infinet

I am thankful for arXiv only made minor adjustments to its UI over the years, and I hope arXiv keep it that way.

I suspect after the job cut, AI is rewriting the cloudflare UI. Today I tried to add a DNS record using the cloudflare dashboard. The UI looks very different from what I remember, it took me a while to find the add new record button, which is just a blank area without label. The popup dialog is basically unusable. It is transparent and impossible to know where to input. I gave up after 20 minutes.

"Is anyone still using emacs?"

I have never used emacs seriously as an editor, however, I couldn't work without magit. I even manually build emacs 28 so I can re-use the same set of magit configure files.

I wonder how many comments are from bots in this discussion. Few days ago there was a discussion of traffic stall at the strait of Hormuz on HN. One comment from an user with over 9000 Kama went like "I just checked the traffic on the road and it is normal ...". Unfortunately other bots are not as easy to spot as this one.

Interesting idea, but somehow I feel the world is shaking. For the processing program, what used to black(0.0) and white(1.0) has became very dark gray and very bright gray.

I use DuckDB and like it. Since many mentioned GB level json in this post, so they have large amount of data. Been column based, DuckDB uses more RAM as row count grows. It can be an advantage or disadvantage depends whether memory is constrained. Traditional row based DB such as SQLite can deal with large database with less memory.

I feel your pain. I also get "chatgpt/gemini/grok... CONFIRMED blah blah" as if these are ground truth. What is even more sad is it sometimes mixed with "from first principles...".

I have a gut feeling that human as a creature learns better when looking at the information from several different angles, both physically and mentally. Been physically I mean looking at the same concept on screen and on hard copy books, perhaps taking notes and mark relevent sentences with a highlighter. Similarly, seeing a concept on physical book and write some short code snippet is viewing the concept from different mental angles. Though I don't have a proof for that and have yet to find a formal research on this topic.

I guess I will setup something similar or more complex. But there are alternatives:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114947

"George R.R. Martin Writes on a DOS-Based Word Processor From the 1980s". No internet, no multi tasking.

It uses the Python lib Astral, which uses "equations from Astronomical Algorithms, by Jean Meeus", to find location of the Sun in the sky. That method assuming earth motion without gravitational pull from other planets or the Moon, and has accuracy of 0.01 arc degree. Meeus is a rock star in these kinds of calculations. He also gave a truncted version of VSOP87 that has error less than 1 arc second in finding Sun's location.

The method Astral uses for calculate Moon's location has precision of 1 arc minute. For higher precision, LEA-406 [1] can be used.

[1] https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full/2007/33/aa7568-07/aa7...

Content wise the RedHat docs are great, but navigating the doc has a wired feeling that is hard to describe. Everything is black and white, the page has low information density perhaps because of the line space or paragraph space; the typesetting of command line and configure examples is not clear separated from surrounding text; mouse cannot select text of the command line examples; the page top is distracting because it keeps showing and disappearing as mouse scrolls up and down. Somehow the left navigation pane is also difficult to follow, easy to get lost when trying to find a section.

I hope FreeBSD has longer supporting cycle. Its release has a supporting life of less than one year, if missing the upgrade window, then later upgrade is more difficult than others such as debian stable.

I just switched to single thread and didn't try to fix the issue. Single thread is fast enough to me, it has throughput ~ 730 Mbits/s in a OpenBSD 7.8 vm on a 7th gen i7 linux kvm host.

https://github.com/infinet/rs-wgobfs/commit/c5e62796

There is a saying that many countries have offshored building hardware, aka manufacturing. Now they are offshoring software building to AI. Perhaps the silicon valley will grow a rust belt.

I tried OpenBSD recently and found it behaves very differently from other OS. The same code works on Linux/FreeBSD/Windows but has poor multi thread performance on OpenBSD, async socket stopped working after sending at high speed for few seconds. I am not saying there is anything wrong in OpenBSD, it is just different.

There are few dnsmasq (only?) features that are indispensable to some. Examples: sending query of *.example.com to certain upstream servers, or returning NXDOMAIN for phishing sites, or adding all resolved IPs for *.example.org to an ipset for policy routing. The last one works on FreeBSD as well although BSD does not have ipset. The list of *.example_xyz.com can be huge and it is said recent dnsmasq can handle them efficiently.

