Stars nearest to the Sun Updated +Created
Figure 2.
Distance of stars nearest to the Sun as function of time
. Source.
Some notable ones:
  • Proxima Centauri, the nearest one, at 4 ly. It is part of the Alpha Centauri star system, which contains two other stars at very similar distances as well, and their relative distances to earth will change positions in a few tens of thousands of years.
  • Sirius, the brightest star in the sky at 9 ly
CIA usage of Domains by Proxy Updated +Created
The CIA really likes this registrar, e.g.:
Ethnic minorities in China Updated +Created
As of 2020 (TODO starting when) the Chinese government officially recognizes 55 minorities.
These minorities actually had different legal statuses, e.g. they were exempt from the One Child Policy.
Freedom of panorama Updated +Created
Escherichia coli Updated +Created
Size: 1-2 micrometers long and about 0.25 micrometer in diameter, so: 2 * 0.5 * 0.5 * 10e-18 and thus 0.5 micrometer square.
Reference strain: E. Coli K-12 MG1655.
Genome:
  • 4k genes
  • 5 Mbps
  • www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/167
  • wget ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/all/GCF/000/005/845/GCF_000005845.2_ASM584v2/GCF_000005845.2_ASM584v2_genomic.fna.gz
  • wget -O NC_000913.3.fasta 'https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/api/sequence/NC_000913.3/?report=fasta'
Omics modeling: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5611438/ Tools for Genomic and Transcriptomic Analysis of Microbes at Single-Cell Level Zixi Chen, Lei Chen, Weiwen Zhang.
Epoch and batch size Updated +Created
Erik Finman Updated +Created
www.unilad.com/technology/erik-finman-bitcoin-12-year-old-millionaire-invest-798094-20231207
In 2011, Finman made a deal with his parents that he would not pursue a college degree as he wanted to make his fortune outside of traditional education.
After receiving $1,245 from his grandmother that year, Finman invested into Bitcoin (BTC) - which was then trading at around $12 - and this gave him about 103 BTC.
Shame that he seems to be a American exceptionalism idiot. Perhaps it was inevitable given his circonstances. After a small market crash: x.com/erikfinman/status/1820457023013626322.
Opportunities like this come across only once every few years.
This ain’t financial advice…
But if you got the cash.
Never bet against America
2013 DNS census NS records Updated +Created
ns.csv is 57 GB. This file is too massive, working with it is a pain.
We can also cut down the data a lot with stackoverflow.com/questions/1915636/is-there-a-way-to-uniq-by-column/76605540#76605540 and tld filtering:
awk -F, 'BEGIN{OFS=","} { if ($1 != last) { print $1, $3; last = $1; } }' ns.csv | grep -E '\.(com|net|info|org|biz),' > nsu.csv
This brings us down to a much more manageable 3.0 GB, 83 M rows.
Let's just scan it once real quick to start with, since likely nothing will come of this venue:
grep -f <(awk -F, 'NR>1{print $2}' ../media/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/hits.csv) nsu.csv | tee nsu-hits.csv
cat nsu-hits.csv | csvcut -c 2 | sort | awk -F. '{OFS="."; print $(NF-1), $(NF)}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1 -n
As of 267 hits we get:
      1 a2hosting.com
      1 amerinoc.com
      1 ayns.net
      1 dailyrazor.com
      1 domainingdepot.com
      1 easydns.com
      1 frienddns.ru
      1 hostgator.com
      1 kolmic.com
      1 name-services.com
      1 namecity.com
      1 netnames.net
      1 tonsmovies.net
      1 webmailer.de
      2 cashparking.com
     55 worldnic.com
     86 domaincontrol.com
so yeah, most of those are likely going to be humongous just by looking at the names.
The smallest ones by far from the total are: frienddns.ru with only 487 hits, all others quite large or fake hits due to CSV. Did a quick Wayback Machine CDX scanning there but no luck alas.
Let's check the smaller ones:
inews-today.com,2013-08-12T03:14:01,ns1.frienddns.ru
source-commodities.net,2012-12-13T20:58:28,ns1.namecity.com -> fake hit due to grep e-commodities.net
dailynewsandsports.com,2013-08-13T08:36:28,ns3.a2hosting.com
just-kidding-news.com,2012-02-04T07:40:50,jns3.dailyrazor.com
fightwithoutrules.com,2012-11-09T01:17:40,sk.s2.ns1.ns92.kolmic.com
fightwithoutrules.com,2013-07-01T22:46:23,ns1625.ztomy.com
half-court.net,2012-09-10T09:49:15,sk.s2.ns1.ns92.kolmic.com
half-court.net,2013-07-07T00:31:12,ns1621.ztomy.com
Doubt anything will come out of this.
Let's do a bit of counting out of the total:
grep domaincontrol.com ns.csv | awk -F, '{print $1}' | uniq | wc
gives ~20M domain using domaincontrol. Let's see how many domains are in the first place:
awk -F, '{print $1}' ns.csv | uniq | wc
so it accounts for 1/4 of the total.
Wayback Machine CDX scanning Updated +Created
The Wayback Machine has an endpoint to query cralwed pages called the CDX server. It is documented at: github.com/internetarchive/wayback/blob/master/wayback-cdx-server/README.md.
This allows to filter down 10 thousands of possible domains in a few hours. But 100s of thousands would be too much. This is because you have to query exactly one URL at a time, and they possibly rate limit IPs. But no IP blacklisting so far after several hours, so it's not that bad.
Once you have a heuristic to narrow down some domains, you can use this helper: cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/cdx.sh to drill them down from 10s of thousands down to hundreds or thousands.
We then post process the results of cdx.sh with cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/cdx-post.sh to drill them down from from thousands to dozens, and manually inspect everything.
From then on, you can just manually inspect for hist on your browser.
Existential quantification Updated +Created
Existence and uniqueness of solutions of partial differential equations Updated +Created
If you have a PDE that models physical phenomena, it is fundamental that:
  • there must exist a solution for every physically valid initial condition, otherwise it means that the equation does not describe certain cases of reality
  • the solution must be unique, otherwise how are we to choose between the multiple solutions?
Unlike for ordinary differential equations which have the Picard–Lindelöf theorem, the existence and uniqueness of solution is not well solved for PDEs.
Excessive encapsulation is the root of much evil Updated +Created
Some anecdotes.
Ciro Santilli never splits up functions unless there is more than one calling point. If you split early, the chances that the interface will be wrong are huge, and a much larger refactoring follows.
If you just want to separate variables, just use a scope e.g.:
int cross_block_var;

