randomstring

The obvious next step is to crawl the whole database of vulnerable Kia cars and create a "ride share" app that shows you the nearest Kia and unlocks it for you.

I wonder if you could construct a hash collision for high pagerank sites in the google (or Bing) index. You would need to know what hash algorithm google uses to store URLs. This is assuming that they hash the URLs for their indexing. Which surely they do. MD5 and SHA1 existed when google was founded, but hash collisions weren't a big concern until later IIRC. You'd want a fast algorithm because you're having to run your hashing algorithm on every URL you encounter on every page, and that adds up quickly.

The max legal length of URLS is 2048, but I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't plenty of non-compliant URLs longer than that in the wild. If you were limited to 2048 characters, and a valid URL format, I suspect it would be hard if not impossible to build a URL with the same MD5 of an arbitrary high ranking URL like "https://nytimes.com/" But what if you just wanted to piggy back the pagerank of any mid to high rank site? Is there a URL in the top million ranked URLs you could MD5 hash collide?

I doubt google would use a URL hash as strong and as slow as MD5. Maybe Page and Brin weren't even thinking about cryptographic hashes, and just a good mixing function.

"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it. " -spaf

And some other famous quotes: https://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/quotes.html

But hear me out...

What if we could make every car $5-10k more expensive instead?

</satire>

I once thought that using AI to make all cars self driving might be the key to making pedestrians and cyclists safe. Self driving cars are playing a game of Russian Roulette. The systems will get it wrong occasionally, with LIDAR or without. Not if, but when. Whether or not someone dies depends on the situation.

The point is that the vast majority of scrapers do not bother to run javascript.

Search traffic has always been mostly automated spam bots.

Even back in the Open Directory Days when we powered part of search.netscape.com I estimated 80+% of all search traffic was automated. At least most of it self-identified with the same Java useragent.

Later when working Topix, despite being a news search engine, most traffic was bot traffic. Most included the word “mortgage” in the query. Topix specialized in localized content, and that was very popular for SEO scrapers.

Lastly at Blekko, I estimate 90+% of traffic was automated. By then maybe half or more learned to change the user agent. Most used HTTP/1.0, a dead giveaway as no browser still uses 1.0. This was a major aspect in Blekko's load shedding strategy. If the servers started to get overloaded, we'd start bouncing suspected bot traffic to a redirect that would show in the logs. If there was a human with a modern browser running javascript on the other end, would get redirect to a link that wouldn't get bounced. I would check the logs weekly to see if any humans got caught. None ever did. This was a huge monetary savings, you only need 1/10th the servers if you can safely ignore the bots.

Often it's endless repetition of the same keywords in a random order with a place name appended, or prepended, or inserted. over and over. Often variations on known monetizatable SEO keywords. However, much of it doesn't make any sense.

I don't have any insight into Google's numbers but I would conservatively estimate 95% or more of all their queries are automated bots and not humans. And the level of spy-vs-spy going on for Google CPU resources vs SEO bots is probably pretty evolved by now. I stopped tracking many years ago when Google switched to densely packed obfuscated javascript for page renders. Maybe this is part of why automated queries are so high across the web, maybe google is too hard to crack for most.

Cuil was way ahead of its time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255122

http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/ Cuil Theory

My thought exactly. Now they just need a project acronym that spells out MOTHRA.

MOsquito Tracking and Heat RAy?

I was introduced to this and other calendar quirks by Professor Edward Reingold when taking introduction to CS at UIUC. One of our "machine problems" (AKA programming assignments) was to write a date converter that could convert between Gregorian, Julian, and the French Revolutionary calendars.

Dates from 1752 were in the test set.

The French Revolutionary Calendar was interesting. Ten days in the week, 3 weeks per month, with a extra "bonus" month at the end of the year with 5 (or 6) days. One reason it didn't last is that despite the change in the week length, workers only got 2 days off per week.

This is very disappointing. I would love to hear from user crhulls https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=crhulls the CEO Life360 (or so claimed, I can't verify). Too bad Hacker News doesn't have a notify on @ mentions. Then again, not being discord is a feature not a bug.

