Hacker News: gol706

New comment by gol706 in "Cache of devices capable of crashing cell network is found in NYC"

gol706 — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 15:53:03 +0000

I think smaller ones might be useful for network quality testing and mapping. I think carriers drive around with boxes in vehicles to test their own networks reliability and map their competitors.

New comment by gol706 in "Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?"

gol706 — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 20:11:49 +0000

Octoprint is still a great piece of software that works with most printers, but it's running into a dead end where streaming G Code over the USB Serial emulation isn't fast enough on the newest generation of printers to keep them printing at their full speed.

New comment by gol706 in "Bringing fully autonomous rides to Nashville, in partnership with Lyft"

gol706 — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 15:57:17 +0000

They have hired staff in San Antonio but not officially announced a launch yet.

New comment by gol706 in "Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam"

gol706 — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 15:25:30 +0000

Weirdly I had the exact opposite experience. Elgato always felt laggy. I bought a no-name USB Stick format card and it looked great (once I got my camera settings dialed in) but would disconnect when I bumped my desk. I cracked the case open and soldered a USB cable I cut in half to the pads, and 3d printed a new case and it's been rock solid for the last 4 years. Only problem is the once in a blue moon I need to use Teams my video get's horizontally squished and I can't seem to fix it.

New comment by gol706 in "Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map"

gol706 — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 19:01:34 +0000

I can say that in San Antonio where I live and also operate a ADSB receiver the dedicated air force flight trainers (T38 Talons and T6 Texans) routinely fly with ADSB on. The C5 cargo plans also fly with ADSB on when doing training but I've seen non-training flights fly overhead with ADSB off.

I can actually receive high flighting planes over Del Rio so it would be interesting to see if they are reporting bad NIC values.

New comment by gol706 in "Show HN: I hacked my son’s Duplo train to go faster using my voice"

gol706 — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 16:28:45 +0000

Sadly Bluetooth support on Node is a mess and has been so forever. Noble is the only BLE library, and the original creator abandoned it years ago. The community forked it and has been maintaining it since then, but it's still got a lot of the baggage from the original, particularly that it's near unusable on Windows. I've considered rewriting one of my projects in another language just to get away from Noble.

New comment by gol706 in "AdoptOpenJDK: Open-source, prebuilt OpenJDK binaries"

gol706 — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 18:15:05 +0000

That's all well and good for software developed in house by a full time development team that gets deployed to a single known environment, but that's only one way that the JDK gets used. If you provide software to customers to deploy in their own environments without direct control over updates, or if you have maintenance mode line of business software that you just want to keep patched this becomes a much bigger burden. Oracle also hasn't really been giving the time for these changes to be adopted either when the support for even LTS JDK builds is dropped at the same time the next stable major version is released. I realize that Oracle's answer is "and that's when you should pay us for support", but for anyone who wants to continue to use Java (or the JDK) in the "free" way its been historically, it's so much safer form a business perspective to use a JDK provider that has better support commitments to their free versions. Other than the fact that it's the default served by *.jdk.net that people are used to, I don't see why you would choose the Oracle OpenJDK over another provider.

New comment by gol706 in "AdoptOpenJDK: Open-source, prebuilt OpenJDK binaries"

gol706 — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 21:50:59 +0000

This has been my hell trying to navigate for the past year. As a general rule, anyone who can't commit to updating and testing their software to run on the latest JDK ever 6 months should avoid the Oracle OpenJDK binaries like the plague since support for even LTS versions of Java is dropped 6 months after initial release.

New comment by gol706 in "German Ham Radio Operator Takes Picture of Solar Eclipse From the Moon"

gol706 — Sat, 17 Aug 2019 02:54:41 +0000

We did leave a mirror on the moon

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

New comment by gol706 in "Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years"

gol706 — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 19:13:45 +0000

For all intents and purposes that hash becomes the users password at that point. Also you can't really salt that hash in a meaningful way.

New comment by gol706 in "Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact"

gol706 — Thu, 24 May 2018 23:11:14 +0000

I probably should try it. I've been writing my own partly as an excuse to learn React. I've already got a Pi with a touchscreen and a 3d printed enclosure setup to run whatever solution I actually end up using.

