April 2023
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April 29, 2023
Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet
556 by statquontrarian | 309 comments on Hacker News.
Across many different pages including science journals, ChatGPT, and many others, CloudFlare verification goes into an infinite loop of: 1. "Verify you are a human" 2. Check the box or perform some other type of rain dance 3. "Please stand by, while we are checking your browser..." 4. Repeat step 1 I'm on Fedora Linux 37 using Firefox 110. The workaround is to use Chrome. After experiencing this dozens of times and getting annoyed of needing to use Chrome, I finally went and deleted all my cookies and cache which I had been dreading to do. It did not help. I don't have a CloudFlare account so I wrote up a detailed post on their community forums. I offered a HAR file and was willing to do diagnostics. It received no responses and it was auto-closed. It's unacceptable that CloudFlare is breaking the internet while offering no community support. Edit: I'm in Texas. I'm not using a VPN or Tor, just AT&T Fiber. I don't have ad-blockers. No weird extensions. Nothing special (besides being on Linux). Edit2: Since this got traction, I opened a new community post: https://ift.tt/OJaSKEc To be clear, I'm not against CloudFlare doing DDoS protection, etc., but it can't be breaking the internet while ignoring community posts on it . Edit3: The CloudFlare team has engaged. Thank you HN!

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April 28, 2023
Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
630 by l2silver | 847 comments on Hacker News.
Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.

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April 26, 2023
Show HN: Homemade rocketship treehouse – hardware to custom OS
385 by david_elson | 48 comments on Hacker News.
(This was previously submitted as https://ift.tt/gd3OKhp ) The Ravenna Ultra-Low-Altitude Vehicle is a backyard rocketship treehouse nestled in the Seattle neighborhood of Ravenna. Click the link to see a demo video ( http://rocket.jonh.net ). The hexagonal treehouse is about 6.5 feet (2 meters) across at its widest point. The frame is welded mild steel with riveted aluminum siding. It contains nearly 800 LEDs forming dozens of numeric displays spread across 14 control panels, each with an acrylic face laser-cut and etched with labels such as "Lunar Distance" and "Hydraulic Pressure". The pilot controls the rocket using a joystick and panels full of working switches, knobs and buttons. Underneath the capsule are three "thrusters" that shoot plumes of water and compressed air under the control of the pilot's joystick, simulating real positioning thrusters. Takeoff and docking sequences are augmented by a paint-shaker that simulates the vibration of a rocket engine. Sound effects complete the illusion, with a powered subwoofer that gives the rocket a satisfying rumble. When it was built in 2011, rocket operations were controlled by three Atmega328 microprocessors on custom-fabricated printed circuit boards, running a small operating system, RULOS, built just for this project. A trench running from the house to the rocket carries 12VDC power for the lighting and electronics, water for the thrusters, compressed air, and several data signals. Since 2011, the two-person team has upgraded it, here is a recent update from the makers: One of the most visible changes is replacing the primary 4-line display with a slicker 6-line display (i.e., 6 rows of 8 columns of 7-segment LEDs). The audio synthesizer has been upgraded to a PCB that can generate 50khz, 16-bit audio. The interconnection bus, which had been flat IDC cable carrying individual on/off lines, was upgraded to a true I2C-based networked distributed system with over a dozen individually addressable targets, all interconnected by standard cat5 cable that carries both our I2C protocol and power. We also moved much of the electronics from 8-bit atmega328s to newer, 32-bit STM32F3's. RULOS has been expanded into a pretty general purpose embedded systems platform ported to 5 major lines of CPU (atmega, attiny, stm32, nxp lpc, and esp32). We've used it for dozens of other projects in the last 12 years, including a nanosecond-accurate timestamper, a GPS datalogger, an air quality sensor, various little electronic control boards for toys (e.g. these, and this), and an autonomous boat (that sank). It is all available on Github: https://ift.tt/5xZHVjD .