I've been using emacs as my primary editor since 1989. It has for that entire time been a PITA to configure. My first customization was to map backspace to ^H and map the insert key to 'nil.

I used to dedicate a couple days every January to investigate new emacs tools. Read about the latest features or new modes, often from my org-mode TODO list where I bookmarked them. I have learned to never update emacs mid-project as I've on multiple occasions shattered my emacs config updating versions or moving to a new distros. MacOS brew install vs .dmg install? Aquaemacs? DoomEmacs? Oh, hello the malpa repo URL changed and is https only now.

"eldoc" error wrong-type-argument stringp number-or-marker-p

Googling that doesn't get you anywhere.

VSCode has a healthy extension marketplace, something emacs should adopt.

elisp is dead. Not because it is dead, or deserves to be dead, but because everyone "believes" it dead. Same goes for Perl.

I love emacs, it has been a rock my entire programming life, but it's a time suck to configure. I know there are some who have created a Sistine Chapel in their .emacs.d, and I'm jealous. There's a fine balance between spending time and effort optimizing and sharpening your tools and emacs is deep on the wrong side of the line for me.

I don't want emacs to ever die. But come on, if you're losing to vim in popularity, you are already dead.

https://nostalgiacentral.com/pop-culture/toys-games/six-mill...

A quick look on ebay shows they're typically selling for less than $100.

This new version of the Fisher-Price Record Player is heartbreaking. I learned so much from trying to understand how it worked. Concepts like stored energy: experimenting with trying to over-wind, under-wide, a few turns, many turns, slowly adding pressure to the winding knob until it would start playing and try to maintain just enough pressure to play. Physically slowing and speeding up the turntable to change to the tempo. Trying to intentionally misaligning the head to play out of tune. Turning it on it's side, upside down, trying to peek at the teeth on the head and manually play individual notes. All at an age before I could read. That toy was indestructible, because if it weren't I would have torn it down to individual components (just like my very expensive 6 million dollar man action figure, to the great chagrin of my parents). It wouldn't be until much later I'd have to tools to dissemble one, and by then I was taking apart real record plays.

This toy is a good analog for a real record player and with grooves that move a needle and play sound encoded on the disk. Leading to understanding of sound waves.

This new toy is a mix of new and old tech. How can a per-literate child be expected to decipher binary encodings and how they map to individual songs? What deeper understanding of how things work are within the grasp of a child that cannot yet use a screwdriver, wire cutters, and a volt meter?

This new toy is boring. Once you learn how to turn it on, it can have no appeal to a child exposed to much better music players all around them: cell phones, iPads, computers, tvs. This is just a piece of plastic and e-waste destined for the landfill, purchased by some sentimental old timer who has fond memories of the original F-P record player.

Of course I had to test this by drawing an Interrobang: ‽

It got it right. My first drawing didn't have interrobang at the top of the suggestion list, because I didn't have the top closed. So there is some bias from the font it was trained on.

Yes, paraphrasing. I forget the exact details, but the javascript intentionally blocked for 5 seconds before proceeding to do anything useful.

I filed a bug, but I suspect it was about as effective as shouting into a hole in the ground. The bug was still there when I left IBM.

I worked at IBM a few years ago. When I started we were had to use Notes for email, not long after we got migrated to Verse (IBM's webmail system). Verse was better than Notes (damning with faint praise).

One day I wondered why Verse took so long to start, i.e. time to first render of emails. So I profiled the startup using a browser performance profiler. It didn't take me long to discover there was a sleep(5) in one of the Javascript files. Every employee was subjected to a sleep(5) for every single login. Of course for security reasons your email session timed out every 12 hours or so, meaning that every employee is logging into email at least once a work day. Some napkin math: at the time IBM had almost 400k employees, so that's 555 hours per day of wasted employee time. Or 138,888 hours per year of wasted employee time. To be fair some large number of IBMers may not have had jobs that subjected them to Verse.

Why doesn't an Argon ONE M.2 Case not fit your requirements? https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-m-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-...

