An acquaintance of mine is an FBI investigator and moonlights as a higher-grade Realtor.
He would use the same memory card and high end camera both during "stakeouts" for surveillance photos as well as listing photos for the homes he was selling.
One day he uploaded the entire contents of the memory card to the MLS on one of his public listings, surveillance photos and all. I'm pretty sure everything was up for a few days before being cleaned up.
It's been years but I still haven't made up my mind on whether that makes him a worse agent of law enforcement or real estate.
As a young kid right about to go to college I got to meet Ed (probably 24 years ago now). He was easy to talk to and seemed eager to share knowledge. I remember him showing me some of his work on a Mathematica workbook.
He told me a story about how the phone dial tones were designed with 2 frequencies such that a human wouldn't accidentally make those sounds while talking. But he figured out how to simultaneously hum and whistle to mimic a dial tone. The phone company guys were in disbelief but loved the MIT folks (the first phreakers) because they would keep finding vulnerabilities in the phone system. That story was fascinating to me and was my first intro to the hacker mindset.
Ed was one of those OG hackers. May he rest in peace.
As it happens, the Luke-Yoda phraseology like "Do or do not. There is no try" seems to be drawn by George Lucas from the popular late 1960s era books by Carlos Castaneda about a mentorship (~7 mil copies sold). That in turn seems to be about the apprenticeship that Castaneda had with his UCLA PhD advisor Harold Garfinkel:
I have a small bit to add to the story of Pitts in the form of an article my grandfather, an ecologist, wrote with him in the Journal of Mammalogy: Dog Locates Winter Nests of Mammals[0]. The article reads as a charming account of scientists tramping around in the woods with a dog looking for mice. When I talked to my father about this article, however, I learned that this was an attempt by my grandfather to help Pitts and keep him psychologically grounded. I guess the woods made him feel a little bit better.
So... I did my PhD in a group that did a lot of phosphorus and P4 chemistry. Even though I rarely dabbled myself, the most interesting ligands were, iirc, unoxidized phosphorus compounds. This has two oxygens still, notoriously difficult to get rid of.
My coworkers decided to take on a 'move fast and break things' mentality, and hilariously had to transport a crate full of highly dangerous P4 by car to our lab when the last European supplier closed down, as to secure the future of the research; had they crashed the car, that would have made for some interesting headlines. So, not detracting from the importance of avoiding P4; but I'm left wondering if this still needs work to really make an impact on industry and research.
I fully accept the (huge) possibility that I'm wrong though because it's been a while and this never really was my specialty.
Either way cool to see P4 chemistry on the HN front page!
I practice anesthesia. My most significant change so far has been to drastically reduce the amount of ketamine I give. It is a very interesting drug. Very stable re. cardiovascular concerns. Maintains blood pressure nicely. We use it to induce anesthesia and for pain, but others use it for depression, chronic pain, borderline personality disorder.
It's fine for pediatrics. Adults not so much. We dose ketamine quite a bit higher as an induction agent at the start of operations than what would be considered a recreational or psychotherapeutic dose/"K hole".
In opposition to kids, adult patients have frequently found themselves in a very bad place on emergence from anesthesia and in the recovery room. They sometimes endorse reliving trauma and confronting themselves in a dark region of their minds that they possibly have never known about. This is why it has promise as a therapeutic agent in psychotherapy, however it is often the case that patients are cared for by one recovery room nurse who is run off her feet/has more than one patient. I have learned that "K hole" context is everything.
Kids are just fine with ketamine. I think it's because their brains are much more plastic & the variation of experience in their waking lives is higher than adults. I think that experiencing the moods and expressiveness and novel situations as a 3 year old for a day would be an incredible hallucinogen or psychedelic.
My fathers's dear friend Stese was close with the old brewmaster at Anchor Steam. He was in his 90's at the time and one day he told Stese to start following him around the brewery and watch how he did things so he could take over for him when he was gone. Stese dutifully observed the brewmaster and took over his duties when he died. Soon there was a kid following him around taking notes on a clipboard. Fritz Maytag took over the operation, expanded it, bought a fleet of trucks and gave steam beer in SF a second life.
