As the "evidence" piles up, in further mathematics, physics, and the interactions of the two, I still never got to the point at the core where I thought complex numbers were a certain fundamental concept, or just a convenient tool for expressing and calculating a variety of things. It's more than just a coincidence, for sure, but the philosophical part of my mind is not at ease with it.

I doubt anyone could make a reply to this comment that would make me feel any better about it. Indeed, I believe real numbers to be completely natural, but far greater mathematicians than I found them objectionable only a hundred years ago, and demonstrated that mathematics is rich and nuanced even when you assume that they don't exist in the form we think of them today.

To a reasonable degree, yes, I can. I am also probably an outlier, and the product of various careers, with a small dose of autism sprinkled in. My first career was as a Submarine Nuclear Electronics Technician / Reactor Operator in the U.S. Navy. As part of that training curriculum, I was taught electronics theory, troubleshooting, and repair, which begins with "these are electrons" and ends with "you can now troubleshoot a VMEbus [0] Motorola 68000-based system down to the component level." I also later went back to teach at that school, and rewrote the 68000 training curriculum to use the Intel 386 (progress, eh?).

Additionally, all submariners are required to undergo an oral board before being qualified, and analogous questions like that are extremely common, e.g. "I am a drop of seawater. How do I turn the light on in your rack?" To answer that question, you end up drawing (from memory) an enormous amount of systems and connecting them together, replete with the correct valve numbers and electrical buses, as well as explaining how all of them work, and going down various rabbit holes as the board members see fit, like the throttling characteristics of a gate valve (sub-optimal). If it's written down somewhere, or can be derived, it's fair game. And like TFA's discussion about Brendan Gregg's practice of finding someone's knowledge limit, the board members will not stop until they find something you don't know - at which point you are required to find it out, and get back to them.

When I got into tech, I applied this same mindset. If I don't know something, I find out. I read docs, I read man pages, I test assumptions, I tinker, I experiment. This has served me well over the years, with seemingly random knowledge surfacing during an incident, or when troubleshooting. I usually don't remember all of it, but I remember enough to find the source docs again and refresh my memory.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus

Specification: each cipher from 0 to 9 is using n+1 stroke, using only horizontal, vertical or left-bottom to right-top orientations. They also have distinctive traits that let them be identified even with only the very top or very bottom part. So 0 looks like / for example.

I also went above base 10 and made enough glyph to cover a sexagesimal base. The constraints on the drawing are then looser, so to go up to 20 we had a single "\". Incidentally and funnily enough that makes the 10th glyph look like a X. Then to get up to 40 glyphs, we simply square the 20 previous ones. And the plan to reach the 60 glyphs is to have a circled variation.

I’m not versed in the art of font crafting, but I would love to find someone to work in common on that one.

Here is a draft with the first steps for those interested:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alternative_cipher_n...

Balatro is a roguelike survival game where you need to multiply "chips" and "mult" together to meet a requirement each round. You get three chances to draft enough resources to survive. I designed my own slide rule to help with the mental multiplication - most of the fun of the game comes from the mechanics being slightly obscured from the player.

Since I designed this slide rule myself, I was able to make a couple unconventional design choices that fit my needs. For instance, mine has three octaves so it can represent numbers within the ones, thousands, or millions' range, for example; no need to track arbitrary powers of ten. Since it's a rotary rule, it wraps around. Eg. 353×24 shows on the device as 8.47, so you can think of it as 8.47 thousand, for example.

Holding a physical object in my hands while playing helps more than I thought it would. Should I take a card that increases chips by 600 or increases mult by 1.3×? Do I need to take a card to clear the blind in the short term, or do I have enough resources to draft a slower card that will scale better over time? Even just looking at how densely packed the marks are on the "Chips" side vs the "Mult" side of the device gives a visceral physical sense of what my build needs to focus on.

Pictures and .STL: https://www.printables.com/model/1026662-jimbos-rotary-slide...

