e-khadem (u/e-khadem)

e-khadem commented on Ask HN: Do you still use physical calculators? · Posted by u/speedylight

e-khadem · 10 days ago

Yes, I have a Casio fx-9750GIII and I love it. I still haven't found an Android app or website that can do everything that I need (basic functionality), but in general:

- I need physical buttons. I often find that on touchscreens I mistype something and I don't notice.

- The history feature. Maybe I want to do a serial task or calculation, and I can just replace/correct one of the formulas in the history and it automatically recalculates all of the expressions that came after it.

- I have written some micropython code / utilities for the calculator and I use it all the time.

- I don't want to context switch to do a quick calculation. On my PC I have to open up a new terminal or a website (I might be offline, so I have to hotspot and then connect the wifi and ...) and interrupt my existing work or I have to frequently switch between a PDF or latex or whatever that I'm working on.

- Typing out `sin` or `np.sin` or `sin^-1` on PC is both longer and more error prone. It gets very frustrating very quickly.

- The numerical solver is a godsend. Try solving for the roots of an expression like `xe^x = 10` on your PC without internet. Or with an android application. On my calculator it's just a few dedicated button presses. On the PC, I have to use isympy and typeout `nsolve(Eq(x * exp(x), 10), 1)`, and you wouldn't even get a proper graphical display of the expression while you are typing it.

e-khadem commented on Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only restofworld.org/2026/iran... · Posted by u/siev

N19PEDL2 · 16 days ago

> it had to be a proper low fingerprint method (e.g., you had to hide the tls-in-tls timing pattern and do traffic shaping).

Can anyone recommend a good book, video course or other material to learn more about these topics?

e-khadem · 16 days ago

FOCI papers[1] are great IMO, but some of submissions are just an academic curiosity, not a practical solution that works for the average Joe at a low cost and scale. For practical methods that are heavily used, you can take a look at popular opensource implementations and their documentation. Sing-box, Xray core, hiddify (their patches on top of xray and singbox), shadowsocks and shadowtls, and many more. ShadowTLS provides a good starting point with a fairly detailed documentation and clearly describes the development process.

The way that I see it, its not just a technical problem anymore. It's about making the methods as diverse as possible and to some extent messing up the network for everyone. In other words, we should increase the cost and the collateral damage of widespread censorship. As an anecdotal data point, the network was quite tightly controlled / monitored around 2023 in Iran and nothing worked reliably. Eventually people (ab)used the network (for example the tls fragments method) to the extent that most of the useful and unrelated websites (e.g., anything behind cloudflare, most of the Hetzner IPv4 addresses, and more) stopped working or were blocked. This was an unacceptably high collateral damage for the censors (?), so they "eased" some of the restrictions. Vless and Trojan were the same at that time and didn't work or were blocked very quickly, but they started working ~reliably again until very recently.

[1] https://www.petsymposium.org/foci/

e-khadem commented on Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only restofworld.org/2026/iran... · Posted by u/siev

breppp · 16 days ago

for someone with a tech background, how hard is it to setup your own tunnel? I'd assume cloud providers are whitelisted due to economic reasons?

e-khadem · 16 days ago

Lol. That was _before_ these new restrictions. And don't assume that you could setup a simple wireguard server and be done with it. No, it had to be a proper low fingerprint method (e.g., you had to hide the tls-in-tls timing pattern and do traffic shaping). Now, something like dnstt sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. You may be able to open gmail in 10 minutes if it does, and you explicitly have to block the fonts.

e-khadem commented on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes reuters.com/world/america... · Posted by u/jumpocelot

cmrdporcupine · a month ago

Willing to completely give up domestic control of your energy sector in exchange for this regime change?

Because that's what has actually happened here.

It's not like there will be peaceful and organized elections now. The template from US actions in Latin America in the past is: A puppet regime will be installed and it will be involved in heavy domestic oppression of its own.

e-khadem · a month ago

> Willing to completely give up domestic control of your energy sector in exchange for this regime change?

You're saying this as if they (the people) had any control before.

