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:-( The link works for me when open it in an incognito/private window w/o and login page. Wonder how NYT decides that.

Mark Stephens (aka Robert X. Cringely) obituary:

https://www.hillandwood.com/obituaries/Mark-Stephens?obId=49...

Tell HN from two weeks ago about Bob's death:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49949438

Plane Crazy documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSNzF-KSGiw

(I watched it for the first time last week. Very entertaining.)

FYI, that's audio only. Magnolia Pictures is enforcing their rights on it, so if you want to see the video you either have to rent/buy it or it can be found on the high seas in varying degrees of quality.

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/15/nyregion/nyc-street-sign-...

If you use CF as your registrar, they require you to use CF DNS. If you're okay with that, they register domains at cost. It's also easy to move a domain later if you change your mind and is quite fast. I recently moved a gTLD domain from CF to Porkbun and the transfer was complete in a matter of minutes, at the cost of a 1-year renewal.

Porkbun. Cloudflare if you don't mind being locked into using them for DNS too.

TokenRing was already an academic curiosity when I was getting my CS degree in the mid-90s. The CS department by that point had already switched to twisted-pair Ethernet. By the time of my first job in the late 90s, we used FDDI for our web farm's backend network, but we tore that out with the arrival of gigabit, so FDDI didn't last too long either.

> and one with real combustion rocket engines

The site states it's cold-gas thrusters for both models: "Features a multi-mode suction system paired with cold-gas thrusters positioned around the perimeter of the vehicle that support forward and upward acceleration as well as lateral rotational movement."

This change sucks (but as a long time Withings user doesn't affect me... for now), but I haven't had trouble with either the scale or BP cuff syncing to Apple Health. I don't have any suggestions besides double-checking the Withings app has permissions to write to HealthKit. I don't see any settings in the Withings app itself besides a prompt to check "Settings > Privacy > Health > Withings App".

Sorry if this isn't helpful.

Aside: all BP cuffs and their apps sorta seem to suck when it comes to sync. I also have an Omron. At least mine measure accurately. Make sure to validate yours with your GP.

What the heck was that?: The first and last essay ever to be written about "Plane Crazy" (JULY 24, 1998) :

https://web.archive.org/web/20090510230055/http://www.pbs.or...

According to its wiki page, it's still under active development by Software MacKiev since 2004 (Kid Pix Deluxe 3), with Hickman serving as a consultant since 2011:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix

The Apple TV doesn't support DV profile 7 (you just get the HDR base layer; you lose the enhancement layer), nor does it support TrueHD Atmos (you get the bed channels but lose height channels). Same for DTS:X.

Whether or not this matters or you notice will depend on the specific Blu-ray and whether you have a Dolby Atmos capable sound system.

https://community.firecore.com/t/dolby-vision-profile-7-8-su...

https://community.firecore.com/t/help-get-more-dolby-atmos-o...

https://old.reddit.com/r/appletv/comments/1789et4/does_infus...

> The appeal of the Shield Pro is you don't have to deal with custom flashing a "no-name" device and you don't have to dual box to keep streaming services happy.

Fair, but I just wasn't willing to put up with Android TV. And the Shield doesn't handle FEL so there's still some ripped content it won't play.

For me it's easy enough to use my Apple TV for streaming and even most ripped blu-rays, and the Ugoos for the blu-ray rips that benefit from it. Flashing the AMB6+ was a one-time thing. After that, updating the OS is just dropping a tar file into a folder and rebooting it.

> It's frustrating that nobody else seems to care about attempting to be the all-in-one box given how much Shield is showing its age now.

It's a niche market and any all-in-one box is likely to run afoul of Dolby Labs licensing restrictions.

> I don't get why Apple just refuses to allow audio pass through or DV Profile 7.

I don't even care about pass through audio if it could just use Dolby MAT to playback decoded DTS:X / Dolby TrueHD Atmos w/o losing the spatial channels.

DV Profile 7 is very likely Dolby licensing issues.

> What's crazy is that it's still close to the best device you can get.

Unless you prefer an Android TV device, I don't get the appeal of the Shield Pro. I bought one years ago and resold it a few months later. For me the only things it did better than an Apple TV (playing certain ripped blu-rays) are better done by the Ugoos AM6B+. So those are the two devices I use nowadays.

Except they left in "AI-generated" instead of using "SI-generated".

> At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts

I gather these are cards that he opened and funded, not stolen cards. I'm surprised at this scale it wasn't detected much sooner.

