zackmorris

9 ms·

31.
by zackmorris 4mo ago
I wish we had a license like "this project merely extends the project it's based on to add features and fix bugs". So that we could justify immediately switching to the fork that solves our immediate problem. When OSS first g
32.
by zackmorris 4mo ago
Thanks, that means a lot. I cringe after posting this stuff, caught somewhere between ego and soul. But I agree with you that having a written record of our experience is important. And I realized after sleeping on it that it's not goo
33.
by zackmorris 4mo ago
Revisionist history will tell it differently, but I remember that from the mid 1990s until about 2000 when the economy was booming yet prices weren't rising, Greenspan publicly indicated that he wasn't sure exactly why that was. O
34.
by zackmorris 4mo ago
Export controls and banning foreign nationals sound like cover stories for favoritism towards OpenAI and Grok. We can't determine anything without evidence, but it will be interesting to see what deals come out of this. I used Fable fo
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by zackmorris 4mo ago
I started with System 3 on a Mac Plus with floppy disks back in the late 1980s, and ported original C code from around System 7 all the way through modern versions of macOS X. Apple has a long track record of deprecating basically everythin
36.
by zackmorris 4mo ago
I want to do an engine swap in my 1980s Toyota pickup (like on Back to the Future) from a 100 hp 22r to a 150-250 hp fuel injected inline 4 or turbodiesel to raise the thermodynamic efficiency from 20-25% to ~40% to nearly double fuel econo
37.
by zackmorris 4mo ago
Ya I forgot to mention that the reason I chose microplastics and PFAS is that those are relatively new compared to when Gen X was growing up in the 70s and 80s. We had BPAs and leaded gasoline etc, but those effects were well-understood and
38.
by zackmorris 4mo ago
Sorry, false memory - I remembered the full story in all of its gory details after sleeping on it. We did use magenta and colors near it for reserved pixels that would never be seen onscreen, but in our case it was for color animation. The
39.
by zackmorris 4mo ago
We randomly chose magenta as our transparent pixel for shareware games too! I consider 1993 the last "good" year of the pre-internet age. The web didn't go mainstream until around 95, and 94 felt like a liminal year (dunno wh
40.
by zackmorris 4mo ago
I'm against this because hints should be a last resort in declarative programming languages like SQL. Our productivity is proportional to our ability to recruit abstractions. The more we deal with pure concepts like relational algebra
41.
by zackmorris 4mo ago
I think it's endocrine disruption from microplastics. Hormones act like relays in the body, so when one system goes, a cascade of failures often follows (the most famous being diabetes). The body goes into maladaptive modes of operatio
42.
by zackmorris 5mo ago
I live in a Right-to-Work (for less) state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law Loosely that just means that if you work somewhere with a lot of employees, you'll hear that the same job in a neighborin
43.
by zackmorris 5mo ago
That's why if trickle-down economics were real, its proponents would also support antitrust enforcement
44.
by zackmorris 5mo ago
If anyone wants breadcrumbs, I just did a deep dive and there are a couple of promising technologies that could terraform Venus on roughly a human timescale of 100 years: * Sun shade/sail near L1 tipped up to 35 degrees to remain still
45.
by zackmorris 5mo ago
Has anyone made a sandbox site running every type of container and presenting a shell where users can try to break out of any uncompromised ones remaining? It's self-evident that we should only run containers that haven't been pwn
46.
by zackmorris 5mo ago
Thanks, I couldn't find the price. I've been looking for 200+ hp engine swaps for my 100 hp, 125 lb-ft of torque lifted 1986 Toyota pickup with 31" tires (like the one on Back to the Future but 1 year newer and not extended c
47.
by zackmorris 5mo ago
Oh man. I used PostScript a ton when I worked at hp 20 years ago. It's actually a pretty great language, like lisp/scheme but I found it to be more approachable somehow. Maybe because it's postfix instead of prefix? https:&#
48.
by zackmorris 6mo ago
It's partially because the internet only grants us free storage (noun), not free compute (verb). Which is fundamental to so many XY problems, including why cloud services are so byzantine instead of just providing isolated secure shell
49.
by zackmorris 6mo ago
Friendly reminder that antitrust enforcement and deregulation are incompatible
50.
by zackmorris 6mo ago
Hacker Mews
51.
by zackmorris 6mo ago
In his 1999 book "Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization", Robert Zubrin mentioned checking the math for Bussard ramjets with Dana Andrews in their 1988 join paper "Magnetic Sails and Interstellar Travel" an
52.
by zackmorris 6mo ago
Just wanted to mention genetic algorithms (GAs), popularized by John Koza and others. The post uses a 4 instruction program as an example having about 256^4 or 4 billion combinations. Most interesting programs are 10, 100, 1000+ instruction
53.
by zackmorris 6mo ago
Andreessen's criticism of introspection, and Musk's criticism of empathy, are projections of their fear of being disconnected from spirit (primarily the notion that we're all one). Some of us eventually find ourselves in situ
54.
by zackmorris 6mo ago
Note that we had the technology to do this affordably as of about 2008, when lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries became widely available for about $10-12 each (I had to look that up). They were definitely available at low cost ($6) b
55.
by zackmorris 6mo ago
This is great! Forkrun is part of a vanishingly small number of projects written since the 1990s that get real work done as far as multicore computing goes. I'm not super-familiar with NUMA, but hopefully its concepts might be applicab
56.
by zackmorris 6mo ago
I don't know why you or your parent commenter got downvoted, but I use that as evidence that the end is very near. With the current geopolitical climate and the arrival of AI, I'm predicting a sharp economic downturn at the end of
57.
by zackmorris 6mo ago
This is great! I remember having this debate back in the late 1990s when I was in college for my electrical and computer engineering (ECE) degree. At the time as students, we didn't really know about nuances like delta cycles, so prefe
58.
by zackmorris 6mo ago
MostlyStable, are you a deregulation zealot? By extension, are you also an antitrust enforcement denier? Also by extension, do you understand the term late-stage capitalism? Because if you truly believe that regulation isn't necessary,
59.
by zackmorris 7mo ago
Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade. Also I can't paste filenames in the save file dialog in some apps. And the URL field in Safari is just weird. My computer was running so slowly that I had to m
60.
by zackmorris 7mo ago
I added a cost/performance analysis for that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509236 in case anyone's interested.

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