Or is it about having it all pre-built and pre-installed?

This has been on my TODO list for a while. But first I need to set up another Pi to be the PXE server... :)

I just advertise both Pi-Holes via DHCP and when I configure manual DNS settings. The primary DNS gets the vast majority of the DNS traffic, about 150 requests/minute and the secondary gets about 10 requests/minute (mostly from a single device).

Both piholes are on different UPS power, different switches, in different locations. In theory the lights will go out on the main UPS and switch first (it draws more power), but this configuration did save me once.

To be fair, I have 7 Pis running on my network. Home Assistant, 2x Pi-Holes (for redundancy), 1 magic mirror, my Weasleyclock, 1x w/ a hi-fi berry acting as a Spotify streaming device, and a garage door sensor. So roughly half the pis are in service. Maybe only 5% of all the sensors and projects are.

"Outside of commercial use, the $100 dollar price tag is a little high for the 'impulse buy then stick it in a drawer' use case most of us using Pis are familiar with."

I swear, some day, maybe even soon, I will find a use for all the Raspberry Pis, various Pi POE adapters, Pi cameras, and sensors I own.

I had a friend who implemented what he referred to as Zeno's Progress Bar. After every unit of time passed, the progress bar would progress half the distance to completion. So 0 -> 50% -> 75% -> 87.5% and when the task finished it would jump to 100%. It didn't bother to measure the actual progress at all. Key factor was making users think something was happening and not give up before it was done. In hindsight, it leverages the human's susceptibility to the sunk time fallacy.

They may not have been the first to invent the idea or implement it. I found this description of the same idea here: https://cerealnumber.livejournal.com/27537.html

and an online implementation and demo here: https://jan-martinek.com/etc/zeno/

Hacker News thread on this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22925091

During my tenure at Sun the burrito tool faxed your order to Burrito Real (good, but not the institutions that La Costena and La Bamba were). Maybe this was in the wake of La Costena turning off their fax machine.

It was a dark day for Bay Area Burritos when they tore down the building that housed La Costena and La Bamba. There was some Burrito magic on that corner of Old Middlefield and Rengstorff.

Wait, you're getting referrer strings with DDG in them? How is that private?

Exactly. If you can accurately ignore 50% of the bot traffic you halve your hardware expense. The trick is doing it in such a way that the bots don't notice.

I would estimate that greater than 90% of that traffic is bot traffic. Having run two web search engines in the past: search.netscape.com (pre-google) and blekko.com. Robots accounted for > 80% of traffic at Netscape (around 3M searches/day in 2000 IIRC) and definitely more than 80% at blekko. Maybe 90% or more. Some traffic is obviously bot traffic (single source IP, common patterns, obvious bot useragents) and then there's the non-obvious bot traffic that is random-ish, but in aggregate is clearly bot traffic. For instance, way too many queries matching the pattern "(mortgage|home loans) (zip|county|city|state)" even if they are coming from random IPs and user agents.

At blekko, under high traffic, we would loadshed obvious bot traffic first and prioritize searches from humans.

I've been trying to figure that out myself. Another post here recommended Grandstream products for connecting analog phones to VoIP. Looking at the user guide for the HT802 you can make direct calls between the extensions. http://www.grandstream.com/products/gateways-and-atas/analog...

Unfortunately there system requires dialing "*701" or "*702" and dialing star on a true rotary phone isn't possible without some other system in place. Like this product from dialgizmo: https://www.dialgizmo.com/how_it_works.html Dialing two consecutive stars would still be annoying and slow.

I've been wanting to wire up an in-house "intercom" system using old phones. I'm a little surprised there isn't a "telephone HAT" for the raspberry pi that will interface directly with an old phone. A HAT that could interpret the DTMF or pulse dialing and drive even the old fashioned mechanical ringers.

While not on the posted list of favorite 2020 books, these are on mine: Martha Well's Hugo and Nebula award winning Murderbot series. The saga begins as the hero, Murderbot, hacks its own governing software to obtain freedom.