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ccooffee commented on Signet App – Your digital identity and security of communications at your palm   signet.app/... · Posted by u/Sami_Lehtinen
ccooffee · 2 years ago
For a secure communications app, the website is awfully light on details of that security. This could just be a mis-alignment issue (i.e. website aimed at "average users" who may find technical jargon a reason to avoid the app). But my initial question of "why would I use this over Signal or GPG emails?" doesn't seem answerable from the website.

The security page says:

> 3. Verified and Secure -- Widely reviewed Open Source Public Key Cryptography and App itself can be fully audited and accredited.

As a bit of feedback, this description needs some cleanup. The word "can" in here is a scary word. Has the app been audited and accredited? If it has, make that clear. (Perhaps include information about when the app was audited and by whom.) If it has not been audited and accredited, this advertising blurb is a super red flag. "We could do some security stuff in the future but have not yet" wouldn't go onto the website, but you've wrapped the statement in enough jargon that unsophisticated users may be misled.

ccooffee commented on     · Posted by u/chasil
ccooffee · 2 years ago
Submitting an article but substituting in a title to make the story about yourself goes against the submission guidelines [0]. The article doesn't have a particularly informative title, but piecing together the subtitle gives: "Team creates guidelines to reduce staph infections after surgery (2013)".

That said, the paper that this UIowa article references [1] is a meta-analysis of 39 previous studies. It doesn't seem fair to credit Schweizer et al with creating the guidelines. But that's university press shops for ya.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23766464/

ccooffee commented on Quitting the full-time poker scene   team-bhp.com/forum/shifti... · Posted by u/ankit70
jjxw · 2 years ago
Is this not also true for many sporting or competitive pursuits that are also effectively zero sum? For sports I suppose one could argue there are benefits to exercise and for other competitive games with professionals like chess there are mental benefits from getting good at them.

However, neither seem particularly "productive" outside of all the money that is funneled into events for marketing purposes. There is, of course, perhaps some inherent aesthetic and community building around a common interest that is valuable, but I'd argue that the same is true for poker - I personally find the game of no limit hold'em interesting from a theoretical perspective and have met a lot of people that I would not have otherwise through playing it.

Poker doesn't seem that much different to other abstracted competitive pursuits to me besides that it has a larger luck factor to it.

ccooffee · 2 years ago
In non-tournament settings, every dollar you win at poker comes out of the pockets of another player at the table. It's truly a zero-sum game, as adding up the gains and losses of players at the table will result in zero.

In contrast, tournament games (chess, golf, tennis, WSOP, esports, etc) may have significant entry fees, but at a professional level the total winnings are significantly more than the sum of all entry fees. Generally the excess money comes from corporate sponsors or viewership fees. The entry fees can result in some players walking away with less money than they started, but I don't think this is common outside of tournament-play poker.

The most popular professional sports (soccer, football, baseball, etc) have players on salaries. Those players often also get performance bonuses, either for entire-team results (winning the championship) or personal results (number of games played, statistical thresholds, etc). But they're all getting paid _something_ win or lose.

ccooffee commented on Astronauts drop tool bag into orbit that you can see with binoculars   usatoday.com/story/news/n... · Posted by u/IndrekR
gumby · 2 years ago
> A space drone with gas propulsion and a grasping hand?

Please, for this application you should use the term, "gripping hand".

To be more substantive: now you mention it I haven't heard of such a device and I also wonder why. Makes sense for inspection (but how much happens?) though retrieving lost tools sound quite difficult.

And though difficult, it seems like something worth becoming good at. Seems like a 1U might be big enough to hold a small drone and some things to retrieve. However you'd have to design your experiment carefully so that something you failed to retrieve would rather soon reenter the atmosphere and not become dangerous orbiting junk. I don't know how easy this would be: what if the drone tried to grab it and added a non-normal (i.e. sideways) component that put the target on a potentially destructive trajectory?

ccooffee · 2 years ago
Aside: does the phrase "grasping hand" have a particular meaning in robotics jargon? (Or is there a different reason to avoid that terminology?)