It's a fair claim if you make it for Wolfram Research rather than Stephen Wolfram personally (which is all he ever does).
Jupyter notebooks were inspired by Mathematica notebooks: that's widely known and has been explicitly said in blog posts and elsewhere by the creators of Jupyter. It's no secret… And as the designer and developer of Mathematica notebooks I am flattered and honored that my ideas are now so widely used, even if it is in a product other than the one I wrote myself.
Time for a trip down memory lane. There were several notebook-adjacent products around at that time (1987) but none of them implemented notebooks as we know them today.
At the time I was using Xcode, which had a terminal-like interface that was a plain text document in which you could put all the shell commands you needed to build your app. This could include calls to the compiler, linker, or just any generic shell commands. To evaluate a given command (which could be one or more lines long) you had to manually select the exact range of text you wanted to run, which was kind of irritating. Any output would be placed directly below the input line. Because the document was pure plain text, it had no way of knowing what was input and what was output, or distinguish new output from old. So all the outputs accumulated, and you had to manually select and delete them periodically. It was an improvement over a glass teletype terminal interface, but I thought I could do better for Mathematica (code name Omega at the time).
The solution I came up with was to create a text document that was annotated with “zones” delimited by vertical bars along the right side of the screen (where cell brackets are now). Initially I used different black and white texture patterns on 4 or 5 pixel wide vertical bars. One texture for input and another texture for output.
This immediately gave two huge advantages: first, you didn’t have to manually select the range of a multi-line input. Just putting the cursor anywhere within an input zone and evaluating would evaluate the whole input. Second, because the system was keeping track of what was output, old output could be deleted automatically and replaced with new output.
Initially I called these things zones, but Steve Jobs suggested I use large close-square-bracket symbols instead of patterned bars, and think of them more like cells in a spreadsheet than like zones in a text document. Once you have brackets instead of bars, it’s immediately obvious that you could have larger brackets that encompass two or more cells. So I created cell groups, initially just to group input/output pairs, but of course it’s not a big leap to also have sections and subsections, then different cell types, styles, graphics cells, etc.
These key defining features of notebooks did not exist in any other system at the time, and to the best of my knowledge were not independently developed by other people. All the current notebook systems that share these broad features, definitely including Jupyter notebooks, derive from the original Mathematica notebooks I developed in 1987-8. (There are other styles of user interface, including some used by Maple and Matlab around the same time, that are called notebooks, but they did not share the key features I’ve described. They were and are fine products that I’m sure have both advantages and disadvantages compared to our Notebooks, but unlike our Notebooks, they are not the precursors of Jupyter.)
So can Stephen Wolfram personally claim to have invented notebooks? No, and he doesn’t: he claims that Wolfram Research did, which is true, since I was one of the co-founders of that company, and I invented that form of notebook.
On a personal note, this is also part of why I exist at all.
My father came from England very young, worked his way through agriculture jobs in California, and somehow found himself with a job offer at the u of u as an electron microscopist. Met my mom there. Details are fuzzy and not retrievable from the dead. For some reason this job required him early access to the „internet“ in the 80s.
In 1994, we were, as I was told at the time, one of the first families to “have internet” in Utah. We had a dial up connection that lasted 15 minutes before needing to reconnect. As anyone my age remembers, that was about as long as it took to load one webpage with one image.
It was a massive influence on me and my neighborhood friends in countless ways and I’m eternally grateful for what came of it.
The duo in 1969 developed the line-drawing system displays LDS-1 and LDS-2, the first graphics devices with a processing unit. They then built the E&S Picture System—the next generation of LDS displays.
I'm working with my limited and stereotyped knowledge of Utah, but is "line-drawing system" a easter egg reference to latter day saints?
I was one of the members who reviewed expertly what has been done both in sorting and hashing. Overall it's more about assembly, finding missed compiler optimizations and balancing between correctness and distribution (in hashing in particular).
It was not revolutionary in a sense it hasn't found completely new approaches but converged to something incomprehensible for humans but relatively good for performance which proves the point that optimal programs are very inhuman.
Note that for instructions in sorting, removing them does not always lead to better performance, for example, instructions can run in parallel and the effect can be less profound. Benchmarks can lie and compiler could do something differently when recompiling the sort3 function which was changed.
