The Weekly Weird - 2018-10-12

Skorgu

2018-10-12 14:00

Definitely weird: Bees don't fly during solar eclipses.
The most exciting words in science are, of course, 'Well this model doesn't make much sense'. If the tone of that article is a bit too breathless for you, give this excellent HN comment a shot instead. Exciting!
OT vs CRDT: fight!
Apparently, I'm Finnish.
Protobuffers are not universally loved.
It doesn't matter if the cops have your DNA you know, they will find you (source article).
It's been a rough week for state space agencies. Roscosmos had an oopsie which will not help the perception of their previous oopsie. NASA's kind of just hitting itself (but no earth-shattering kaboom so that's something).
Flying car? Flying car!
You can predict which side of the tracks is the 'bad' one: it's the side with all the smog.
Everything old is new again: A statically-compiled dialect of javascript.
Ok, this Bloomberg/Supermicro thing just makes no sense. So far, almost everyone mentioned in the story (Amazon, Apple, Homeland Security, The FBI...) has pretty much denied it, and not in fuzzy carefully-precise language either. Bloomberg though is not so much giving up as doubling down despite their named source not sounding so sure.
Finally, someone's rewriting a real operating system in rust.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-10-05

Skorgu

2018-10-05 14:00

I loathe linking twitter threads, they're just reader-hostile. But this one is worth it for the top-quality science.
I guess we gotta talk about the NSA bankrupting Supermicro via Bloomberg (Is that not what it's about?) Vaguely useless HN comments and an in-depth analysis of plausible (but unproven) attack vectors. Also, anyone want to translate this product page?
The only problem with state-sponsored hardware espionage is the lack of a catchy name. Not like iDRACula, which is killer.
"Building an organic computing device with multiple interconnected brains" (2015) leads to a slightly-less-invasive one-bit replication in humans.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-09-21

Skorgu

2018-09-21 14:00

Man did I pick the wrong RustConf 2018 talk to pull out the other week. Catherine West gave a great closing keynote about game development and how Rust leads/forces the programmer towards a good design by making some bad designs hard or impossible. A fairly well known game developer was sufficiently unimpressed by this talk to make his own video calling out this conclusion: "The borrow checker isn't beneficial here: you're avoiding it by using a pattern you'd use in C++ anyway.". Oh dear. This led to a veritable cornucopia of blog posts clarifying that you can't 'turn off' the borrow checker, trying to tease out what the disagreement actually was, digging a little deeper into the difference between an integer and a pointer, and of course, Catherine's own blog post digging much deeper into the proposed architecture.
Also in rust-land, Bryan Fucking Cantrill falls in love with rust. (This is pretty much the article I would have written except a thousand times better because Bryan is a genius). See also his videos of the Summer of Rust and the statemaps he talks about.
How many moves does it take to solve a Rubik's cube? 20. Unironically: what a great use of 35 CPU years!
Once you've built your giant orbiting rotating space station, how will you light it up? Geometry.
This is neat: Cloudflare now generically proxies IPFS hashes. That might be the impetus I need to publish this trash to SPACE-COMPATIBLE BITS.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-09-14

Skorgu

2018-09-14 14:00

Look how dedicated I am to you all, I still manage to get you your needed Weird through my horrid plague.

How anonymous is zcash anyway? It's complicated.
Timezones are dumb but even by that standard, this is ridiculous.
Guard your metadata. Steps can tell you about videogame releases in addition to the previously-noted secret military bases.
Ok, look. Can we just be a little less on the nose here? Don't introduce the aliens to the AI!
Compilers: apparently just getting started.
You rarely get to see a rocket launch from quite this angle.
You know how I feel about Go. Here are some extra-surprising bits.
Today's lesson, nothing is free. I could do without the breathless prose but hey, payment for order flow is a thing, even for Robin Hood.
From the surprisingly-old department: this boat and this fish. See also this delightful list.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-09-07

