criticaltinker (u/criticaltinker)

criticaltinker commented on Why does gRPC insist on trailers? carlmastrangelo.com/blog/... · Posted by u/strzalek

Relevant post from a few days ago:

Connect-Web: TypeScript library for calling RPC servers from web browsers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32345670

I’m curious if anyone knows how Google internally works around the lack of support for gRPC in the browser? Perhaps gRPC is not used for public APIs?

The lack of browser support in the protobuf and gRPC ecosystem was quite surprising and one of the biggest drawbacks noted by my team while evaluating various solutions.

criticaltinker commented on Security Vulnerability in Tor Browser darknetlive.com/post/psa-... · Posted by u/Vladimof

jerheinze · 4 years ago

This is deeply misleading and based on old data.

> A reminder that Tor Browser might be one of the least safe browsers you can run: it's a fork of Firefox, meaning that its maintainers have to coordinate and port patches from the mainline project.

Tor Browser ships updates as soon as new ESR versions come out.

> Firefox is already not one of the most hardened browser engines.

That might've been true in the past, it's hard to argue for it now.

> Meanwhile, the fork you'll be running is specifically designed to hide sensitive traffic, and collapses all those users into a single version for exploits to target.

The overwhelming majority of exit traffic now is using HTTPS and Tor Browser ships with HTTPS Everywhere to avoid SSL Striping attacks (in fact the next version of the Tor Browser will have the HTTPS-Only mode enabled by default, it's already being tested in the alpha release), so how will those evil exit node burn those exploits?

> I'm ambivalent about Tor, but if you're using Tor, don't use the Browser Bundle.

First off, the "Tor Browser Bundle" is a deprecated name. If you're not using the Tor Browser you're making yourself both insecure (it ships with a smaller attack surface, no WebGL for example) and fingerprintable defeating thus the full privacy advantages of the Tor Browser. There is simply no other alternative.

You can read the Tor Browser design documentation (though old) to get a rough sketch of what it's trying--and what it's not trying--to achieve: https://2019.www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

Further reading in case you think VPNs are the solution: https://matt.traudt.xyz/posts/2019-10-17-you-want-tor-browse...

criticaltinker · 4 years ago

FYI I’m seeing a 404 from that last link.

Is this the intended link?

https://matt.traudt.xyz/posts/2019-10-17-you-want-tor-browse...

criticaltinker commented on Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies bbc.com/worklife/article/... · Posted by u/_jxdz

kibwen · 4 years ago

Quite often I find that Man suffers only because a second Man finds joy in the suffering of the first. Detachment will serve you well in alleviating the suffering that would otherwise arise from the uncaring, undirected whims of the universe, but will leave you unprepared at dealing with willful and directed malice.

criticaltinker · 4 years ago

In the spirit of curiosity and playfulness I would like to respond with a bold claim:

The distinction between self and other is simply a concept. Certainly useful in many situations, but ultimately just one perspective - one tool at the mind’s disposal.

One could reasonably argue this is the central teaching of Buddhism. Alan Watts helped articulate these ideas to western audiences in many of his lectures:

“You see, the point is that an enormous number of things are going on inside us of which we are not conscious. We make a very, very arbitrary distinction between what we do voluntarily and what we do involuntarily, and we define all those things which we do involuntarily as things that happen to us rather than things that we do. In other words, we don’t assume any responsibility for the fact that our heart beats, or that our bones have such and such a shape.

If you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you’re doing, then you become aware, also—in the same moment and at the same time—that you’re not only beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun.”

criticaltinker commented on Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies bbc.com/worklife/article/... · Posted by u/_jxdz

id · 4 years ago

Is it good to not care?

criticaltinker · 4 years ago

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

- Alan Watts

criticaltinker commented on The Case for Higher Rates thelastbearstanding.subst... · Posted by u/gw67

deevolution · 4 years ago

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

criticaltinker · 4 years ago

I’ll bite. The data/graphs look suspicious and convincing enough, so WTF did happen?

I was hoping for an answer but alas there was none. Anyone have plausible theories? Is this an unexplained mystery or just an artifact of S curve growth?

criticaltinker commented on How many radioactive bananas would you need to power a house? what-if.xkcd.com/158/... · Posted by u/notRobot

dredmorbius · 4 years ago

Energy densities of various substances and/or reactions is pretty fascinating concept.

Some of the most interesting energy analysis I've come across (Vaclav Smil and David MacKay especially) describe energy in terms of area: what are the comparable land areas which would have to be dedicated to specific sources or forms of energy or fuels, and how do those compare? One of Smil's descriptions of petroleum wells is "punctiform", which I love. A hole in the ground, only about 20 cm in diameter, can provide years to millennia of human energy output, per day.

1 litre of oil is equivalent to about 3 days of human energy output (at 3,000 kilocalories/day).

1 gallon of oil is eqivalent to about 11 days of human energy.

One of the oldest oil wells in production (the First Oil Well of Bahrain) produced 80,000 barrels of oil per day initially. That's over 1,000 years of human energy equivalent.

By comparison, the yeild of current biomass production is far, far less. The difference, of course, is that oil is biomass, accumulated, converted, and concentrated over hundreds of millions of years. We're consuming it at > 5 million times its rate of formation. (See Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003).)

