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lebuffonon Northern summer was hottest on record by a significant margin

I just heard about a jump in atmospheric methane that is not understood. The oil/gas industry has made some progress to curtail methane emissions so we don't think it is that gang.

I wonder about millions of tons of frozen ancient vegetation in Canada and Russia beginning to rot. ?

One idea is that we have hit the true "terminus" point of the past ice age and temperatures will rise rapidly over the next few decades and then stabilize at the new "normal".

Human CO2 might have pushed temps up but this could be much bigger than we expected.

https://theconversation.com/rising-methane-could-be-a-sign-t...

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/

lebuffonon New study finds microplastics infiltrate all systems of body, alter behaviour

Alternative explanation (call me crazy) :-)

A US comedian once commented that when he went to Europe 20 years ago, he noticed that people only ate three meals a day.

What a concept!

lebuffonon Ask HN: What do non-technical founders need to know about software dev?

I don't follow. What species of females are you hanging with? :-)

lebuffonon Ask HN: What do non-technical founders need to know about software dev?

I recommend reading Fred Brook's Mythical Man Month. It's old but still has relevance and has been republished this century.

My favourite: "It takes nine months to have a baby no matter how many women you put on the job."

His failure on the OS for the IBM 360 mainframe led him to believe software is like that. It's worth the read.

lebuffonon AI and the Automation of Work

Robocop...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REC-ZYWL1to

lebuffonon RF Spectrum Mapping

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and-divulg...

Does this law apply in the USA or is it moot because it's not about content?

lebuffonon Vintage National Geographic Photos (1888-1999)

Select 1952 from the menu and see the Meola Glacier in the Himalayas.

Then look at this 2009 photo looking directly up the same valley rather than from the side. https://www.indiamike.com/india-images/pictures/meola-glacie...

The change is happening at a pace that we don't see, without the overview of historical photos.

A very bad omen for India's water supply I think.

lebuffonon LiquidPiston – The combustion engine reimagined

Legacy technology always "improves" when a serious disruptor enters the market. It seldom can overcome the disruption for very long.

However this engine seems to be a great improvement on pistons if we want to continue burning dinosaur juice. It might be interesting to try it as a range extender for long-haul electric trucks due the smaller size and weight.

lebuffonon Medieval Illustrations of Bonnacons

Sounds like the medieval equivalent of the legendary jackalope.

https://travelwyoming.com/article/jackalope-amaze-visitors-o...

lebuffonon Ed Sheeran demonstrates how copyright is destroying musicians

Standard rules of business normally apply to anything sold.

1. Product gotta be good enough to compete with other similar products 2. Price low-price, middle or premium, but it needs to fit the category 3. Place make it easy to find and purchase 4. Promotion tell the people who need this thing, all about it

If any of these are wrong you don't get market success.

But there are a lot of non-linearities. Old Marketing joke: "I know half of my budget is not working, I just don't know which half"

lebuffonon Ed Sheeran demonstrates how copyright is destroying musicians

"incentivized to catch fish by the *prophet" is a very funny error.

"profit" is a different incentive than divine revelation although both have worked in human history.

lebuffonon The skills gap for Fortran looms large in HPC

Is the use of "codes" in the article, versus "code" a sign that the author/editor is not "code" literate?

Asking for a friend.

lebuffonon In Praise of Top Down Programming

Forth will echo your "Meh". How much of top-down is because bottom-up is so @#$%! hard in non-interactive languages.

lebuffonon My4TH – A minimalistic FORTH computer with discrete CPU

29% less transistors for similar capabilities would be good. How does the instruction set compare to 6502?

lebuffonon Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

Oh my. This surely falls under the category: G_d has a sense of humour.

lebuffonon Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

That's an interesting case and use of the word efficient.

Developer time reduced by 5X CPU time increased by 500x

When CPU cycles are cheap it's a logical tradeoff but it still grates against my sensibilities.

lebuffonon Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

Maybe we should bring back cigarettes. The are less lethal to young people...