A military intervention should always be the last resort. Two examples of military intervention / occupation working out in the long run are Germany and Japan in WW2. Maybe even South Korea (stabilization of a dictatorship and economic development lead to a democratic revolution later). One can be hopeful that this starts a better chapter for the Venezuelians as well.

e-khadem commented on Calibre adds AI "discussion" feature lwn.net/Articles/1049886/... · Posted by u/pykello

Arodex · 2 months ago

[flagged]

e-khadem · a month ago

Safety is a valid concern in general. But avoidance not the right way to approach it. Democratizing the access to such tools (and developing a somewhat open ecosystem around it) for researchers and the general public is the better way IMO. This way people with more knowledge (not necessarily technical. For example philosophers) can experiment and explore this space more and guide the development going forward.

Also, the base assumption of every prospering society is a population that cares about and values their freedom and rights. If the society drifts towards becoming averse to learning about these virtues ... well, there will be consequences (and yes, we are going this way. For example look at the current state of politics, wealth distribution, and labor rights in the US. People would have been a lot more resentful to this in the 1960s or 70s.)

The same is true about AI systems. If the general public (or at least a good percentage of the researchers) study it well enough, they will force this alignment with true human values. Contrary to this, censorship or less equitable / harder access and later evaluation is really detrimental to this process (more sophisticated and hazardous models will be developed without any feedback from the intellectuals / the society. Then those misaligned models can cause a lot of harm in the hands of a rogue actor).

e-khadem commented on After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up e360.yale.edu/features/ir... · Posted by u/YaleE360

pjc50 · 2 months ago

3 million from where? Is that by any chance refugees from the collapse of nearby Syria?

e-khadem · 2 months ago

Afghanistan [1]. Most Syrians ended up in Europe I assume.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghans_in_Iran

e-khadem commented on After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up e360.yale.edu/features/ir... · Posted by u/YaleE360

MangoToupe · 2 months ago

Believe it or not, other things do happen in the country aside from what is reported on in western media. Claiming this is all they do is heinously ignorant.

e-khadem · 2 months ago

Of course. Like embezzlement. I live in Iran and if you want a more detailed picture of the situation I find data provided in [1] well-researched. The executive summary is that one of the military branches really doesn't care about the environment as long as they get more power / money / anti-US proxies.

Also, that "Tehran will run out of water in two weeks" statement came from the president, and some neighborhoods really don't have water for several hours each day. The official advice is to "install water pumps and storage tanks."

[1] Why Iran is Rapidly Dying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8kSGH4I8Ps

e-khadem commented on Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable theverge.com/tech/823337/... · Posted by u/throwaway270925

cwillu · 3 months ago

It's two checkboxes in the gui to enable RPM Fusion, and then you click “Steam”. It's not that hard.

e-khadem · 3 months ago

Usually this is not the main problem that people run into. Most often we take basics of terminal usage and config management for granted, and these are the hardest parts for new comers to learn, because they often don't know the conventions and the unwritten laws of the typical config file format, and once they get a weird error due to for example a non-existent config file or insufficient permissions and they search the exact error message, they get lost in deep, unrelated technical discussions of more obscure problems that real sys-admins encounter. They don't know that they should search for the basics, and along with weird cryptic error messages they can easily get stuck on a trivial tasks for hours ...

The other day I handed my Arch laptop to a friend (a mechanical engineer) who liked tinkering with computers, had a few papers on $RECENT_AI_TOPICS, and was considering moving to arch to learn Linux. I advised him to start with Ubuntu and then move to arch, but he insisted so I gave him a quick test.

Since he was more or less comfortable with reading manuals and searching, I asked him to install nginx on my laptop and change the configs to listen on 8080. He eventually succeeded ... after 70 minutes or so. He installed nginx and started the service pretty easily in a couple of minutes, but then he got stuck on editing the config files. First, he wasn't familiar with the terminal file editors so he had to learn one (he chose vim and went through vimtutor) and then he opened the config file without sudo, so he couldn't save the file. Then he thought that maybe he needed to stop nginx first but that didn't work. And then he started reading nginx manuals and tutorials and SE threads for like 30 minutes. Finally he decided to search the vim error directly and then found the issue.

I have often heard similar stories, and I think the main hurdle for most people is not "the hard part" or RTFM, but it's "the unwritten part" and the conventions.