Github repository: https://github.com/gcr/balatro-slide-rule

The actual plotting code used Marimo notebooks, which host a python in your browser via WASM. Take a look here: https://marimo.app/l/4i15d7

I entered it in Printables’ educational tools competition but the other entries were cooler. Maybe HN might like it. :-)

I'm speaking from the perspective of US coins because that's what I specialize in but this generally applies to coins all over the world as well:

Prior to (and including) 1964, US 10c, 25c, 50c, (and when they were made, $1) coins were made of 90% silver. We made A LOT of these, so in terms of outright rarity, most are not rare. Today they're referred to as "junk silver" because in terms of collectibility, they're junk, but the 90% silver content means there's some inherent precious metal value (as of this moment on Jan 30, 2026, they have ~approximately~ 60x their face value in silver content, eg $6, $15, $30, and $60 in silver respectively.)

So that's their basal value that fluctuates with the silver market. But the next layer is actual rarity / collectibility -- if a given coin is desirable enough that it surpasses its metal content, you get a different set of values.

Now to your actual question: Do they get smelted/melted down? The answer is...sometimes. They trade somewhat like financial instruments, based on the assumption that you could melt them down (and there's a cost to doing so), so that's how people value the various silver coins. In reality, there's usually enough demand from people who want to hold physical silver in various forms that they don't actually need to be melted down.

There's obviously a lot more to it, but that's the 5c version ;)

To my astonishment, it turns out Don doesn't have a Wikipedia page (though the rocker bogie suspension does).

Robots are great at the bulk movement required for sticking sheet metal into huge stamps as well as repeatably welding the output of these stamps together. Early paint stages happens by dipping this whole chassis and later obviously benefits highly from environmental control (paint section is usually certain staff only to enter.)

But with this big painted chassis you still need to mount the engine/transmission, the brake and suspension assembly needs installing, lots of connectors need plugging in for ABS- and supporting all the connectors that will need plugging in is a lot of cabling that needs routing around this chassis. These tasks are very difficult for robots to do, so they tend to be people with mechanical assists, e.g. special hoisting system that takes the weight of engine/trans while the operators (usually two on a stage like this, this all happens on a rolling assembly line) drag it into place, and do the bolting.

Trim line is also huge, insert all these floppy roof liners, install the squishy plastic dashboard, the seats, carpets, door plastic trim, plug in all your speakers and infotainment stuff, again the output of the automated stages is literally the shell of a car, and robots are extremely bad at doing precise clipping together of soft touch plastics or connection of tiny cables. Windshield install happens here too, again these things are mechanically assisted for worker ergonomics but far from automated.

Each of these subassemblies also can be very complex and require lots of manual work too but that usually happens at OEM factories not at the assembly factory. Automation in these staffed areas mostly is the AGVs which follow lines on the floor to automatically deliver kanban boxes which are QR tagged (the origin of the QR code, fun fact) to ensure JIT delivery of the parts needed for each pitch.

It is far from lights out even in the most modern assembly plant and I think it will be a long time until that is true. The amount of poka-yoking that goes into things like connector design so there is an audible "click" when something is properly inserted for example- making a robot able to perform that task at anywhere near the quality of even a young child will take vast amounts of advancement in artificial intelligence and sensing. These are not particularly skilled jobs but the robotics skill required is an order of magnitude more than we can accomplish with today's technology.

(TIS-B is a system that broadcasts ADS-B-like signals for aircraft that are being tracked by radar but either don't have ADS-B Out or otherwise might not be picked up by other aircraft with ADS-B In, e.g. maybe they're at a low altitude.)

There have been a couple other incidents with the TIS-B system. E.g. this apparent test near Dallas in 2022 that generated dozens of false targets in an interesting pattern: https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1481712428932997122 There was a similar incident around LAX several months later.

David Sarnoff and RCA was an entirely different matter, of course…

The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs. Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.

Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.

When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.

You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.

So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.

They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.

It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.

Now I build all sorts of apps for my farm and organizations I volunteer for. I can pound out an app for tracking sample locations for our forage associations soil sample truck, another for moisture monitoring, a fleet task/calendar/maintenance app in hours and iterate on them when I think of features.

And git was brand new when I left the industry, so I only started using it recently to any extent, and holy hell, is it ever awesome!

I'm finally able to build all the ideas I come up with when I'm sitting in a tractor and the GPS is steering.

Seriously exciting. I have a hard time getting enough sleep because I hammer away on new ideas I can't tear myself away from.

Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds.

She usually sleeps at the bottom of her cage, beneath a towel I put down for her. It's already unusual for parrots! But tonight she has made quite a nest with her towel: It's folded in half like usual, but she has nuzzled her way between the fold, so she has the towel underneath and on top of her. It's super cute.

I'm treating her with delicacy but she is determined to be a wild child of a bird. She's still flying around during the day and moving around plenty. I don't think I would be so confident if I had an egg like that inside me.

She has a stone perch that she likes to nibble on when she's working on an egg. I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)

So that's my night. Sitting outside of the metaphorical delivery ward with a metaphorical cigar, making sure she lays this egg that isn't even fertile to begin with! Birds :)

The flourinert tank has a ball valve, like a toilet cistern. we hung a plastic lobster in ours, because we called the cray "Yabbie" (Queensland freshwater crayfish)

That re-generator, the circuit breakers are .. touchy. the installation engineer nearly wet his trousers flipping on, the spark-bang was immense. Brown trouser moment.

The front end access was Unisys X11 Unix terminals. They were built like a brick shithouse (to use the australianism) but were a nice machine. I did the acceptance testing, it included running up X11 and compiling and running the largest Conways game of life design I could find on the net. Seemed to run well.

We got the machine as a tax-offset for a large Boeing purchase by Australian defence. End of life, one of the operators got the love-seat and turned it into a wardrobe in his bedroom.

Another, more boring cray got installed at department of primary industries (Qld government) to do crops and weather modelling. The post cray-1 stuff was .. more ordinary. Circular compute unit was a moment in time.

(I think I've posted most of this to HN before)

The UX group would present work to Steve J. every Thursday and Steve quickly passed judgement often harshly and without a lot of feedback, leading to even longer meetings afterward to try and determine course corrections. Steve J. and Bas were on the same wavelength and a lot of what Bas would show had been worked on directly with Steve before hand. Other things would be presented for the first time, and Steve could be pretty harsh. Don, Greg, Scott, Kevin would push back and get abused, but they took the abuse and could make in-roads.

Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don't you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn't push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.

I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen's ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple. This is fine I guess. Many people are just fine going with the flow and not rocking the boat. It may be even easier when you have Apple-level comp and benefits.

My opinon; unless Stephen gets a very strong push from other forces, I don't see that he has the will or fortitude to make the changes that he himself has approved in one way or another. Who will push him? Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller? The perceived mess of Tahoe happened on the watch of all of these Apple leaders.

Raffy, the UPS delivery guy I see maybe five times a year? He's doing well, finally feeling things slowing down some after the holidays. His fiancé will finish her graduate degree this spring, then they're going to decide if they want to stay here or move back to the state where they were born. They like it here, but think job opportunities will be better back home.

I'm sure many here are familiar with "This is Water," the commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace. Many often cite his line, "Everybody worships," his observation that we all hold aspects of life in reverence, whether religious things or otherwise. It's a valid, pithy point, but I always thought the key part to his speech comes later and has been widely overlooked:

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

He delivered that speech in 2005. Before the modern smartphone. All those people I mentioned earlier were strangers. That's no longer the case because all of us chose to interrupt what we were doing and open up a little to someone unfamiliar. It's a choice. Or, as Bob Dylan once sang,

Freedom, just around the corner from you

But with truth so far off, what good will it do

It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was coming up.

At the time, there was a team working on an experimental web app hosting platform code named Prometheus -- it was later released as App Engine. Using an early, internal build I put together a web site where people could submit "facts" about Jeff Dean, rate each other's facts on a five-star scale, and see the top-rated facts. Everything was anonymous. I had a few coworkers who are funnier than me populate some initial facts.

I found a few bugs in Prometheus in the process, which the team rapidly fixed to meet my "launch date" of April 1st. :)

On the day, which I think was a Sunday, early in the morning, I sent an email to the company-wide "misc" mailing list (or maybe it was eng-misc?) from a fake email address (a google group alias with private membership), and got the mailing list moderator to approve it.

It only took Jeff an hour or two to hack his way through the back-end servers (using various internal-facing status pages, Borg logs, etc.) to figure out my identity.

