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16
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407
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Not that good a thing to be doing as each such project potentially balloons into drama, dealing with each new client and their often confused or inexperienced expectations will be its own hassle, etc. Working full time or having a few long term clients is a lot better, as is getting leads through people you know if you have some special expertise in something.

    I've heard people suggest looking for bug bounties. I haven't tried that myself so I'm just relaying the suggestion.

    Front-end web stuff is its own circle of hell but back-end is just like any other programming, so you could look for that.

    I mentioned the "freelancer" HN thread a while back, but it's mostly people looking for work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434575

  • ten distinct propositions, enumerated from 0 to 9,

    11th proposition: write unreadable manifesto and make sure to maximize irony by posting on a Microsoft site (github) that uses everything there for AI training among other things.

  • This isn't about random vs pseudorandom numbers, it's about the use of hashing in protocols that are provably secure under the random oracle model (ROM) but turn out to have problems anyway. It's a pretty near certainty that first year CS courses don't explain what the random oracle model is. But basically, there have been known attacks for decades against protocols intentionally designed to be vulnerable in the standard model while still secure in the ROM. This is the first time such an attack has been found against a real world protocol.

    Matthew Green had an explainer a few months ago that was more detailed than the Quanta article while still being readable: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/02/04/how-to-prove-false-statements-part-1/

    Anyway it sounds like caution is warranted but "ZOMG the sky is falling" is overreaction.

  • You couldn't do it with one slingshot, as several people have explained. But if the slingshot was big enough to launch a ship carrying someone with another slingshot, you'd do a little better. With the second ship carrying a third ship and so on, the slingshot round on the last ship might move fast enough. This is how multi-stage rockets work, by the way.

    Added: the math you want is called the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation.

  • nanoplastic — plastic particles 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

    I hate this type of dumbed down description with the actual info removed. It's like when someone describes the capacity of a hard drive in terms of "libraries of congress" or "feet of stacked paper" instead of gigabytes or terabytes. We all use hard drives and know what a terabyte is, so give us the plain info.

    Anyway, clicking the Nature link shows that nanoplastic means less than 1 micron diameter. That's much simpler than making us look up the diameter of a human hair to find out how big the plastic is.

  • I don't understand the question if there is one. Anyway, be honest and be nice and be understanding. IMHO it's important to let some level of communication stay open (say an occasional phone call) but it's ok to limit it to that if you need to for your own mental health. Whether you can be actual friends depends on both of you, and might require waiting a while first.