn't work reliably with my phone charging in the same room...

New comment by azalemeth in "Google tools for customizing searches"

azalemeth — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:51:29 +0000

I distinctly remember being an 8 year old in primary school and not being believed by a teacher that tungsten existed. I was told I must be wrong about the density of this metal being higher than lead and unless I could find a book to prove it I should shut up about it. In reality I'd been to a museum and learnt all about wonderful wulfram and probably just must have been insufferable.

Wikipedia is a godsend.

GradIEEEnt half decent – The hidden power of imprecise lines(2023) [pdf]

azalemeth — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:34:40 +0000

Article URL: https://tom7.org/grad/murphy2023grad.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48007375

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by azalemeth in "Utilyze measures how efficiently your GPU is doing useful work"

azalemeth — Sun, 03 May 2026 15:17:44 +0000

This looks fantastic, but I've got access to some very nice AMD cards. Any hope of a rocm-smi or opencl version?

New comment by azalemeth in "Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga"

azalemeth — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:05:55 +0000

Very ironically I get this error trying to read the article:

403 ERROR The request could not be satisfied. Request blocked. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation. Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)

Qui blockat blockodiodes? Cloudfare, it turns out....

New comment by azalemeth in "Ubuntu 26.04"

azalemeth — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 05:52:56 +0000

I know that the interim releases had issues with zfs and trying to update gave the message "Sorry, cannot upgrade this system to 25.04 right now System freezes have been observed on upgrades to 25.04 with ZFS enabled. Please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PluckyPuffin/ReleaseNotes for more information. "

The release notes don't seem to mention zfs. I hope these issues have been fixed?

New comment by azalemeth in "Your hex editor should color-code bytes"

azalemeth — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:01:24 +0000

I really like hexyl [1], which does this by default.

https://github.com/sharkdp/hexyl

New comment by azalemeth in "GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry"

azalemeth — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:42:56 +0000

One thing I noticed is that github's "clone" drop down menu used to include instructions on how to do so via git git (i.e. `git clone /path/to/repo`). Now there are only instructions provided by default for `gh`, their client.

I can't help but guess if these are related.

New comment by azalemeth in "Air is full of DNA"

azalemeth — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:36:56 +0000

I do often wonder about stories like this in the context of forensic science – my (incomplete!) understanding a lot of the time suspect DNA samples are taken from small areas and amplified significantly with high-cycle count PCR. I'd worry that any jury presented with a statistical argument about a fragment of somebody's DNA being very unlikely ("1 in 100 million") to be different to the sample found at the scene would not be aware of all of the potential systematic reasons why the actual true probability may be much, much higher.

New comment by azalemeth in "A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform"

azalemeth — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:22:32 +0000

Very ironically, they seem to have upped their game. Trying to read TFA on an older version of firefox gives me the lovely message:

Failed to verify your browser Code 11 Vercel Security Checkpoint, arn1::1776759703-rtDgRAtRyXvjD4IoU4RbqvkGmvQQCP7H

Gah.

New comment by azalemeth in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

azalemeth — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:21:20 +0000

This is excellent news. Now make them have user-unlockable and user-relockable bootloaders...