It is very difficult for people with impaired vision to find the scrollbars, buttons et.al. on windows 11. The scrollbars are too narrow and often auto hidden. The buttons are flat and not easy to separate from normal text. Tell one window from another is also quite challenge.

Anyone put the standby on ZFS or other filesystems that can take snapshots for backup?

From my very limited experience with duckdb, being a column based database, simple query also need loads entire columns and that uses a lots of RAM if a table has millions of rows. Perhaps there is a way to make it more memory friendly but I don't know how.

Very interesting!

For completeness, the job in the article is not strictly parallel, instead, they are separable tasks, which fall under high-throughput computing. HTCondor is a popular choice and is widely used in physics. If the cluster has a shared filesystem such as NFS, it does not even need ssh to each node. Moreover, nodes can share the same R installation on NFS, remove the complexity of installing same set of R packages on all nodes. HTCondor is available on Ubuntu.

Once I used an old MIPS debian in qemu to test big endian. I thought since LoongArch has its root in MIPS it may be big endian. It turns out "LoongArch bit designations are always little-endian".

Documentation https://pkuhpc.github.io/CraneSched/en/index.html

One reason is to use the Linux page cache instead of dedicating RAM to ZFS, given how expensive memory is now. I am very happy with MGLRU and won't miss ZFS's ARC.

to make this in an area with less infrastructure you might use a template and carbide gas torch to cut

Metal work seems very expensive in some places. In a 2025 paper [1], a cooking pot looks like several aluminium rings welded together, about 50 cm tall and 70 cm in diameter, is 416 USD in Ghana, which is one of the destinations of this hand-crank washing machine.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266711312...

Sticking head into a barbecue oven for 10 minutes might get rid of lice, but expecting cooking smoke kill bugs is absurd. People use the three stone and hearth fire not because they want the smoke, but because they do not know better. Combustion is a complicated process, it generates CO2, H20, CO, H2, CH4. The higher the temperature, the more thorough the burning. It requires the right amount of air, enough to burn all the biomass, but not too much that carries heat away thus lowers the temperature. Higher temperature also transfer heat more efficiently to the cookware. Only a well designed stove can do that. These are not things that can be figured by meditating in front of an open fire.

Saving fuel is a matter of life and death in the ancient world. Winter is brutal to the poor largely because gathering fuel is difficult, especially in areas that have supported large population for centuries.

I am interested in unit cost for mass production. It needs to be significantly cheaper than an old style top-loading washing machine to be affordable. The design of old style washing machine is mature and priced at around $100 for 8kg model. I suspect it can be stripped down further, remove water pump, remove program controlled inlet valve et al. to reduce the cost to below $50. Granted, washing machine like that needs electricity, but solar panel may be cheap enough.

One more thing, the water is not always easy to get in poor places. It is often much easier to carry laundry to a well, creak, or river than transport water to home. The path to the water sources may be a narrow trail often going up and down hills, so even with wheels on the machine, it is impractical to drag the machine to the water.

the worst case is that we would have to ditch the space station (which is already planned in a few years)

There is more than one Space Station up there. "Tianhe space station module conducted preventive collision avoidance due to close approaches by the Starlink-1095 (2020-001BK) and Starlink-2305 (2021-024N) satellites on July 1 and Oct. 21 respectively." [1]. Wikipedia also has a long list of planned and proposed space stations.

1. https://www.n2yo.com/satellite-news/Chinas-space-station-man...

My apologies for the digression. But it reminds me a post I saw long time ago when a guy installed all the antivirus/antimalware software he could find on a Windows machine. It started an antivirus civil war and the Windows fell into a coma within seconds.

I'd love to know more about Unicycling. Is it just my browser, or is anyone else seeing the huge black Q letter or magnifying glass icon that occupies 2/3 of the screen?

The article talks about fungi been attracted to ionising radiation. Per wikipedia:

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

Ionizing (or ionising) radiation is particle or photon that has enough energy to detaching electron from atoms or molecules. It includes all the usual high energy radiations such as Gamma, X-rays, high energy UV, alpha, beta, neutron et al. HN high energy physicists can correct me, sounds like it is not any particular category of the harmful radiation from a nuclear disaster, it is all of them.