Hacker News Reader

chronomexon Waymo pulls over, calls cops on juvenile riders who had 'ghost gun"

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Is there an alternate source available?

chronomexon UWaterloo Steam Tunnels (2016)

no one i know got caught :)

chronomexon Symbian OS Kernel (2010)

another copy, in the original Mercurial, and with mediawiki dumps too: https://archive.org/details/SymbianOpenSource

chronomexon An almost perfect rsync over SSH backup script

Rsync also doesn't track hardlinks by default! I use "-avPzHAXS" for my backups.

chronomexon The slow rise of robots in the data center

The rack unit's dimensions are inherited from manual telephone switchboard jack-and-lamp panels ... and the standard rack is approximately 100 years old. https://archive.org/details/bstj2-3-112

chronomexon Super Crunch (1986)

In context, with the rest of the magazine: https://archive.org/details/MacUser8605May1986/page/n9/mode/...

chronomexon Siliconpr0n: High Resolution Chip Maps

ESD protection Zener diodes, maybe?

chronomexon Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte

If "hella" is 10^27 then clearly "hecka" would be the correct name for 10^-27.

chronomexon Visa Advertising Solutions (VAS) Opt Out

One hundred percent of the time when I've clicked that button, it says "XYZCorp is advertising to people located in the United States", even when the ad is clearly more targeted than that.

chronomexon Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)

Yeah, it's feet measured east and north of an arbitrary point southwest of everything in the state. There is an actual point inside the state used as a base but they set up a false easting and false northing by subtracting a large round number such that the origin of the coordinate system is southwest of everything in the state. A lot of things in surveying are designed such that the math is easier for people working in the field to reliably get correct.

chronomexon Show HN: Photo Realistic QR-Codes

Related work elsewhere (2012): https://research.swtch.com/qart

chronomexon On the Closing of Living Computers: Museum+Labs

Hi there! Connections Museum volunteer here. We're on good terms with our landlords (CenturyLink). While we are 100% volunteer run, we also are part of an independent non-profit, the Telecommunications History Group.

We've been keeping busy during quarantine, working on all kinds of restoration projects, and look forward to being able to give tours when that's safe again. For now you'll have to get by with our youtube channel.

And our power draw is more in the neighborhood of 200A than 1000A :) With respect to moving, the greater challenges are that everything is hard-wired together (not connectorized) and we'd need a space with 13+ foot ceilings that allows high floor loading.

chronomexon Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth

They serve everything in-house and are their own AS; this allows them to provide stronger guarantees of reader privacy than sites that use a CDN.

chronomexon 31% Can’t Pay the Rent: ‘It’s Only Going to Get Worse’

Yes, in the US rents are usually due on the first of the month and all months cost the same amount.

chronomexon I built a dumb cell phone with a rotary dial

Sidetone! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidetone

chronomexon OpenAPI 3.0.3 Specification Released

Isn't this what SOAP promised? What's different this time?

chronomexon The Horror of Microsoft Teams

ripcord is exactly that

https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

chronomexon Capehart Communications Collection – For Sale

i've visited a number of private telephone collections and Don's is absolutely massive by any standard. i can't do it justice, nor can any photo album. but he has, among other treasures, some highlights from my memory:

  - autovon equipment
  - several generations of digital switches
  - electromechanical switches too
  - loads and loads of paper documents on compact shelving
  - bell labs prototypes
  - phones that i never knew existed
  - the first switch from Sprint's long distance network

i sincerely hope that he finds homes for all his collection.

chronomexon Idleness as Flourishing

I've definitely watched birds playing.

chronomexon A brief history of the numeric keypad

One of the articles cited is available for free: <https://archive.org/details/bstj39-4-995>. I find it interesting to note that the engineers also made variable force profile pushbuttons to test different springinesses as well.

chronomexon Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid

Natgas is a turbine engine directly; coal and oil uses a boiler running a steam turbine.

chronomexon Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft reaches cosmic 'diamond'

Yeah ... I can drive across the country and land in a particular parking spot with 100% repeatability.

chronomexon Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

That's not what they said though. They said "if you want to know if someone feels welcome, and you ask them, and they say they don't feel welcome, then you're done researching whether or not they feel welcome".

chronomexon What of the lowly page number

Click.

chronomexon FAA Proposes Nearly $2M Fine Against Drone Operator

Birds aren't made of plastic and metal and lithium-polymer.

chronomexon PaperBack – How to store data on a single A4/Letter sheet

Tyvek, perhaps? I'm not sure how long-term it would stick around, but it wouldn't decay as fast as paper in an unprotected environment.

chronomexon Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

And yet we still have to manually query every combination of departure and return dates to find reasonable airfare.

chronomexon My favorite underused Python idiom

What's with the forced email signup form?

chronomexon In High-Tech Japan, the Fax Machines Roll On (2013)

Most of these gracefully (?) degrade to sending a paper cheque in the mail, if the recipient isn't a party to their payment system.