Hacker News: cuspycode

New comment by cuspycode in "Ask HN: Just received spam to an address only used at Amazon?"

cuspycode — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 18:15:53 +0000

I use a different email address for every web shop I do business with, for the obvious anti-spam purposes. Amazon is just one of them.

New comment by cuspycode in "Pipewire to replace Pulseaudion on Ubuntu 22.10"

cuspycode — Sun, 22 May 2022 11:07:56 +0000

The standard procedure for me is uninstalling pulseaudio and installing "apulse", which is ALSA-glue for applications that depend on pulseaudio, e.g. browsers. And my experience with Bluetooth is that it works fine directly with ALSA.

New comment by cuspycode in "Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation"

cuspycode — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 19:29:14 +0000

Obligatory story beginning in 1963, where computer scientist Les Earnest explains why he always entered "mongrel" when questioned about his race:

http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm

New comment by cuspycode in "Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?"

cuspycode — Sat, 04 Dec 2021 16:57:56 +0000

I found out by experiment that wildcards work, e.g. -site:pinterest.*

New comment by cuspycode in "Why philosophers should care about computational complexity (2011)"

cuspycode — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 18:55:33 +0000

But how do you even distinguish appearance of thought from actual thought, objectively? Of course you can always argue that actual thought is something that is subjectively experienced, but that leads to solipsism, doesn't it?

New comment by cuspycode in "The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb"

cuspycode — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 18:56:01 +0000

That's what he thought, and afterwards said he thought, and it's a great quote. What he actually said at the time according to his brother Frank Oppenheimer was "It worked!"[0]

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer

New comment by cuspycode in "Fail2ban – Remote Code Execution"

cuspycode — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 12:30:32 +0000

I use it for ssh, ftp, and dovecot. Even with ssh passwords disabled, fail2ban reduces traffic a lot on some servers (since culprits get null-routed) which is always good.

New comment by cuspycode in "A Tunguska size burst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, Bronze Age city in Jordan Valley"

cuspycode — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 18:31:27 +0000

As I understand it, redirection is our best hope. Destruction via nukes would only work for comparatively small rocks. There is a fairly comprehensive write-up of the various options on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance

New comment by cuspycode in "Improving Git protocol security on GitHub"

cuspycode — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 17:57:02 +0000

Natural language is sometimes ambiguous. I read "Git protocol security" as the protocol security of network protocols related to Git in general. They are deprecating the internal git protocol (tcp on port 9418) entirely, and changing the requirements for using the ssh protocol (tcp on port 22).

New comment by cuspycode in "Post Mortem: Incorrect Cache Configuration Exposes Personal Information"

cuspycode — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 16:40:15 +0000

What I'm wondering is: why would you ever want a CDN configuration to override no-cache instructions from the backend? I assume there's a use case for this, but I can't figure out what it is. Can anyone explain?

New comment by cuspycode in "Sweden’s Northvolt raises $2.8B to supercharge EV battery output"

cuspycode — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 18:32:06 +0000

Finland was historically a part of Sweden for about 600 years, and the northernmost part was called Lapland. Nowadays that part is split into Swedish Lapland and Finnish Lapland. Norrland (literally "northern land") is the name for the part of Sweden that is north of approximately 61 degrees northern latitude, so it includes Swedish Lapland but also a lot more.

New comment by cuspycode in "Is Euler’s Identity Beautiful? and If So, How?"

cuspycode — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 13:24:17 +0000

In a way it's analogous to how Einstein's E = mc^2 is a special case of how the norm of the four-momentum is defined in special relativity, which is mc = √((E/c)^2-p^2). For the special case of a stationary object we have p = 0, so E = mc^2 follows automatically. But the special case is somehow more memorable and more famous, and I believe something similar has happened with Euler's identity.

New comment by cuspycode in "Entropy Will Fuck You"

cuspycode — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 20:28:28 +0000

The article would have been a lot better if it had mentioned the classical definition of entropy (by Clausius), which is essentially energy dividided by temperature. From this definition it is easy to see that incoming energy from the Sun at 5700 K which is then dissipated at 250 K, will result in a local entropy decrease.

New comment by cuspycode in "Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?"

cuspycode — Thu, 27 May 2021 16:42:58 +0000

Scott Aaronson is IMHO worth reading even when he writes about non-technical topics. And he tags his posts with categories such as "Quantum", "Complexity", "Rage Againts Doofosity", etc, so it's easy to skip topics that you aren't interested in.

New comment by cuspycode in "Engineer Who Won the Nobel Prize Twice in Physics"

cuspycode — Mon, 10 May 2021 17:23:46 +0000

Alfred Nobel's will states that the prize should go to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." The part about the preceding year didn't work out very well, but when it comes to conferring the greatest benefit to mankind, John Bardeen certainly made the grade. Twice.

It doesn't really matter whether he should be primarily categorized as an engineer or a physicist or anything else.

New comment by cuspycode in "Dear Zuckerberg, We're writing to urge you to cancel Instagram for children [pdf]"

cuspycode — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 18:10:48 +0000

It's 2021. It's really not that hard to secure these days.

New comment by cuspycode in "Yuri Gagarin: Sixty years since the first man went into space [video]"

cuspycode — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 19:10:22 +0000

There was also the purely physical qualification that he was only 157 cm tall. Size matters when sending payloads to space.

New comment by cuspycode in "Whatever happened to IoT smoke alarms?"

cuspycode — Sun, 11 Apr 2021 14:23:58 +0000

> They have a lifespan based on radioactive decay of the detector.

Americium-241 has a half-life of 432.2 years, while the recommendation is to replace a detector after only 10 years. But only 1.6% of the Am-241 has decayed after 10 years, so there must be other reasons for the short life span.

New comment by cuspycode in "Yellen calls for global minimum corporate tax rate"

cuspycode — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 18:50:40 +0000

> This would be regressive, though. Why not tax the individual via a progressive cap gains tax?

How would it be regressive? According to Wikipedia[0], most corporate tax rates are proportional (i.e. "flat"). Just replace that with an equivalent rate on payout of dividends. Capital gains tax for the recipient is an entirely separate question.

> If a company can't think of a good use for their profits, do we really want to force them to keep the money within the organization?

In such situations they can pay dividends of course, which are taxed in my proposal. The point is that there is no point in buying back stocks instead of paying dividends.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax#International_co...

New comment by cuspycode in "Yellen calls for global minimum corporate tax rate"

cuspycode — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 18:22:10 +0000

Agreed. Instead of taxing the profit of a corporation, just tax the payment of dividends from that profit. The total tax burden can still remain the same if that's what people desire, but the end result will be more transparency as you say. I think Estonia has exactly this policy, or at least they did last time I checked.

It also removes the incentive to mess around with stock buybacks, which is good because the extra liquidity can be put to better use within the company.

For very small companies (such as my own) it would also remove the bureaucracy involved in saving profits from one fiscal year to the next.