For hashing it was even funnier, very small strings up to 64 bit already used 3 instructions like add some constant -> multiply 64x64 -> xor upper/lower. For bigger ones the question becomes more complicated, that's why 9-16 was a better spot and it simplified from 2 multiplications to just one and a rotation. Distribution on real workloads was good, it almost passed smhasher and we decided it was good enough to try out in prod. We did not rollback as you can see from abseil :)
But even given all that, it was fascinating to watch how this system was searching and was able to find particular programs can be further simplified. Kudos to everyone involved, it's a great incremental change that can bring more results in the future.
This is the most obvious practical application of my PhD topic. A Bose Einstein Condensate is an extremely sensitive detector of gravity- a nuclear submarine could use it to make an ultra-accurate map of the world based on variations in the gravitational constant g. This would remove one of the primary reasons subs need to surface , in order to GPS lock.
It’s a naval chart that would not require surfacing.
A French postdoc in my lab swore this was the moneymaker for our entire subfield, and it seems he was on to something …
The satire in the title is reminiscent of how Firebase was born.
We were previously working on a chat system called Envolve (https://www.envolve.com), that was 'Facebook Chat for any website'. A game that was using us for in-game chat created channels, used display: none on them, and passed game state through the chat.
We scratched our head, asked them why, and learned they wanted to focus on the frontend, not to deal with realtime message passing.
This led us to create a 'headless version' of our chat infra (re-written in Scala) that became the Firebase Realtime Database.
A fun anecdote: I taught him some machine learning for an afternoon! He used to spend a few months per year in Oxford, and he had gotten in touch with my PhD advisor to ask some ML questions, as at the time he was writing his new book about linear algebra and learning from data. My advisor couldn't make it to their meeting so he sent me at the last minute instead. So bewildered me, a PhD student, met with Gilbert Strang to explain him some basic machine learning concepts! Interestingly, whenever I'd asked if he was already familiar with some concept, he'd always say no, which I suspect was a strategy to hear it explained in new words.
Anyway, Gil is a very polite and kind person, his encounter will stay a great memory.
So funny story, for a while I worked on a 'reverse' exploit. Which is to say morphing the response from ssh to the client with large malformed packets. The idea was to crash the client making the request. In my case I found these attacks would have like 6 to 10 attempts from the same source address. By time stamping the requests, I could evaluate if the next attack from the same address came more quickly or more slowly. I then had my server "morph" the return payload somewhat randomly and keep the three responses that caused the most slowdown. When I got to 100 variants that had "won" this selection criteria I took the three best and started over from there. After a couple of months of this I finally got a response where after one request I would not get a second.
I felt extremely pleased with myself for about another month, and then my server address got hit with a massive DDOS attack (for me anyway) over my 6MBPS DSL line. So clearly I had hit a nerve somewhere :-). Anyway, I moved my server to a different address and used fail2ban to just note source IPs and put them into the IP tables as banned addresses. That works great and hasn't resulted in the same sort of drama as last time.
I got hired to be an analyst for a MLB baseball team off of a HN post like 7 years ago. Because of HN I have 2 world series rings! Life is very strange but I'll forever be grateful for that Who's Hiring post.
For people who haven't heard Coltrane, I would highly recommend "Ballads" and "John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman" as a very very lovely and gentle intro. I have successfully got people who don't even like jazz into Coltrane with those. "Ballads" was done sort of as a riposte to critics who said that he was basically a stunt sax player who could only play fast and crazy and it comprises some of the most beautiful playing of ballads from the standard repertoire you'll ever hear. And the album with Johnny Hartman shows how to play with a singer. The versions of "My One and Only Love" and "Lush Life" on that recording will always be definitive but it's all fantastic. You could also add "Duke Ellington and John Coltrane" to the same category. It's amazing to hear them together but it's more of a thing for people who already like jazz. The version of "In a sentimental mood" from that recording is an all-time great.
Then for the golden period obviously "A Love Supreme" is the one everyone talks about and rightly so because it is a masterpiece, but I would recommend "Crescent". Just an incredible recording which has everything. When I got it I was a student and people in my place of residence thought I had lost my marbles because I literally played the entire recording from start to finish 8 times in a row. It remains my favourite album of all time.