In terms of radioactivity, the net metabolic rate of the Sun's core is lower than that of a human, measured in energy/mass. Solar metabolism is closer to that of reptiles, about 1/5 of mamallian metabolic rates.

Chemical energy is less productive than the most effective nuclear transitions, but its shear abundance and ease of utilisation tends to weigh in its favour.

criticaltinker · 4 years ago

> to produce one litre of petrol it takes 1.29 kg of oil, of which 85% (1.1 kg) is carbon. And as only 1/10,750 of the carbon remains from the plants that were buried millions of years ago, our one litre of petrol is the result of 1.1 x 10,750 = 11,825 kg of carbon from ancient plants. Finally, as plants are approximately half carbon, that means that 23.65 tonnes of plants were required to make just one litre of the petrol available at your local station

Burning Buried Sunshine discussion and link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28214230

criticaltinker commented on The Source of the Aurora Borealis: Electrons Surfing on Alfvén Waves energy.gov/science/fes/ar... · Posted by u/geox

netman21 · 4 years ago

Alfvén was pretty much the father of the electric universe theory.

From Wikipedia:

In 1937, Alfvén argued that if plasma pervaded the universe, it could then carry electric currents capable of generating a galactic magnetic field.[6] After winning the Nobel Prize for his works in magnetohydrodynamics, he emphasized that:

    In order to understand the phenomena in a certain plasma region, it is necessary to map not only the magnetic but also the electric field and the electric currents. Space is filled with a network of currents which transfer energy and momentum over large or very large distances. The currents often pinch to filamentary or surface currents. The latter are likely to give space, as also interstellar and intergalactic space, a cellular structure.[7]

His theoretical work on field-aligned electric currents in the aurora (based on earlier work by Kristian Birkeland) was confirmed in 1967,[8] these currents now being known as Birkeland currents.[citation needed]

Alfvén's work was disputed for many years by the senior scientist in space physics, the British mathematician and geophysicist Sydney Chapman.[9] Alfvén was regarded as a person with unorthodox opinions in the field by many physicists,[10] R. H. Stuewer noting that "... he remained an embittered outsider, winning little respect from other scientists even after he received the Nobel Prize..."[11] and was often forced to publish his papers in obscure journals. Alfvén recalled:

    When I describe [plasma phenomena] according to this formalism most referees do not understand what I say and turn down my papers. With the referee system which rules US science today, this means that my papers are rarely accepted by the leading US journals

----- Plasma does indeed pervade the universe. Electromagnetic forces are 10^^30 times more powerful than gravity and decrease linearly with distance, not with the square. They play a much bigger role in cosmology than gravity. eUniverse theory explains many things, like the rotation of galaxies with no need to invent dark matter. Also, star formation through the pinch effect mentioned above.

criticaltinker · 4 years ago

Thanks! I was going to make a similar comment myself but HN isn’t too keen on these ideas yet. Glad to see other like-minded folks here.

The Wikipedia page for plasma cosmology is extremely biased, so I suggest anyone interested in these topics should read the previous comment I made and some of the resources I linked there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31218219

criticaltinker commented on What keeps earth from collapsing in on itself? (2010) scienceline.ucsb.edu/getk... · Posted by u/gigglesupstairs

rayiner · 4 years ago

Electron degeneracy pressure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_degeneracy_pressure

Stars above 8 solar masses can turn into neutron stars or black holes because during their life they have two forces counteracting gravitational collapse: electron degeneracy pressure and thermal pressure from fusion. When the fusion stops you’re left with a massive body where the electron degeneracy pressure alone isn’t sufficient to counteract gravity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit.

You get a neutron star instead of a black hole when the gravitational collapse can be overcome by the strong force and neutron degeneracy pressure (the same forces that keep the nuclei of atoms from collapsing).

See this more general description of the fundamental forces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction

criticaltinker · 4 years ago

This is a thoughtful comment but IMO your phrasing is too strong and potentially misleading.

As far as science is concerned, the jury is still out on stellar nucleosynthesis. The leading theory - that gravitational collapse causes fusion near the core - may be entirely incorrect, and there is mounting evidence suggesting so including a plethora of modern observations that the theory fails to explain.

For example the so-called ‘coronal heating’ problem has existed for 75 years, since the solar corona was first demonstrated to contain plasma with temperatures of 1 million degrees kelvin and above, much higher than the photospheric surface temperature of approximately 6000 K [1].

As another stunning counterexample, current gravitational models do not explain observed properties of the solar wind like spatial variation and periodicity in time (thanks voyager 1 & 2), among many other things.

See [2] for a dense intro to more unresolved problems in solar physics.

Alternative (non mainstream) theories like “plasma cosmology” are gaining traction in the scientific community for this reason. Note though that many papers do not use that particular phrase to describe their work.

Unfortunately (for intellectually curious folks), the contributors to Wikipedia pages on these physics topics are extremely … biased. Reading [3] may leave you with the impression that “plasma cosmology” has been completely debunked by the scientific community, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth ([4][5] are examples to support this claim).

[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.201...

[2] https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/joaa/029/01-02/0003-0...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cosmology

[4] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00159-013-0062-7

[5] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.102...