Skorgu

2018-09-07 14:00

I would definitely have reconsidered medicine as a career field if I knew stabbing cadavers with ballpoint pens was a valid research track.
On the other hand, AAAAAAAAAAAAHHH. *gasp* AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
"Sudden liquefaction" is a scary phrase but not for the reason you think.
Finishing off this horrible sub-section: straight up Lovecraftian horror, in documentary form: When Snails Attack. Don't worry, humans are still scarier: literal killer robots
If you think you should quit your job, you should quit your job. People stay way longer than seems obvious from the outside.
I present to you the polar opposite of blameless postmortems.
At what orbit should you build your deep-space lunar science station? NASA has you covered.
Hard to beat "literally the speed of light" for nerual network inference latency.
Mapreduce components in rust: Efflux. Q in rust.
So, uh, apparently the issues with Theranos were not what you'd call hidden.
Some videos on Rust: Bryan Cantrill talks about Joyent statemaps and Tools for thought and several core team members discuss how to build a system of people (don't miss this one).
I feel like someone needs to work backward and write a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court homage where we intimidate an invading alien force by predicting a supernova.
Thermodynamics kills. I don't mean poetically, I mean the list of academics studying the subject with successful or seriously attempted suicide attempts is ... startling (h/t stefanetal: Ludwig Boltzmann, Paul Ehrenfest, Julius von Mayer, Clara Immerwahr, Gilber Lewis, and Percy Bridgman.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-08-24

Skorgu

2018-08-24 14:00

"Many of the design flaws were discovered using formal verification. Academics attempted to prove certain security properties of TLS, but instead found counter-examples that were turned into real vulnerabilities."
I can't remember if I've mentioned the Siege of Leningrad here before but this story of scientists starving to death guarding the food vault is one of the more dramatic true stories, right up there with Petrov and Arkhipov (not to mention Borlaug).
In today's episode, Tesla learns that NDAs expire.
Another day, another new human organ discovery.
Build rust, run {Objective C, python}.
I was reading about the oft-delayed but finally-happening GPS III satellite and now I have Things to tell you:
- It'll have so many signals.
- It's not the only GNSS system up there, of course. Russia has GLONASS, Europe has Galileo, and China has BeiDou. And that's not counting India and Japan's regional systems.
- Signals in this band are a complicated game of finder's keepers.
- The first GPS satellites used Cesium atomic clocks but the new ones might just use Rubidium? Galileo and BieDou use Hydrogen Masers.
- How do you build a hydrogen maser? A weak static magnetic field is applied parallel to the cavity axis by a solenoid to lift the degeneracy of the magnetic Zeeman sublevels, obviously.
Ever wonder why fire drills have a bored, barely-intelligable "fire safety director" reading a script? Because otherwise people burn to death.
Former SpaceX engineers building rockets for bigass planes (shouldn't you have a rocket to launch before you build the giant plane?) and 3d-printed everything. SpaceX is not the only game in town for vertical-landing suicide burns, there's this guy.
The thrilling saga of overwhelming a modern computer by typing an email has a riveting conclusion.
"Bugs are never so obvious as when you're the one responsible for them."
Human interests have no end.
Yet Another Clever Filesystem: TxFS: Leveraging File-System Crash Consistency to Provide ACID Transactions.
"Here stands the bastion of the Turbofish."
"Your mother was a Neanderthal and your father was a Denisovan!" Yes, yes they were.
If you drag me against the floor over and over I just produce whining and bar tabs. Not like this showoff that says 'is that all you got'?
From the naming-matters department, 3D-printing with ground up plants and insects: "fungus-like adhesive material".

The Weekly Weird - 2018-08-17

Skorgu

2018-08-17 14:00

Movies love the trope: a boring meeting is interrupted by everyone's phones going off at once and you know Something Has Happened. Turns out, that's exactly what actually happens. (Content warning: gore, terrorism, French). It's also a great look at how preparation and pre-deciding really work when shit gets real.
Another day, another speculative execution attack. Ho hum.
Some neat analysis of gender trends in cities: nyc and sf.
A color 3d printer.
Not getting tracked online is really hard (pdf).
Too much CO₂ in your air? Make rocks with it! It would take 80 billion tons of this to match our carbon emissions but global coal production is ~8 billion tons which is many fewer orders of magnitude away than I would have guessed.
Do AI nerual networks build the same kind of patterns as biological ones? It sure looks like it.
Or, mayonnaise is actually disgusting and that's why nobody buys it. Fight me.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-08-10

Skorgu

2018-08-10 14:00

At least this tcp-level linux vulnerability is just a massive DOS.
A nice talk about OAuth
Surely your CPU doesn't have undocumented, ring-0, layer-violating backdoor instructions that are enabled by default, right?!
I have only skimmed but this article on a comprehensible memory model for Ocaml seems potentially extremely interesting.
When you're done chewing stores and reads, use those mathematical modeling skills on something more interesting.
Once you have a paper model of course, you may find you need a physical scale model to validate. But how to tell if your scaling accurately represents the full-size? NASA to the rescue.