Hacker News: zidel

New comment by zidel in "Spanish track was fractured before high-speed train disaster, report finds"

zidel — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 21:27:32 +0000

The rail is laying on its side in that picture, so what is visible is the foot not the web.

edit: other angles of the same location here: https://youtu.be/DIQ4SrGSua0?t=1174

New comment by zidel in "In defense of lock poisoning in Rust"

zidel — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 13:02:54 +0000

Rust handles this by automatically unlocking when the MutexGuard returned by lock() is dropped. The issue here is not that the mutex remains locked, but rather that the data protected by the mutex might be inconsistent (and the mutex unlocked) after a panic.

New comment by zidel in "Durin is a library for reading and writing the Dwarf debugging format"

zidel — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:04:27 +0000

And for the misuse angle there is this talk from Shmoocon 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLH7ytOTYto

New comment by zidel in "Durin is a library for reading and writing the Dwarf debugging format"

zidel — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 22:49:35 +0000

One interesting thing about the dwarf format is that it is executable and Turing complete, running small programs on a virtual machine to figure out file names, line numbers and exception handling.

New comment by zidel in "Norway reviews cybersecurity after remote-access feature found in Chinese buses"

zidel — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 18:08:31 +0000

A local group of security people have been running a weekend project they call Project Lion Cage where they take Chinese cars into a local mine with spectrum analyzers etc. to watch where they send data and so on. This is how the bus was evaluated as well. Tor Indstøy has quite a few posts on his LinkedIn page talking about the work and what they have found.

Press release (Norwegian): https://www.mynewsdesk.com/no/ruter/pressreleases/ruter-tar-...

New comment by zidel in "Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza"

zidel — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 10:41:44 +0000

That is a rebuttal of the International Association of Genocide Scholars[0] resolution from August[1], not this UN report.

[0] https://genocidescholars.org [1] https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS...

New comment by zidel in "Investment Risk Is Highest for Nuclear Power Plants, Lowest for Solar"

zidel — Sat, 31 May 2025 13:04:41 +0000

The term of art you are probably looking for here is grid forming inverter. The ENTSO-E class list on Wikipedia is probably a good starting point for some of the problems that one might want to handle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource#Grid-f...

New comment by zidel in "More Solar and Battery Storage Added to TX Grid Than Other Power Src Last Year"

zidel — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 20:26:12 +0000

And to add to that, power is almost always the number that is reported/counted so watts is usually correct. That might seem strange since batteries store energy, but in terms of the service they provide to the grid power in/out is more important than storage at least for now.

Edit: 1-2 hours of storage seem to be the current state in Texas at the moment: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/energy-storage/texas-co...

New comment by zidel in "Caltrain's new electric trains"

zidel — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 20:55:20 +0000

The trains are Stadler KISS electric multiple units with 7 cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caltrain_Modernization_Program...

New comment by zidel in "A company is building a giant compressed-air battery in the Australian outback"

zidel — Mon, 06 May 2024 07:41:11 +0000

BloombergNEF reports a cost of $115 per kWh for turnkey energy storage systems (in China) so their comparison is likely to hold up for complete systems in Australia and the US.

https://about.bnef.com/blog/global-energy-storage-market-rec...

New comment by zidel in "Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail"

zidel — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 19:16:39 +0000

The 6+2 spikes around the bright stars is a diffraction pattern created by the edges of the hexagonal mirror segments (the six large spikes) and the three struts that hold the secondary mirror (also six spikes, but four overlap with the mirror spikes).

https://smd-cms.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/webb-dif...

New comment by zidel in "Applying Grease to TLS Extensibility (2016)"

zidel — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 20:40:19 +0000

This became RFC 8701 in 2020: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8701

New comment by zidel in "Oil firms forced to consider climate effects of new drilling, rules Norway court"

zidel — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 14:39:53 +0000

The requirement is for the government to produce an impact statement (including carbon emissions in foreign countries and emissions from e.g. combustion) as part of the plan for development and operations that is presented to parliament for approval. This follows from the Supreme Court decision in 2020.

There is also a temporary injunction on further developments and decisions related to these three oil fields until the validity of the plan has been decided.

The District Court ruling was appealed by the government yesterday.

Edit:

Machine translated judgement: https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-sweden-stateless/2...

Court documents (mostly in Norwegian, some witness presentations in English): https://www.greenpeace.org/norway/dokumenter-fra-oslo-tingre...

New comment by zidel in "Bitmagnet: A self-hosted BitTorrent indexer, DHT crawler, and torrent search"

zidel — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 06:50:39 +0000

> Does this also share back DHT information like a "server"?

No, it ignores all incoming requests. You don't need special software to help out, just run any normal Bittorrent client in the background (no need to download or share anything) and it will help out. Just make sure you forward the right port if you are behind a NAT. Traffic will slowly increase over time, and drop quickly when offline, so leaving it up for days at a time is better when possible.

New comment by zidel in "Will Texas become too hot for humans?"

zidel — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 15:33:38 +0000

A 2022 study experimentally found the limit to be 30.5C ± 1C at 100% humidity, and lower in dry environments.

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysio...

New comment by zidel in "You can’t bribe, threaten, or feed people to get them back in the office"

zidel — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 13:20:10 +0000

> Car commuters miss commuting the least: 55% of this group do not miss it at all. Commuters by (e-)bicycle are the group who miss commuting the most, with 91% missing at least some aspects of commuting. As might be expected, the feeling of missing commuting also decreases with increasing commute duration (Fig. 5). > The connection between work and commuting is evident in the relationship between missing commuting and the intention to work from home in the future (Fig. 7). Among those who do not miss the commute at all, 72% express desire to work more from home in the future. Among those who miss commuting a lot, 69% would like to go back to their previous work routine.

https://urbanstudies.uva.nl/content/blog-series/covid-19-pan...

This matches the numbers that have been reported in Norway as well, where the percentage that miss their commute are roughly 80% for pedestrians/cyclists, 50% for public transport and 30% for driving (https://www.nrk.no/norge/blir-palagt-hjemmekontor-_-mange-sa... in Norwegian)

New comment by zidel in "A new way of keeping trains apart uses magnetic signals in the tracks"

zidel — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 21:40:00 +0000

For information specific to Norway (in Norwegian) there is a lot here:

https://trv.banenor.no/wiki/Forside

https://www.jernbanekompetanse.no/wiki/Forside

New comment by zidel in "Germany to Rethink Nuclear Shutdown as Energy Crisis Deepens"

zidel — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 15:03:12 +0000

This appears to be copied from https://www.montelnews.com/news/1336133/germany-to-review-nu...

New comment by zidel in "Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)"

zidel — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 07:45:14 +0000

I think BitTorrent has all the pieces needed for a fully distributed version of your idea. My initial thought is that you could publish a magnet link that points to a mutable DHT item, which in turn points to a torrent that has a JSON file with some metadata and a list of infohashes the publisher cares about. The client could then scrape the "leaf" torrents from multiple lists to get the peer counts and use that for local prioritization of what to store. By reusing existing torrents you could then share resources with standard torrent clients that are unaware of your system.

The list idea could be extended to nested lists (stavros recommends Internet Archive) for discoverability and composition.

If you go with v2 or hybrid torrents from the beginning you could deduplicate and cross seed files from different collections.

The lists could also be modified to have torrents to exclude, possibly using some salt + rehash idea to make it hard to reverse into a list of e.g. CSAM you don't want to publish as is.

Feels like a neat project that could interoperate nicely with existing torrents.

New comment by zidel in "Attorneys General call for improved car- seat standard"

zidel — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 12:51:21 +0000

Unshortened link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/child-booster-car-seat-standard...