Then I would recommend the album called "Coltrane" and "Coltrane plays the blues" both great, but honestly anything from that period is wonderful.
From there the world is your oyster - I some of the more bonkers stuff (eg the stuff with Dolphy) but if you like crazy, high energy improvisation, the one that jazzers often talk about and shake their heads with awe is "Amen" from "Sun Ship", seriously nuts.
Postscript to add: I joined a big band when their bassist was fired and had just one rehearsal before a gig at a festival. All the music was really difficult and I was sightreading. Our slot was late so I went to the main gig which was an absolutely mindblowing solo piano gig by McCoy Tyner (Famous for being the pianist on most of the recordings I mentioned above with Coltrane). I figured noone would be at our gig after McCoy but not only was the entire place completely packed out but McCoy was sitting at the very front at a table about 3 or 4 meters from me. He spoke to us in the break and was really nice and encouraging.
Story time! When I was a much more junior programmer I once received a call from a client, who asked me if I could double check the code sending the container weights from a container terminal to the ship planning system. She explained a captain of one of the ships had called the planners and remarked he was both deeper in the water and tilted quite a bit more than he anticipated.
So I do my research, and it turns out we were sending weights including the metal of the container itself from the one system, but interpreting them as net weights, so excluding container weight itself. So we were off by about 3000kg per container, which is bad enough if the container is 25000kg total, but even worse when transporting empties, where we were off by 100%.
Thank goodness it is drilled into captains that there are strict limits when it comes to stability, and I have never met a captain who will depart if they are not absolutely positive about the stability of their ship, but man I have spent a good few nights lying awake thinking about what could have happened.
I thought I was just working on some boring logistics software at the time, where the worst that could happen was losing a container for a day or so. It was a rude awakening.
I'm embarrassed to say that I actually wrote that ELIZA ... in 1973, when I was ~13! It's a very poor BASIC knockoff of JW's 1966 ELIZA/DOCTOR. Having it talk to Bernie Cosell's Lisp ELIZA, or even better, Anthony Hay's C++ ELIZA, would be a better experiment.
My dad is Professor J.J.N. Palmer, and I worked with him on the Domesday Book data used and cited in this work.
These days we are used to having all kinds of data at our fingertips, but at the time it was a lot of work to take medieval Latin and turn it into computer readable data. We had to invent our own markup language, parsers and search engines.
I'm the ex(1) troglodyte in question. I don't use custom aliases, because I have had all editing tasks hardwired into my brain for decades, ever since I dropped Teco for ed and then ex. (Ed is the standard editor, but I'm willing to trade off a little standardosity for added convenience.) If the te command had been widely available, I might have stayed with it and not used ex, but that day has passed.
I do pipe stuff through various commands more or less constantly. I most often pipeline through awk, sed, sort, uniq, cat -n, etc. I have a back-burner project to write a meta-editor that works by pipelining and maintains a whole persistent undo-redo history.
Wow, didn't expect to see @xfennec pop up on hacker news while drinking my coffee this morning! I don't know if he'll see this, to be honest didn't know he was still doing things - but this person basically got me into programming and game development-I really can't believe it.
xfennec (and some friends?) I think built a game engine called Raydium, and one of their games called Mania Drive-a Track Mania clone-got distributed with OpenSuse installation CDs back in the day. When I was just like 12 years old, my dad installed that on the family computer and it was all we had, Mania Drive was one of the coolest games on there. Me and my siblings played that for literally days and months on end, making crazy levels we couldn't beat without knowing every turn. It was a huge part of our childhood.
Their game engine was in C with PHP scripting, I remember posting some levels to their forums and asking, in retrospect super dumb, questions and they were so polite and friendly. I remember us joking at the time that the French seemed like these god-like game developers, it had such a profound impact on us, I even wrote about it last year and linked a video of Mania Drive first[0]. I went on to learn Python and then lower-level languages as a result. I'm not sure I'd be coding today without them, to be honest.
Sorry it's off-topic, just really blown away to see a username like that pop up in my feed. Really goes to show that kindness + some cool open source software can have profound effect on people.
hi, im a professional diesel engine mechanic and can easily explain what youre hearing.