// First step.
{
    int myvar;
}

// Second step.
{
    int myvar;
}
Ciro has seen and had to deal with in his lifetime with two projects that had like 3 to 10 git separate Git repositories, all created and maintained by the same small group of developers of the same organization, even though one could not build without the other. Keeping everything in sync was Hell! Why not just have three directories inside a single repository with a single source of truth?
Another important case: Linux should have at least a C standard library, init system, and shell in-tree, like BSD Operating Systems, as mentioned at: Section "Linux".
Amazon anticompetitive acquisition Updated +Created
Amazon is apparently notorious for having bought off many competitors, many of them just to kill off the competition and clear the way, not to actually reuse them.
youtu.be/tfAhTtBlb2Q?t=849 from Video "Jeff Bezos Revealed by Bloomberg (2015)" clearly shows Tim O'Reilly saying that very clearly about Bezos.
I do know of a number of cases in which he [Bezos] has acquired companies in order to take out competitors, potential future competitors. Rather than because he actually wants that business to continue.
Perhaps O'Reilly who is the bookselling business is not the greatest fan of Jeff. But still. My God.
www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf Amazon's Antitrust Paradox by Lina M . Khan from The Yale Law Journal raises this incredible issue.
feedsdemexicoyelmundo.com JavaScript reverse engineering Updated +Created
The JavaScript of each website appears to be quite small and similarly sized. They are all minimized, but have reordered things around a bit.
First we have to know that the Wayback Machine adds some stuff before and after the original code. The actual code there starts at:
ap={fg:['MSXML2.XMLHTTP
and ends in:
ck++;};return fu;};
We can use a JavaScript beautifier such as beautifier.io/ to be abe to better read the code.
It is worth noting that there's a lot of <script> tags inline as well, which seem to matter.
Further analysis would be needed.
Experiment background Updated +Created
PuntSeq is a side project led by a few University of Cambridge PhDs that aims to determine which bacteria are present in the River Cam.
In July 2019, the PuntSeq team got together with the awesome Cambridge Biomakespace, an awesome biology makerspace open to all, to create a two day science outreach activity showing their procedures.
The data collected in this experiment, together with other collection sessions done by the organizers actually led to a publication on eLife: elifesciences.org/articles/61504 "Freshwater monitoring by nanopore sequencing" by Lara Urban et al. (2021), so it is awesome to see that were are actual being part of "real science".
Ciro knows nothing about biology, but since he is very curious about it, he jumped at this opportunity, and decided to document things as well as his limited knowledge would allow.
All participants chipped in some money to help cover the experiment's costs. Ciro suspects that this activity was done partially to help crowdfund the experiment, but it was a worthy investment!
The impressions you get from the experiment as a software engineer will be:
  • OMG, this is so labour intensive, why haven't they automated this
  • OMG, this is frightening, all the 8 hours of work I've just done are present in that tiny plastic tube
  • Amazing! Look at that apparatus! And the bio people are like: I've used this a million times, it's cheap and every lab has one, just work faster and don't break you piece of junk!
fast.ai Updated +Created
A pair of Austrailan deep learning training provider/consuntants that have produced a lot of good free learning materials:Authors:
University of São Carlos Updated +Created
Inverse of the transpose Updated +Created
The transpose and matrix inverse commute:
IP address Updated +Created
Video 1.
The Internet Protocol by Ben Eater (2014)
Source.

There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.