How depressing.

lebuffonon Porth, It's Like Forth but in Python

Dr. Julian Noble (RIP) went down that road but realized it was overkill and switched to providing a "formula translator" for Forth. So it takes infix notation and translates it to RPN Forth code than is compiled interactively like normal Forth.

lebuffonon Porth, It's Like Forth but in Python

I believe the first version of that interpreter was written by Charles Moore himself. "Lines" in Forth are rather fluid but I have a version here that is 154 lines when formatted as a text file rather than 1K disk blocks.

lebuffonon A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

To paraphrase Sarah Palin: Canada can see the USA from their front window. (A great deal of time is spent looking through that window)

lebuffonon Effects on the lips of horn players seated too close to the timpani (2014)

I don't think it is written into a piece (at least not one that I know of) but if you play the 32' pedal C and C# together you get a ~2 Hz beat frequency that is amazing to hear but probably didn't help the church building that I worked at. :)

lebuffonon Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl's incurable cancer

I have long suspected that viruses are the underlying cause of most of the diseases that have eluded us for the last 50 years. HIV gave us insights into a novel way that viruses can operate. It makes sense to think that there are more ways than we imagined.

E/B virus is suspect in Type 1 Diabetes too. E/B Vaccination could eradicate a group of diseases potentially.

lebuffonon Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl's incurable cancer

This is a wonderful outcome and amazing science and all involved are to be commended for saving this girl's life.

However would it not make more sense to try and prevent the disease in society, since there is a viral component to it? It is a retro-virus and was first discovered in 1977. Is there even research on a vaccine? We have one for cervical cancer. (Hit's a nerve since I have a child with Lymphoma)

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/human-t-lym...

lebuffonon Everything I wish I knew when learning C

" ... is often called the stack." " integers are cursed"

These statements and a few others made me uncomfortable. They imply, to me, that the author has too little knowledge of computer internals to be programming in C.

C does a wonderful job of looking like a high level language but it was designed to do low level stuff. There is an implicit assumption, to my mind, that the user has a deeper understanding of what is behind the "curtain" that is created by the compiler.

It almost seems like the there should a pre-requisite course like "Introduction to Computer hardware" before one is allowed to write a line of C.

Maybe I'm just too old...

lebuffonon Thinking Forth (1984)

I worked in a Forth shop for a few years and attended a few conferences. The FEDEX story made its way around the community.

lebuffonon Thinking Forth (1984)

Forth has not won any popularity awards since the end of the '90s but it is still used by a small group of engineers around the world to solve their custom needs. This can be for embedded projects or firmware yes, but it has crept into larger projects.

IMHO opinion Forth is hard to learn, takes more effort to bootstrap your project (more like Assembler) and more importantly it is hard to switch gears to think with Chuck Moore's methodology. However once learned it can make one very productive.

Forth was (is?) used for experimental control in the ISS quite regularly. The ability to wip up a simple DSL that talks directly to hardware and will compile or can be used as a script is a win for those custom projects.

It's running in the FEDEX handheld package scanner from what I understand. (may be dated information) Funny story that. Way back, Version I was started in C but they hit the ROM size limits on the hardware that was already finished. Forth Inc. was asked if they could help. Using their Forth RTOS they re-wrote it and it all fit with room to spare. (Indirect-threaded-code is tight)

Years later, Version II hardware was designed with waaay more memory. Re-write in C fit nicely. All good.

But... the batteries would not last for an entire shift. Forth Inc was brought in again and they own their task scheduler so they modified it to put the CPU to sleep at every chance they could. Batteries lasted.

Largest known Forth program is on Windows. https://ribccs.com/candy/ 1M+ LOC. Compiles with VFX Forth by MPE UK.

</sermon>

lebuffonon Starting FORTH (1981)

Commercial systems are also now available for free for trial or non-commerical use, that offer native code compilers and IDEs and Graphic interface tools.

VFX Forth from MPE UK

SwiftForth from USA

lebuffonon The death of the key change

Supposed quote from the middle ages:

"Lute players spend half their time tuning and the other half playing out of tune"

lebuffonon Ask HN: HNers with multiple sclerosis, can we get in touch?

Thanks for the link. This put me on notice that EBV might also be responsible for other neuralgic disorders since it hangs around forever. It also points to investigating the rest of the Herpes family IMHO.

If we could acknowledge/prove that some of these viruses are dangerous long after initial infection, it might prompt the development of an EBV vaccine. Not sure if Herpes would respond to vaccines. Put it on the list with Human Leukemia/Lymphotropic virus Type 1.

lebuffonon Ask HN: HNers with multiple sclerosis, can we get in touch?

And right next door, Canada is #1.

<rant> When you look at the geographic distribution of MS you would think there might be a pathogen involved. Clearly there are other factors (genetic, environment?) since not everybody gets it, but there is evidence on the map.

Modern DNA techniques should make it possible to search for a culprit but if you don't "believe" that a pathogen is a possibility you will never search for it.</rant>