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April 22, 2023
Tell HN: Eid Mubarak
765 by asim | 313 comments on Hacker News.
To the Muslims on HN, Eid Mubarak! And to everyone else, Eid Mubarak! For those who don't know. Eid is a day of celebration after the month of Ramadan, in which Muslims fasted for 30 days from sunrise to sunset with no food or water. It's something 2B people around the world celebrate to today or tomorrow (moon sighting permitted). A note on Ramadan. To those interested in intermittent fasting, longevity, and coming back to a more human experience not drowning in technology, food and consumerism I would say check it out! After over 20 years of doing it I'm still learning something new every year, or I should say, unlearning bad habits we've created for ourselves as a society through abundance. Hope you all have a great day!

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April 12, 2023
Show HN: GPT-4-powered web searches for developers
595 by rushingcreek | 234 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, Today we’re launching GPT-4 answers on Phind.com, a developer-focused search engine that uses generative AI to browse the web and answer technical questions, complete with code examples and detailed explanations. Unlike vanilla GPT-4, Phind feeds in relevant websites and technical documentation, reducing the model’s hallucination and keeping it up-to-date. To use it, simply enable the “Expert” toggle before doing a search. GPT-4 is making a night-and-day difference in terms of answer quality. For a question like “How can I RLHF a LLaMa model”, Phind in Expert mode delivers a step-by-step guide complete with citations ( https://ift.tt/7DkLfXQ... ) while Phind in default mode meanders a bit and answers the question very generally ( https://ift.tt/sCQJXuV... ). GPT-4 is significantly more concise and “systematic” in its answers than our default model. It generates step-by-step instructions over 90% of the time, while our default model does not. We’re particularly focused on ML developers, as Phind can answer questions about many recent ML libraries, papers, and technologies that ChatGPT simply cannot. Even with ChatGPT’s alpha browsing mode, Phind answers technical questions faster and in more detail. For example, Phind running on “Expert” GPT-4 mode can concisely and correctly tell you how to run an Alpaca model using llama.cpp: ( https://ift.tt/Fs7i6gG... ). In contrast, ChatGPT-4 hallucinates and writes a make function for a fictional llama.cpp. We still have a long way to go and would love to hear your feedback.

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April 04, 2023
iOS lets carriers add WiFi networks that you can’t remove or stop from joining
562 by newZWhoDis | 217 comments on Hacker News.
Well this was a major surprise so I figured I’d share it here to get some eyeballs on it. Essentially, the latest iOS (16.4 at post time) allows your cellular carrier (via eSIM) to add “managed networks” to your device. These networks cannot be removed, they cannot have “automatically join” disabled, and they have equal priority with your real, personal networks. So guess what happens when your neighbors get a wifi/modem combo that blasts a free hotspot SSID? Not only does it pollute the already crowded 2.4ghz band, your iPhone will often prefer this connection over your real /local wifi (despite said wifi being at 1 bar). As of post-time, there is no way to remove these networks short of completely disabling cell service/removing the eSIM and resetting all network settings. You can see this for yourself by going to WiFi/“edit” and scrolling down. Edit: to clarify, I can disable “auto join”, but in 4-5 minutes all of my devices have auto-join turned back on. I’m guessing it re-syncs with the carrier profile. Also, this does not seem to be eSIM or SIM related it can happen on both.