Most italian/european sports cars (with the exception of Mercedes in the past 3 years because American customers) have machined their crankshafts as "flatplane" cranks. Flat-plane cranks, no matter what firing order they have, will always alternate from bank to bank. This yields optimum exhaust scavenging and thus doesn't require the more complex header primaries that have to cross over from one bank to the other. Due to their design they don't need huge counterweights, which is why they rev up so quickly. The downside is that they suffer from secondary vibrations and have lower torque.
Americans typically machine closer to if not dead-on a crossplane crank or cruciform crank. the four crank pins are positioned in two planes, offset by 90 degrees. Typically the two outer pins are perpendicular to the outer and the two end pins are in one 180-degree plane. exhaust gas scavenging isn't as efficient as with a flat-plane crank, but that sound is worth it. This design necessitates larger counterweights to achieve a proper engine balance. The result is that you don't have the secondary vibration problems associated with flat-plane cranks. But they also don't rev as fast or as high. pick crossplane when you want torque imo.
I personally understand that a euro flat-plane crank is superior in its efficiency and power for racing, but the crossplane sound just melts my cold American heart when i hear it.
Fyi, some of those photos are much later than 1981. I wrote added the Arabic/Hebrew support to the Star document editor which probably was about 1984 and showed in one of the photos. I was still in college in 1981 so that could not have been the year.
I was a teenager riding a bicycle through a neighborhood, when I came across a yard sale. Heard that someone had died. Among their things was a tape of the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack composed by Philip Glass. Bought it for a couple of bucks, and later that night was blown away by the music. I had heard nothing like it before - it made me shiver with awe and fear. It felt like the dead was reaching out through the sounds. A few years later I watched the film and had a vision of the monstrous beauty, this ancient swarming organism called humanity, of which I'm like a finger or toe, a leaf and flower. Hard to describe the influence this film has had on my view of the world, and what art can do to you - even now it gives me goose bumps remembering that aesthetic experience in my youth.
Hahaha, that was a busy weekend when this launched in like 2005-2006. I was one of the sysadmins of the website with the THEMIS images. Google promoted it directly below the search box. Which made my web servers 3 clicks away from Google’s front page. I spent the weekend cannibalizing compute nodes from one of our clusters to work as caching proxies. It all worked out pretty well.
This is a blast to see. I wrote IELM at least 25 years ago, when I was learning eLisp and was frustrated there wasn’t a REPL to help me try commands and learn it. I remember it being quite a thrill when the FSF wrote to me and asked me to assign the copyright so it could be bundled with Emacs. I’m so pleased to see it’s still in use!
I do remember I had to use an awful hack to make it work. Comint expects data from a pipe, but eLisp output is internal to Emacs. The details are hazy now, I but I think I pushed the eval result as stdin to a ‘cat’ process for Comint to ingest the output. I wonder if that ever got cleaned up…
The origin of Shenanigan as "sionnach uighm" is very questionable. Seems like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Hooligan definitely does come from Irish, from a troublesome family O'Houlihan
A few other interesting English words that come from Irish:
Galore (from Go leoir, meaning a lot), bother, a slew of, phoney, bog and bogeyman, and unsurprisingly "whiskey".
> The VP, in turn, assigned the task to Beatrice (Luoma) Ojakangas, by coincidence, the older sister of the engineer who had developed the egg roll machine for Chun King.
Beatrice is my aunt! (And the inventor of said egg roll machine, Eugene Luoma, is my uncle. He also invented the zip-it drain cleaner and all sorts of other clever things.)
Beatrice kind of hates talking about Pizza Rolls. She'd rather be known for her many cookbooks and other culinary work, not that trash. Jeno merely paid her an hourly wage to come up with different egg roll fillings and pizza was one of the ones she tried. No royalties or anything.
He would use the same memory card and high end camera both during "stakeouts" for surveillance photos as well as listing photos for the homes he was selling.
One day he uploaded the entire contents of the memory card to the MLS on one of his public listings, surveillance photos and all. I'm pretty sure everything was up for a few days before being cleaned up.
It's been years but I still haven't made up my mind on whether that makes him a worse agent of law enforcement or real estate.