New comment by gol706 in "Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact"

gol706 — Thu, 24 May 2018 18:58:11 +0000

Another pain point with making is that it's really hard to get it integrated with stuff you have bought. I built my own garage door automation with a Particle Photon board. It works great and can do things like text me if I leave the house with the garage door open using the IFTT support from my WiFi router. The problem is that it's really hard to get it integrated with any other control system that the rest of my house uses like my ZWave light switches and Hue lights.

I've been working on a custom UI that sits on top of the Wink Hub API to unify everything, but I'be been stuck with their almost completely undocumented Pubnub event API.

New comment by gol706 in "Problems with MacBook butterfly switch keyboards"

gol706 — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 15:42:44 +0000

Well, I'm glad it's not just me. I had my top case replaced a month ago after my 'w' key started sticking down off and on. I could swear I felt one of the keys on my new case stick once, but it hasn't happend again.

I usually don't buy Apple Care, but as I look at the 1 year mark approach, I'm thinking I may need to suck it up and buy it if the alternative is a $400-700 top case replacement ever few months on my dime until Apple decides to issue an extended warranty. Even if they do issue one, with my last laptop, I had to fight them to replace my main board a second time with the GPU failures because they tried to claim that since they repaired it once, it was impossible that the issue could happen a second time even though all of their diagnostic tests showed that it indeed had.

On the plus side, ever time they replace the keyboard, you get a brand new battery and new USB-C connectors (which I'm also paranoid are going to have longevity issues).

New comment by gol706 in "Animated interactive of the history of the Atlantic slave trade (2015)"

gol706 — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 15:02:04 +0000

I did an independent study back in college to make maps like these. At the time there was a CD-ROM floating around with a database containing all of this data. It must have been an amazing amount of work to compile that database from the shipping records. As impersonal as numbers can be, work like this really helps you wrap your mind around the magnitude of the slave trade and how it shaped the Americas.

New comment by gol706 in "Hacking Voting Machines at Defcon"

gol706 — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 22:03:08 +0000

The US moved to electronic voting in part due to the Florida vote counting fiascos in 2000. Electronic voting machines prevent users from making undervotes and overvotes (picking no candidates, picking more than one candidate). The machines also prevent the hanging chad issue in 2000 where the voters intention was unclear. Electronic voting machines also enable blind voters to cast votes without assistance giving them privacy and assurance that their vote wasn't tampered with. Paper voting can also have it's own security weaknesses like ballot stuffing.

New comment by gol706 in "Show HN: Keygen – A dead-simple software licensing API built for developers"

gol706 — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 18:31:55 +0000

I agree. I think that the pricing is fair for when you have paying customers on the system (at least for my business model), but the 7 day trial isn't really enough time to do a proof of concept to see if Keygen would work for me. I know most companies will extend your free trial if you ask nicely, but ugh. I should have a free option available until I get to Prod.

New comment by gol706 in "Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship"

gol706 — Tue, 30 May 2017 17:55:42 +0000

Telnet is a great way to realize that HTTP is just some simple text commands and not some mysterious binary protocol.

WireShark also provides a good visualization of the HTTPS negotiation process and the various layers of HTTPS requests and responses. It does take a lot more to figure out than telnet though.

Building a Static Documentation Site with Metalsmith

gol706 — Tue, 23 May 2017 19:23:48 +0000

Article URL: https://gregleeds.com/building-a-static-documentation-site-with-metalsmith/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14404355

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by gol706 in "IoT Security Anti-Patterns"

gol706 — Tue, 02 May 2017 16:41:54 +0000

Can you really protect the device software if the hardware encryption element is separate from the microcontroller? Wouldn't it be trivial to sniff the decrypted cypher text of the software with a logic analyzer on the pin between the microcontroller and encryption ASIC even if you can't get the actual key out of it?

New comment by gol706 in "Leaked email from United Airlines CEO blames passenger for violent removal"

gol706 — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 19:02:29 +0000

Some larger aircraft actually have that for routes that require crew changes.

http://www.businessinsider.com/secret-airplane-bedrooms-2015...