These accounts had to be listening a lot in order to generate more royalties than the subscription fees. e.g. Spotify family is $21.99/mo for six accounts. That's $440K annually for 10,000 accounts. Sheesh.

It was FireWire, wasn't it? Pretty sure I still have mine in a box somewhere.

Now having listened to both episodes:

The 99% Invisible episode is all about the Luddite movement.

The Lace and Labor episode talks primarily about the history of crochet and its relationship to labor, with a detour through knitting, after a brief introduction to the Luddite movement.

The episodes are complementary.

(2016). Previous submissions w/comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30623372 (250 points | March 10, 2022 | 27 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232705 (267 points | Feb 4, 2020 | 29 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15608435 (440 points | Nov 2, 2017 | 53 comments)

Also covered by 99% Invisible a few years ago:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/552-blood-in-the-mach...

Based on an interview with Brain Merchant (author of a book about the Luddites called Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech). His blog gets submitted to HN periodically:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bloodinthemachine.com

Notable discussion a few weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49470380

The post admits this, first in the summary: "However, Burning Man’s near zero death rate over its existence is abnormal, and likely due to selection bias of healthier attendees and other confounding demographic factors".

Then again in the final sentence: "The more likely explanation for the remaining gap is something no demographic slicing can capture. Burning Man selects for healthier people who are willing and able to spend a week in the desert heat, regardless of their age, race, or income bracket."

> it's a 12V 7Ah to 8Ah AGM lead acid

Rather, it's a 6V 1.2Ah:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49818289

There are lots of random web sites claiming how to read the Yuasa date code format, but the only official document I found from Yuasa says "contact us for help decoding the date". Here's a photo of the exact same battery on Amazon with a date code of "291118H0". That must be DDMMYY unless the battery was sent to Amazon from the future (or the photo is forged):

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yucel-Y1-2-6-Sealed-Rechargeable-Ba...

And I just found this EU Declaration of Conformity which includes the Y1.2-6 and says the date code is DDMMYY:

https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/4633451.pdf

I had that thought too when I saw the parent comment earlier, but then I looked up the Morse code digits and I have to admit that they are much easier to decode from a flashing light than binary and I'm pretty good doing binary in my head:

    ----- 0000
    .---- 0001
    ..--- 0010
    ...-- 0011
    ....- 0100
    ..... 0101
    -.... 0110
    --... 0111
    ---.. 1000
    ----. 1001

Also, if I see a light with short and long blinks and a pause in between, I'm going to immediately think Morse, not binary, and decoding it is almost intuitive.

Next time you're in Baltimore, be sure to visit the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower where you can see its gravity-driven pendulum clock. It's a beautiful mechanism with a very specific claim to fame: "The clockworks is the largest four dial gravity driven non-chiming clock in the world with the magnificent 24ft dials."

https://imgur.com/a/PjAv85o

https://www.bromoseltzertower.com/about/virtual-tour

(The elevator motors are also up there so there's a lot going on.)

It's a standard sealed lead acid battery:

https://www.rapidonline.com/yuasa-yuvolt-yucel-y1-2-6-valve-...

https://static.rapidonline.com/pdf/18-5207_v2.pdf

Design spec is up to 5 years. The one in the photo looks like it may have a date written in Sharpie on the side. I don't think it's 25 years old though. The "090323" on top could be DDMMYY indicating a battery from 2023.

Gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/magazine/ny-public-school...

It was started in late 2014 and dang explains how it works here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

I debugged terrible git clone performance over the VPN at my last company. It turned out our firewall was stripping TCP window scaling by default, which included both our internal GitHub Enterprise instance hosted on AWS and github.com. I collected a bunch of packet traces (tcpdump was sufficient) and eventually got the networking folks to fix the firewall config.

This was a company of a few thousand people with programmers working from home who all must've assumed it was fine to get no more than ~1 Mbps git clone performance. After a few months of putting up with it I finally got tired of the issue and spent 30 minutes tracking down the cause. It still took a week or more of back and forth between me, and the networking and security teams. And it became an ongoing issue as they were allow-listing IP addresses, not fixing the root cause. Why are Cisco firewalls stripping TCP window scaling by default in 2026? I have no idea!

So, yeah...

My first Linux install, best I can recall, was from a Slackware CD circa 1995? So I guess, me too. I've not used Linux as my desktop since Mac OS X in maybe 2002 but I've always had a Linux box running somewhere or being responsible for Linux boxes since then. It's only in the last few years I've gotten fed up with RPM-based distros and preferred Debian or Ubuntu. My intro to Unix was probably SunOS though.