But everyone enjoyed it!

My only regret is that I targeted the site specifically at Jeff and not Sanjay Ghemawat. Back then, Jeff & Sanjay did everything together, and were responsible for inventing a huge number of core technologies at Google (I have no idea to what extent they still work together today). The site was a joke, but I think it had the side effect of elevating Jeff above Sanjay, which is not what I intended. Really the only reason I targeted Jeff is because he's a bit easier to make fun of personality-wise, and because "Jeff Dean Facts" sort of rolls off the tongue easier that "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts" -- but in retrospect this feels a little racist. :(

My personal favorite joke is: Jeff Dean puts his pants on one leg at a time, but if he had more than two legs, you'd see his approach is actually O(log n).

I used to sweep them more regularly, but Firefox + Sidebery don't even break a sweat with 20K tabs, apparently, so why bother?

The only downside is that it takes about 15 seconds for the browser to launch. I restart the browser whenever Firefox or macOS is updated, so every week or two.

Perhaps it was the way it was written; I couldn’t believe intrigue and passion of computing could be weaved together like this. But there it was.

I did make it home eventually. Fortunately the first 2000km lift back from western Australia to the eastern states with a crystal meth addict on the run from the police didn’t end violently. A few weeks back in Sydney with family some Linux nerds found me working as a receptionist answering phones and scanning paper records in at a failing medical practice. They got me doing desktop Windows and Linux server support. I’m an official software engineer now. I guess I should print this article out to show to my kids!

https://2design.org/

AS prepending is a relatively common method of traffic engineering to reduce traffic from a peer/provider. Looking at CANTV's (AS8048) announcements from outside that period shows they do this a lot.

Since this was detected as a BGP route leak, it looks like CANTV (AS8048) propagated routes from Telecom Italia Sparkle (AS6762) to GlobeNet Cabos Sumarinos Columbia (AS52320). This could have simply been a misconfiguration.

Nothing nefarious immediately jumps out to me here. I don't see any obvious attempts to hijack routes to Dayco Telecom (AS21980), which was the actual destination. The prepending would have made traffic less likely to transit over CANTV assuming there was any other route available.

The prepending done by CANTV does make it slightly easier to hijack traffic destined to it (though not really to Dayco), but that just appears to be something they just normally do.

This could be CANTV trying to force some users of GlobeNet to transit over them to Dayco I suppose, but leaving the prepending in would be an odd way of going about it. I suppose if you absolutely knew you were the shortest path length, there's no reason to remove the prepending, but a misconfiguration is usually the cause of these things.

This was a 5 year play by my dad. Shout out.

Sometimes the inventors are so far ahead of their time that the materials science first has to catch up (in some cases only a few millenia) before they can realize their devices. Effectively it is then the first person after whoever did the materials science part to create the device that gets to claim the invention.

So we get Sikorski, and not Da Vinci.

We get Arthur C. Clarke who claims the 'communications satellite' even though the moon was there all along and the Sputnik was the first working very crude device (it was one way only, it said 'you lost the space race' in a single bit of message).

We get Newcomen, Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (I had to look that up, I can never remember the man's full name), and Hero of Alexandria competing for the steam engine title, with all of them holding some part of the credit.

Pointing at an inventor is hard, and 'who built the first working device' is one way of doing this but it assumes a singular effort whereas most things are team efforts and misses the bit that the idea itself can be an instrumental step in getting your 'true' inventor to make their claim, standing on the shoulders of the giants before them. In isolation, we all probably would invent the hammer in our lifetimes, if that.

I watched it in the browser network panel and saw it fetch:

  https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/static-shards/shard_1636.sqlite.gz
  https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/static-shards/shard_1635.sqlite.gz
  https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/static-shards/shard_1634.sqlite.gz

It's reminiscent of that brilliant SQLite.js VFS trick from a few years ago: https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs - only that one used HTTP range headers, this one uses sharded files instead.

The interactive SQL query interface at https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/?view=query asks you to select which shards to run the query against, there are 1636 total.

We expected this to hurt performance, but we were unable to measure any impact in practice.

Everyone still working in memory-unsafe languages should really just do this IMO. It would have mitigated this Mongo bug.