andrehacker
andrehacker on Hacker News
Hm, Powell was in a U2, not SR71 and supposedly the SR71 never flew over Russia, only close to it.
Is that really the problem, though, or has the audience simply changed? It seems to me that the thoughtful deep dives of years past are still being produced, but they're buried under a much larger volume of lighter content. More importantly, many of the people working at the forefront of technology and product development appear to have moved to private communities such as Discord, Slack, and similar groups, perhaps in part because of NDAs.
Wonderful work by Mr. XKCD (Randall Munroe).
This was published in 2011 when there was "some" misinformation in the U.S. press about the Fukushima nuclear accident.
Based on this chart some proposed to use "bananas" as unit of radition (equivalent to 0.1 uSv).
So (from this chart) one flight from New York to LA exposes you to 400 bananas worth of radiation.
Right.... but it is also an industry that provides an insane amount of (often well paying) jobs to a large amount of people to do "make work", admin tasks.
Reliable details are hard to come by, but some estimations are that more people in the industry are doing admin tasks than instead of providing care, admin tasks that will be reduced drastically once the industry is streamlined.
Once we get affordable care there will be less people who can... afford.
Reproductions are still produced, see the wikipedia page.
That sounds really cool, can you expand a bit on the workflow you used: what format were the 360 pictures in and how did you convert that into data that this Python library uses ?
It appears to me that this is the same pattern you often see when junior employees are given one or more resources intended to help them succeed. Despite having access to those resources, there is frequently no shortage of complaints about how incompetent people are, that they "should know" esoteric home-built sowtware patterns or business knowledge without being told or that they failed to perform a task in the one specific way that someone considers the "correct" approach.
Let my karma burn for saying this:
Maybe it is time to let this go man. These comments are really the new incarnation of "grammar policing". (1)
They don't add anything of value, did the author use an LLM to fix his prose but no useless slop was added in the process: who cares ? Is the article useless slop: fine, downvote it to oblivion.
(1) For those not old enough to remember that wonderful practice please use your nearest LLM to find out or, you know, visit a library and do your own research.
I think the point was that Python, as a language and ecosystem, has experienced a number of breaking changes over the years. In practice, that means code written only a few years ago may no longer run without specific versions of Python and a collection of dependencies, many of which have since been replaced by newer, incompatible implementations.
What I appreciate about the traditional shell languages is their remarkable stability. Shell scripts written in 2000, or even earlier, are often still able to run today with little or no modification. By contrast, Python applications frequently require recreating a historical runtime environment, including older language versions and dependencies, many of which have accumulated significant security vulnerabilities over time.
Interestingly, apart from the various shell languages, Perl is probably one of the strongest alternatives in this regard. The Perl community has placed a high value on backward compatibility, allowing older code to continue functioning while the language itself remains actively maintained and up to date.
So, yeah, this is wonderful since the ARM architecture (Acorn Risc Machine) is arguably derived from the 6502 by Sophie Wilkins and Steve Furber at Acorn Computers.
I concur with that number for Chrome, then
70 Hz with Firefox
62 Hz with Safari
One day i hope to build something like this.
I am not a hardware guy but very intrigued by the basics of computing and interested enough to throw some, but not a lot, of hours at building something like this from a kit I can order in one part.
So far though, all projects I have seen are fairly expensive (Ben Eater’s excellent kits) or unobtainable as they were one-off projects by someone four years ago or (again in this case) using components from suppliers that.. stopped supplying.
Interesting that WSJ forgot to tell this part of the story:
June 2023 "Galyn Susman, the Pixar producer who saved Toy Story 2, and Lightyear director Angus MacLane were among the 75 employees laid off by Pixar in late May, reports Reuters."
Very nice.
I checked and, yes, my favorite is on there:
“The Santa Rosa Air Center was used to film Bruce Willis' 'Die Hard 2' in 1990
according to an article in the July 22 [2009] issue of the San Jose Mercury News.
The airport was used to depict [Washington] Dulles [International Airport] in the movie"
Isn't that how it is supposed to work ? Stroke of genius (over and over again) to get something working given constraints of the day followed by hundreds of engineers who will improve on the foundations, basically like Wozniak ?
No vacuum tube questions.
Fantastic deep dive as always, thanks for doing such stellar work!
On that note, any chance we might get a teardown/history of Cray architectures in the future? Specifically the Cray-1 and 2?
To throw a more serious challenge your way: How about a write-up on the original Frank Rosenblatt Perceptron? I know finding an original Mark-1 part would be close to impossible but it blows my mind that they were successfully doing real-time visual classification in 1957 with an electro-mechanical machine (potentiometers and motors) using a 20x20 "video" feed with some learning algorithm that was not based on backprop.
Posted by
andrehacker on Thursday June 04, 2026 @07:42PM
from the self-post dept.
Most of us were amused when DALL-E and its peers went mainstream, and we were quick to point out the obvious flaws.Then ChatGPT hit the scene and again, many of us dismissed it as a parlor trick that would never amount to much.Using LLMs for coding initially was a only small step up from basic code completion, and a welcome farewell to Stack Overflow.I am curious: what was the specific moment...
Oh, and (more often) they move pieces out of the way before the real move. First time you see that it looks like an illegal move but it’s all good because it gets moved back :)
One of the tricks I observed is that they move pieces half-way a square.
Ah—my favorite is in there:
https://tluif.home.xs4all.nl/chescom/EngExcPhanF.html
It’s a “robotic” board that moves the pieces by itself.
You can sometimes find “untested” (i.e., broken) ones on eBay for a reasonable price, and if you’re lucky they’re an easy fix. Mine was stuck because the lock slider had wedged something and the repair took all of 10 minutes.
Very clean engineering: a few screws gets you in, there’s a remarkably small PCB, few wires and mechanical pieces: the main mechanism consists of two orthogonally mounted sliders with a stepper motor and belt each.
I don’t even play chess, but it’s amazing to watch it play both sides.
They also use a clever algorithm to route pieces around other piece since (obviously) the pieces can’t jump over other pieces given that they are moved by a magnet under the board.
Am I the only one that misread the title and expected to see something about the reclusive Bellard ?
Word is that NetApp and Juniper are using FreeBSD.
What these have in common is that they rely heavily on FreeBSD's I/O performannce and capabilities which is said to be head and shoulders above Linux.
Hm, the fact that he was mentioned or referenced does not prove that his role was downplayed, a quick search of the interwebs shows:
- 2018 Oscars: Despite his massive influence on Coco, none of the filmmakers mentioned him by name in their acceptance speeches for Best Animated Feature.
- Film Premieres: Lasseter did not attend the 2018 premiere of Incredibles 2, a film he was heavily involved in, further signaling his detachment from official company events.
After the MeToo allegations, his contributions have been removed—or at least significantly downplayed—in Disney and Pixar’s accounts of Pixar’s origins.