jloughry

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91.
by jloughry 10y ago
Reliability and fail-safe are important considerations at sea. Glass windows still work when electrical power is lost. Warships take the concept further, placing the navigation bridge where it's most effective but having a completely r
92.
by jloughry 10y ago
Steve Wozniak's disk controller for the Apple II used the same kind of approach: a few simple chips on the disk controller card with all the timing and marshalling done by code running on the CPU. Doing it that way is practical if you
93.
by jloughry 10y ago
In telescope photos it's often caused by diffraction off the 'spider' that holds optical elements in the centre of the telescope's barrel.
94.
by jloughry 10y ago
Regarding trains, it was a safety issue. Standard Time (and time zones) were invented to keep train schedules sane. The reason is because two trains occupying the same section of track simultaneously causes loud noises and news articles a
95.
by jloughry 10y ago
Yep. Small products from Apple like chargers and cables, HP inkjet cartridges, and other things where I'd prefer to have the original product for safety or performance reasons, are impossible to buy from Amazon. Every seller insists it
96.
by jloughry 10y ago
Use makefiles and git with LaTeX. Use \input{} to structure large documents as a main file that includes smaller ones. Keep all your BibTeX citations in one large .bib file (under git) and symlink it into the current directory for every new
97.
by jloughry 10y ago
Actually there is something like that in the internationalised DNS standards (that is, internet domain names that look like .xn--xyz-abc sometimes and .日本 other times.) There's a blacklist of certain Unicode characters that are disallo
98.
by jloughry 10y ago
If anyone else is looking for this, Windows calls its version of the technology Alternate Data Stream (ADS).
99.
by jloughry 10y ago
I can't believe nobody has invoked Fred Brooks yet, so I'll do it: "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; th
100.
by jloughry 10y ago
If your grep is like mine you may need to add "-h" to the "-P" option to get the desired output.
101.
by jloughry 10y ago
Lovely! I'm going to start using this in all my Makefiles. Seriously, thanks. You solved a problem I had.
102.
by jloughry 10y ago
In the early 1990s I got a paper letter from a Nigerian scammer. It came in an airmail envelope addressed by hand—almost completely illegibly—to my work address. (Seriously impressed by the Post Office's diligence in parsing that mess
103.
by jloughry 10y ago
Found it, I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price#Scient... Price's Law generally predicts the growth of social networks, which is why it's important today, but he discovered it in the
104.
by jloughry 10y ago
This is an excellent introduction to neural networks, deep neural networks, and the recent use of GPUs to speed up training them. Good explanation of Type 1/Type 2 errors at the end, too: 'it correctly identified birds 95% of the
105.
by jloughry 10y ago
This feels like the introduction to a book. It sounds like an interesting one.
106.
by jloughry 10y ago
Well, it's distinguishable (entropy 5.026987) from a large sample of English text (entropy 4.851720), an executable (entropy 6.495817), and a string of all 1s (entropy 0.129234) by Didier Stevens' byte-stats.py [1]. [1] didierstev
107.
by jloughry 10y ago
You're right, and IIRC this symbol has been proposed before unsuccessfully. But recent events have called to attention the backstory behind Prince's symbol---how it was created for use as a tool to modify an unfair contract, and
108.
by jloughry 10y ago
Honest answer: to get to orbit, you've got to go really fast (like Mach 25) and there's a lot of air between you and outer space. Air resistance goes up as the cube of velocity, so you want to minimize frontal area. Balloons or
109.
by jloughry 10y ago
To propose this character to the UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) you'll need to include as many examples as possible showing the symbol used in running text. Physical objects and logos won't do; you need to show historical use o
110.
by jloughry 10y ago
Funny, I saw it and thought 'hey, seven bit ASCII---how appropriate'.
111.
by jloughry 10y ago
Yes. The LHC has a beam dump off to the side, tonnes of concrete and steel buried underground, specifically for the purpose of dissipating the entire beam energy if needed. It's about the same as the kinetic energy of an aircraft carri
112.
by jloughry 10y ago
The word you want in English might be 'prestidigitation'.
113.
by jloughry 10y ago
It used to work; unfortunately, Apple removed ipfw from recent versions of OS X. The new method uses dummynet and pf but isn't reliable and I've never got it to work consistently, despite trying for hours and hours. The only metho
114.
by jloughry 11y ago
Watch out for toxicity, though; ammonia refrigerant leaks have killed lots of people---bad enough that Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd together invented a new refrigeration technology that didn't rely on rotating seals that might leak.
115.
by jloughry 11y ago
In the analogtv.c source code, by Trevor Blackwell (part of XScreenSaver) is this comment [1]: A maxim of technology is that failures reveal underlying mechanism. A good way to learn how something works is to push it to fail
116.
by jloughry 11y ago
HillRat, you made my day---"ablative shielding"---thank you for that phrase.
117.
by jloughry 11y ago
It's an example of Antonin Scalia's advice to "yield indefensible terrain---ostentatiously": Rarely will all the points, both of fact and law, be in your favor. Openly acknowledge the ones that are against you.
118.
by jloughry 11y ago
Elsewhere I showed [1] that you can store that number in a 32-bit integer if you first swap the leading two digits. Don't ever do this. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11323371
119.
by jloughry 11y ago
Years ago, North American area codes always had a middle digit of 0 or 1. This led to the practice of storing a phone number efficiently in 32 bits by swapping the first and second digits. It yielded a value that would fit in a 32-bit integ
120.
by jloughry 11y ago
Location: Denver, Colorado Remote: yes Willing to relocate: will consider Technologies: Security C&A: SABI, TSABI, Common Criteria; penetration testing, UNIX hardening Résumé: https://github.com/jloughry/CV/blo

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