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April 04, 2023
Launch HN: OutSail (YC W23) – Wingsails to reduce cargo ship fuel consumption
454 by jmoorebeek | 215 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! I’m Joseph, and along with Arpan and Bailey we are the founders of OutSail Shipping ( https://ift.tt/7OQgfvl ). We’re building a sail the size of a 747 that rolls up into a shipping container. When deployed, it will generate thrust from the wind to reduce the fuel consumption of a cargo ship. An array of these devices will reduce fuel consumption on ships by up to 20%. These sails are easily stowed and removed to cause no interference with cargo operations. Here’s a short video showing our prototype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUpVqzpym54 . Sails powered ships for millennia; but then the convenience of energy-dense fuels displaced sails. As ship speeds eventually exceeded wind speeds, the consensus became that sails had no place in shipping and were relegated to hobbyists and sport. Fast forward a century and a half, and maritime shipping, like all other industries, is facing a reckoning to mitigate the greenhouse gasses produced by their activities. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has introduced new regulations which use a vessel’s Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII) to grade ships. This grading scale becomes more aggressive over time, and any ship with a poor grade must take corrective action. The corrective actions can be as non-invasive as reducing speed (aka: slow steaming) or as extreme as a retrofit to use a different, cleaner fuel source. This costs millions and takes a ship out of commission for months, and it’s difficult to ensure your (now more expensive) fuel is available at every port of call. Ship owners are hedging their bets that slow steaming will dominate their future, with ship order books full to reflect the increased capacity needed when containers take 20% longer to cross the ocean. Or option three. There is sufficient wind on the ocean to power the entire shipping industry, if you’re willing to grab it. Wind Assisted Ship Propulsion (WASP) devices can be used as a corrective action to improve a vessel’s CII rating, without reducing ship speed or changing the route. In other words, a return of sails. We are hardware engineers with over two decades of experience between us, working at Tesla, SpaceX, JPL, Relativity, and some startups. The idea for OutSail came from Arpan and Joseph getting coffee after work one day. When we asked each other “What would you do if you weren’t building satellites?” maritime cargo came up from both sides; Arpan from having studied the industry for opportunities to reduce emissions, and Joseph from a love of hydrodynamics and maybe too many sea-shanties. Bailey and Arpan, meanwhile, had been looking at working on bicycling infrastructure. What brought the three of us together was actually a Dungeons & Dragons game where we realized we made a good team! We settled on OutSail as a good fit for our hardware hacking mentality, trading in our druids staffs for spanners. Aerodynamically, sails are simply vertical wings. Wind blowing across the vessel causes the sail to generate lift and drag, and the resultant vector has some forward component to pull the ship through the water. However, if the wind comes from an angle too close to the direction of travel, there is no thrust. As an added complication, the sail only sees the relative wind. If the ship travels faster, the wind will appear to come from closer and closer to the direction of travel, even if the true wind is coming from perpendicular to your course! Despite this, standard sails can still produce forward thrust as long as the wind is at least 20 degrees off from directly in front of the vessel. This is how our sails can still save power, even on a fast moving vessel. There are many sail technologies out there. A common question we get asked is “Are you going to use flettner rotors/suction airfoils?”. Both of these technologies use power supplied by the ship to increase the lift produced by a surface; rotor-sails spin, and suction airfoils…suck? Each of these have a place, especially at low vessel speeds. But our customers ask us for a solution that works for container ships cruising at the relatively high speed of 22kt. At these speeds, the relative wind is almost always ahead of you, so lift/drag becomes more important. Powered sails suffer from poor lift/drag, both from the high induced drag from very high lift coefficients, and system losses from drawing on ship’s power. So no we are not going with flettner rotors/suction airfoils. While they are the new exciting technology on the block, if you factor in their power usage and high drag ratio, they are just not as practical as a simple sail. So now that we’ve given a general summary of sailing, it’s time to explain how a 747 wing will ever fit inside a 9ft tall cargo container. It’s simple really: imagine a tape measure. In a tape measure a thin, flexible strip of metal is wound into a spiral. Then, when the metal is uncoiled, it naturally returns to its original shape. That’s exactly how we plan to make our sails. The skin of our sail or the inner spars (we haven’t finalized our design) will be made of tape measure like material (2mm thick steel) and the wing will be able to extend out of the cargo container. The video in the first paragraph explains this in a bit more detail. By fitting our sail into a cargo container we allow for our device to be installed on any cargo ship right at port. Remember how we mentioned that some shippers are ordering a lot more ships and some ships are getting retrofitted with new fuel? Well, shipyards are backed up for the next 5 years. By making a device that requires no shipyard to install, not only will we drastically outcompete other retrofit WASP companies in terms of deployment cost, but we will be the only company with a product shippers can put on their ship without a multiple year wait time. Do you have any interesting stories around sailing or wind tech? We would love to hear your ideas, experiences, and feedback on any and all of the above!

MKRdezign

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