drfuchs

10 ms·

61.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Way back in 1956, Librascope's LGP-30 had an "R" instruction ("store Return address") that stored (already-incremented)PC+1 into the address portion of the instruction at the destination, which was by convention an
62.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Warning! Not Dr. Smith (of Lost In Space).
63.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Lots and lots of wire, yes, with each one cut to a specific length so that all of each gate's input signals arrive at the same time. That's why the backplane looks like a mess of wires hanging down due to seemingly being way too
64.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Is your last name Magliozzi? The Car Guys were always talking about Tom’s (Ray’s?) ‘62 Dodge Dart that just wouldn’t die.
65.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Disagree. Folks in the 60’s thru 80’s expected global nuclear annihilation with some probability.
66.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Credit where credit is due: Pascal had “with” back in the 1970’s.
67.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Switch to a Princess phone and you’ll be amazed.
68.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Well, the discontinued Chevy Volt is just that: 50ish miles on electrons from the plug-in battery; only then a few hundred on a tank of gas via the ICE. So, no range anxiety, and you can likely commute on battery alone. Can’t imagine why
69.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Yes, elementary topology clearly shows that sewing machines don’t exist in three dimensions.
70.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Thanks. For those wondering how someone may have missed this: Evidently I had not in fact accidentally done a "hide", so nothing was in my hidden list, and thus my profile page cleverly didn't have a "hidden" link a
71.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Very cool, thanks. How does one become aware of this class of magic? It seems completely undiscoverable, not being in the FAQ, nor in the present "List of Hacker News's undocumented features..."
72.
by drfuchs 3y ago
I accidentally hit “hide” on an item I want to see. Where’s the documentation on how to unhide?
73.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Initially because teletypes only had uppercase, and those were the only tty devices available. And then when early CRT terminals became available, RAM was expensive, and you could save a whole chip by not storing one more bit per screen ch
74.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Well, there was a carrot that was lost in space half a century ago... https://lostinspace.fandom.com/wiki/The_Great_Vegetable_Rebe...
75.
by drfuchs 3y ago
What’s old is new again: IBM 360 architecture also only used 24 bits for addresses back in the 1960s, so you could stuff data in the upper byte of pointers. Eventually, programs had to declare themselves to be in “Extended Mode” if they wan
76.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Sheeple! The Death Star is flat!
77.
by drfuchs 3y ago
The Back Bay section of Boston begs to differ. Even with alleyways between the streets, still no trash cans, just plastic bags (that get chewed through pretty much uniformly).
78.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Great. Now how do I call this API from WASM without any intervening JavaScript?
79.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Not quite good enough! You have to make it clear that the host will always "open another door" no matter what, and that the contestant knows that fact. Otherwise, the contestant might reasonably think that he might only be off
80.
by drfuchs 3y ago
It's not going to work well when both the day of the week and the date change while you're having lunch.
81.
by drfuchs 3y ago
The amazing thing was that they actually diagnosed mechanical failures over the phone . And in later years, they'd call back some earlier callers to ask whether they had been right or wrong, and they actually had a pretty good track r
82.
by drfuchs 3y ago
The original invention of PoW, as well as the idea of using it for email, was years earlier; see Naor and Dwork's "Pricing via Processing, Or, Combatting Junk Mail" in CRYPTO'92.
83.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Indeed. Who'd have thought I was being too subtle?
84.
by drfuchs 3y ago
In the 70’s, the AI folks were at the D. C. Power building (the benefactor’s name!) up in the hills behind campus (pass 280 on Page Mill, turn right on Arastradero; but don’t expect to see it: it was torn down some time ago, as being too de
85.
by drfuchs 3y ago
I wonder where at Stanford this was worked on? Certainly not the Computer Science Department (source: me).
86.
by drfuchs 3y ago
No, OP paid for a fraction of the ink they received. If you don’t finish paying for your house or car, you don’t get to keep them. HP is simply not asking for OP to return the fraction of the ink he’s deciding not to buy, presumably becau
87.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Dr. McCoy’s medical instruments on Star Trek TOS include artsy salt shakers. This sort of thing is very common. https://www.cbr.com/tv-legends-revealed-were-mccoys-star-tre...
88.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Modula-2 compilers were slow to appear on many important architectures, and again there were various divergent dialects, and the whole shebang seemed to get semi-abandoned when Wirth et. al. shifted yet again to Oberon; lather, rinse, repea
89.
by drfuchs 3y ago
Standard Pascal did not store string length and had no notion of variable-length strings. This was such an egregious design failure that various dialects came up with non-standard, non-portable, compiler-specific work-arounds. In the 1980&
90.
by drfuchs 3y ago
My “is now” indeed means “was, but no longer is.” So, no SNAFU; it’s OK.

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