To me a "gripping hand" is intuitively something that continuously holds an item. It might require human intervention to work, such as positioning my camera onto a universal tripod mount. A "grasping hand" (or "grabbing hand") would be something that transitions from empty-handed to holding an item.

ccooffee commented on Passive radiative cooling ceramic with high solar reflectivity   cityu.edu.hk/research/sto... · Posted by u/geox
NL807 · 2 years ago
The material is apparently hydrophilic, so it can absorb a lot of water. That means things like algae and gunk will fill the material, rendering it less effective.
ccooffee · 2 years ago
From reading through the supplementary materials for the paper [0], it seems that the authors are aware of this flaw and they found a way to make it hydrophobic. The approach they tested involved soaking the ceramic in a bath with a commercially available fluorosilane [1] that is used to make things superhydrophobic. Fig. S20 in the supplementary materials has a chart that shows the treated ceramic being very good ("solar reflectivity...remains at ~99.0%") but not quite as stellar as the untreated ceramic.

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adi4725

[1] https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/aldrich/667420

ccooffee commented on Ask HN: How would French police locate suspects by tapping their devices?    · Posted by u/ThalesX
Akronymus · 2 years ago
> There was literally a black hat talk on exploiting cellular networks this year.

Is that talk recorded somewhere?

ccooffee · 2 years ago
I assume GP is referring to

Title: "Over the Air, Under the Radar: Attacking and Securing the Pixel Modem" Summary/Slides: https://www.blackhat.com/us-23/briefings/schedule/#over-the-... YouTube (48 minute): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrkB_enz2Pk

ccooffee commented on How the greatest PhD advisor in computer science does it   technologyreview.com/2023... · Posted by u/elephant_dream
ccooffee · 2 years ago
Dr. Blum is also a great professor for smaller undergraduate classes. I took his "theoretical cryptography" class, which was a semi-random walk through the history of creating and breaking crypto-systems. It was a small class (8-12 people), and his whiteboard lessons were great. That said, it took some getting used to the environment. The first problemset he assigned in that class started with the question "1. Think about the scientific method"; the "no right answer, but many wrong answers" approach was typical of most of his assignments. His extremely open-ended approach to learning was a breath of fresh air compared to other undergrad CS classes which seemed geared for memorization not understanding.

Multiple times throughout that course, the class collaboratively created a cryptosystem. Dr. Blum would inevitably see the cracks in them instantly, and then teach the principles so we could rigorously show weakness. None of our cryptosystems were any good, being a handful of novice undergraduates, but _collaboratively_ tackling hard problems in small pieces definitely helped me in my career afterwards.

ccooffee commented on Uber, Lyft pay $328M for "cheating drivers" out of earnings, NY says   arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/rntn
ccooffee · 2 years ago
The terms of the settlement[0-pdf] are kind of interesting.

Drivers in New York City proper are entitled to $17/hr for sick pay. If I'm reading it correctly, that is also the minimum wage that drivers must be compensated at.

However, drivers who begin trips in New York State _but not inside NYC_ are guaranteed pay at $26/hr [see paragraph 30 of settlement]. If I'm reading this right, drivers in Buffalo, Syracuse, Utica, Albany, etc. are all going to reap significantly higher pay from Uber while living in much lower cost-of-living areas.

[0-pdf] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/settlements-agreements...

ccooffee commented on Moon-forming impactor as a source of Earth's basal mantle anomalies   nature.com/articles/s4158... · Posted by u/uolmir
lumost · 2 years ago
an interesting, albeit unsatisfactory solution to the Fermi parodox would be that we are a rare anomaly of a distant moon of comparable but lesser mass to the primary body, located in the inner solar system, but without tidal locking.

The latter two points might turn out to be extremely rare events.

ccooffee · 2 years ago
I wouldn't call that a final solution to the paradox, though.

(Put on your tinfoil hats.)

Maybe the Earth-Moon system was engineered. The solar system came together from a nebular cloud 4.6 billion years ago. The great impactor hypothesis points to the mega-collision around 4.5 billion years ago. During the early days of the solar system, the system was very chaotic. By applying tiny-but-very-precisely-calculated forces in that system, you could cause an impact. Sure, it's many orders of magnitude above what humans have accomplished, but the gravity slingshots that got the Voyager missions out of the solar system are the same principle.

ccooffee commented on Cosmopolitan Third Edition   justine.lol/cosmo3/... · Posted by u/jart
ccooffee · 2 years ago
I'm amazed by this. Platform-independence _with the same binary_ is such a neat solution that would really have helped me at a prior job.

Some corporate IT shops manage user machines with tooling that can't deploy software specific to machine os/version/hardware/etc. This often caused problems with 32-bit vs 64-bit windows machines or differing windows versions (XP/Vista/....). We also couldn't easily make linux or osx executables available for the end-users due to corporate IT policies.

u/ccooffee

KarmaCake day1149February 21, 2022
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