Well, it's complicated. As I understand, one of the polio vaccines - the oral one - has an unusual quirk. The live virus used in it can reproduce and spread in low-vaccination communities. While the vaccine version of…
Imagine a power splitter + phase shifter that produces a correct phase shift for each element in a phased array to produce a directional beam from one radio transceiver. Now this clever arrangement, instead of having…
Right! I think a lot of people, who have not done a lot of "things you can kick" engineering, have a very romantic view of it. Especially the relationship with whoever is nominally setting the goals of the project. The…
As a matter of fact, Nature does regularly publish papers about wetting properties of water. In fact, it just published one last week, from Nature Physics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03299-z Scientists…
If you can read more than one language, try reading translations into two or three different ones. It'll give you a different view of a book you enjoy: the translations will all have a different feel, in my experience.
On most modern Apple SoCs, including these two, there's an IOMMU dedicated to the USB complex (called the USB DART, perhaps DMA Address Remapping Table). However, Boot ROM on these two chips does not program it; Apple…
Sure, StarCraft is kind of a hybrid when you think about it. The guaranteed-hit model, the extremely simplified low vs high ground approach to determine if a shot is possible, etc. are pretty deterministic. But in more…
Chess presents a comparatively small and, importantly, discrete set of choices at any moment. So it feels like it's a solvable logic puzzle: like it should be possible, at any moment, to make an optimal move. You can…
He's basically repeating his mistake - underestimating the relevance of technological progress - from 28 years ago, except now it's explicitly in service of his political bias. For your information: Paul Krugman is a…
It's difficult to consider Krugman's takes seriously after his very flawed 1998 predictions. Perhaps he's uniquely poorly suited to understanding the role of technology in economic development, and is best described as…
It became obvious / accepted wisdom that a moderately successful startup exit is the only way to have a decent future as a living person. This used to be only one of many paths available to a nerd, but now: (a) academia…
Neat! What do you think about adding a "-2, -1, 0, +1, +2" agreement scale to each quote and showing the average instead of votes? I think many of those are pretty subjective, and maybe not always right for everyone or…
Once you understand how a program works, get someone else to write it for you. Then, you will quickly find out your understanding was insufficient.
I don't think I've seen anything sufficiently RAM-like. The classic sense amplifier architecture tends to make this impractical. I guess modern Flash can store a few levels but that's a far cry from actual analog…
Tubes can also just be very _clever_ in a way that transistors generally are not. For instance, counting tubes that would contain a decimal counter in a single glass bubble (that's quite a few transistors even in TTL,…
Pretty good detail in this article! But what really surprises me is how some ideas just keep coming back. When I wrote a binary translator, I ended up having to keep a translated return stack to optimize RET opcodes.…
That was a fun site to browse. I really enjoy fixing / hacking on non-disposable equipment (lab, test, optics, etc.) and there are some well-done write-ups in there.
USSR, yes. But the ISS was launching during a time when USSR no longer existed and Russia was fairly isolated. Hence, "obviously": US at that time had many close allies, but Russia had only a few, and not as…
I think it's an attempt to express that the station consists of only two segments: Russian (ROS) and US (USOS), but the US invited its allies to work together on its segment. So parts of the USOS are made in Europe,…
Good point. Or repair rows (like Virage/Synopsys STAR).
Hacker News is still skewed towards people interested in programming languages (as opposed to actually programming). Probably some sort of Y-combinator Lisp heritage. There's also a persistent minority of CS grads who…
If you don't have space for a microscope, you can also get yourself the long-range (~400mm) 2.5-3.5x magnifiers that you may have seen your dentist wear. They're easily available on Amazon, not too expensive, and…
It sort of feels like no major open source repository can be possibly left well enough alone. I remember how SourceForge went down the drain, it's a real pity to see same happen with GH. Side note: I read the URL as…
In all fairness, he gets stuck trying to do something good, which is not the standard "evil trapped by its own design" moral.
