HN user

aero_code

32 karma
Posts0
Comments14
View on HN
No posts found.
Linux 7.1 1 month ago

Ubuntu switched to the Paragon NTFS driver by default. When I upgraded to kernel 6.5 (I think) from Ubuntu, I started getting frequent kernel panics, like every day. Soon, I noticed that I couldn't even compile a Rust project on an NTFS partition because the compiler was getting random file system errors, and compiling was at high risk of causing a kernel panic. The NTFS driver in that kernel version is just totally broken. I switched to the FUSE NTFS-3G, and then I stopped getting panics and can compile stuff again no problem.

Looking at kernel commits, it looks like the driver may have been fixed since, but I'm scared to use it after it had such major brokenness in that version.

In addition to the sibling comment, even Minecraft server has an "online-mode" setting, and if it's set to false, it doesn't authenticate players. Whenever my family has played on LAN, we've never used any auth servers (which is clear because we don't give Minecraft any credentials). The setting only applies to LAN players, but that should be easy enough to work around with a VPN or something.

No, ICE did not kill those people. I looked through the latest six this year. Two were suicides (one suicide was of a man who had state charges against him for several crimes including child molestation), one was someone who had diabetes and refused to take insulin, and the others seem to have had other health issues. They got medical care many different times.

I think it is misleading to conflate murder with people dying of health issues in detention after medical care.

But sunscreen doesn't stop all damage to skin. I spent weekdays working inside on a computer, then sometimes spent summer weekends outside in the sun. I get sunburned easily, sometimes in like 10 minutes of direct sun. You wouldn't try to deny a light sunburn isn't skin damage? SPF 50 suncreen, blocking 98% of sun, extends the 10 minutes by 50x to 8.3 hours, but that is still not that great. I can still exceed that in two days. And I don't see why having light skin and wanting to spend the weekend outside would be unusual. Blocking 99% of UV and doubling the time over 98% would help quite a bit.

Older computers usually guzzle power, especially if you look at the absolutely awful Pentium4 systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_4_proces...

The Northwood chips were 50 to 70 W. HT chips and later Prescott chips were more 80 to 90 W. Even the highest chips I see on the page are only 115 W.

But modern chips can use way more power than Pentium 4 chips:

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

The i5-14600K has a base TDP of 125 W and turbo TDP of 181 W, and the high-end i9-14900KS is 150 W base/253 W turbo. For example, when encoding video, the mid-range 14600K pulls 146 W: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-core-i9-14900k-cpu-r...

More recent processors can do more with the same power than older processors, but I think for the most part that doesn't matter. Most people don't keep their processor at 100% usage a lot anyway.

"it certainly will eventually" - I think even that is underselling how unlikely it is for Git 256-bit hashes to collide. I calculated (taking into account the birthday paradox), that even if 8 billion people on Earth each created a Git commit every second, that they would have to do that non-stop for 1,588,059,911 trillion years before there's a 50% chance that any of the two commits have the same hash. Our sun is predicted to only last 0.005 trillion years more.

√(2^256)×1.1774÷8000000000÷3600÷24÷365 = 1,588,059,910,945,875,138,261

UUIDs are more likely to collide but still basically impossible. You'd have to generate √(2^122)×1.1774 = 2714899559048203259 to have 50% chance of a collision. Just to store the UUIDs for that database would take 39,506,988 TB of space. If you aren't thinking about your database not fitting on millions of drives, don't think about UUID collisions.

The court decided the opposite--that APIs are copyrightable. However, the Supreme Court ruled that Google's usage was fair use, so I would agree that Google mostly won. The Supreme Court didn't consider whether APIs are copyrightable (the lower court ruled that) because Google would win regardless because it was fair use.

So I'm not sure it matters much whether APIs are copyrightable when what Google did was ruled fair use. I'd prefer if the courts ruled APIs weren't copyrightable, but I think it was still a good result because doing what Google did probably covers about any use case anyway.

All right, I'll search for those and read about them.

It's unfortunate when a project I've worked on for a while is never used, but at least nice when I learned something from writing it.

Thanks!

I'm interested in using LDPC (or Turbo Codes) in software for error correction, but most of the resources I've found only cover soft-decision LDPC. When I've found LDPC papers, it's hard for me to know how efficient the algorithms are and whether it's worth spending time on them. Reed-Solomon has more learning resources that are often more approachable (plus open source libraries). Do you have more information on how to implement LDPC decoding using XOR-based operations?

I don't think the numbers are accurate in the quantity of gas. Since kWh and BTU are both units of energy, finding the cf of gas is unnecessary (assuming the efficiency numbers are correct).

1 kWh = 3.6 megajoules and 1 BTU = 1055 joules

The 6.6 kWh of the heat pump is 23.76 MJ which is 22,521 BTU of energy. Assuming that the power plant and distribution are 60%, it would take 37,535 BTU of gas to produce (22,521/60%).

Instead, using that 37,535 BTU of gas in an 80% efficient furnace would only produce 30,028 BTU of heat, which is worse than the 50,000 BTU from the heat pump.

I'm pretty sure even a poor heat pump will be more efficient than heating directly with gas. (Of course, they have drawbacks, like they can leak their refrigerant that causes more of a greenhouse effect than CO2.)