I think the issue is that while you can (and perhaps should) do at least one such thing, it's going to be a pretty lonely pursuit, unless you have a pre-existing group of people to connect over this. The Internet used…
Well, it's complicated. As I understand, one of the polio vaccines - the oral one - has an unusual quirk. The live virus used in it can reproduce and spread in low-vaccination communities. While the vaccine version of…
Imagine a power splitter + phase shifter that produces a correct phase shift for each element in a phased array to produce a directional beam from one radio transceiver. Now this clever arrangement, instead of having…
Right! I think a lot of people, who have not done a lot of "things you can kick" engineering, have a very romantic view of it. Especially the relationship with whoever is nominally setting the goals of the project. The…
As a matter of fact, Nature does regularly publish papers about wetting properties of water. In fact, it just published one last week, from Nature Physics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03299-z Scientists…
If you can read more than one language, try reading translations into two or three different ones. It'll give you a different view of a book you enjoy: the translations will all have a different feel, in my experience.
On most modern Apple SoCs, including these two, there's an IOMMU dedicated to the USB complex (called the USB DART, perhaps DMA Address Remapping Table). However, Boot ROM on these two chips does not program it; Apple…
Sure, StarCraft is kind of a hybrid when you think about it. The guaranteed-hit model, the extremely simplified low vs high ground approach to determine if a shot is possible, etc. are pretty deterministic. But in more…
Chess presents a comparatively small and, importantly, discrete set of choices at any moment. So it feels like it's a solvable logic puzzle: like it should be possible, at any moment, to make an optimal move. You can…
He's basically repeating his mistake - underestimating the relevance of technological progress - from 28 years ago, except now it's explicitly in service of his political bias. For your information: Paul Krugman is a…
It's difficult to consider Krugman's takes seriously after his very flawed 1998 predictions. Perhaps he's uniquely poorly suited to understanding the role of technology in economic development, and is best described as…
It became obvious / accepted wisdom that a moderately successful startup exit is the only way to have a decent future as a living person. This used to be only one of many paths available to a nerd, but now: (a) academia…
Neat! What do you think about adding a "-2, -1, 0, +1, +2" agreement scale to each quote and showing the average instead of votes? I think many of those are pretty subjective, and maybe not always right for everyone or…
Once you understand how a program works, get someone else to write it for you. Then, you will quickly find out your understanding was insufficient.
I don't think I've seen anything sufficiently RAM-like. The classic sense amplifier architecture tends to make this impractical. I guess modern Flash can store a few levels but that's a far cry from actual analog…
Tubes can also just be very _clever_ in a way that transistors generally are not. For instance, counting tubes that would contain a decimal counter in a single glass bubble (that's quite a few transistors even in TTL,…
Pretty good detail in this article! But what really surprises me is how some ideas just keep coming back. When I wrote a binary translator, I ended up having to keep a translated return stack to optimize RET opcodes.…
That was a fun site to browse. I really enjoy fixing / hacking on non-disposable equipment (lab, test, optics, etc.) and there are some well-done write-ups in there.
USSR, yes. But the ISS was launching during a time when USSR no longer existed and Russia was fairly isolated. Hence, "obviously": US at that time had many close allies, but Russia had only a few, and not as…
I think it's an attempt to express that the station consists of only two segments: Russian (ROS) and US (USOS), but the US invited its allies to work together on its segment. So parts of the USOS are made in Europe,…
Good point. Or repair rows (like Virage/Synopsys STAR).
Hacker News is still skewed towards people interested in programming languages (as opposed to actually programming). Probably some sort of Y-combinator Lisp heritage. There's also a persistent minority of CS grads who…
If you don't have space for a microscope, you can also get yourself the long-range (~400mm) 2.5-3.5x magnifiers that you may have seen your dentist wear. They're easily available on Amazon, not too expensive, and…
It sort of feels like no major open source repository can be possibly left well enough alone. I remember how SourceForge went down the drain, it's a real pity to see same happen with GH. Side note: I read the URL as…
In all fairness, he gets stuck trying to do something good, which is not the standard "evil trapped by its own design" moral.
I think the issue is that while you can (and perhaps should) do at least one such thing, it's going to be a pretty lonely pursuit, unless you have a pre-existing group of people to connect over this. The Internet used…