niccl

No, I think it's an engineer in search of a fun challenge

One of the local music venue owners used to be tour manager for Leonard Cohen. When Cohen died, this guy organised a tribute concert with a whole bunch of local talent.

The guy that did Hallelujah is a fantastic rock guitarist and, recognising that the world was Halellujah'd out, did a rock version, more along the lines of Hendrix' Star Spangled Banner than anything I'd ever heard before. It was _awesome_ (literally awe inspiring).He was so into it he had no recollection later of what he'd done or how he'd performed, but to the audience it had as much power and feeling as the 'real thing'.

Sadly, there's no recording of it in any form. I've asked him a few times if he could do it again so it could be recorded, but he says he doesn't even want to try because it was just of the moment and he didn't think he could do it again

A fun full-circle. The Jacquard loom was influential for input for early computers, and now the computer is influencing the output of looms

definitely agree. the information density of well written article (or even 'blog- spam, in this case) is far higher than almost any video

> My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang

Was that the "'Ay for 'Orses" thing? I still know most of it, and never knew where it came from

CDs are fun in a microwave, arcing and spitting like fury for a while. So not just crinkly things

Wasn't there an article on HN recently about some Army thing that makes recommendations on targets which are supposed to be reviewed by the Human In The Loop. IIRC the reason for the article was that the Humans In The Loop were just rubber-stamping the chosen targets with consequent loss of civilian lives.

I think that simple rubber-stamping would happen in any situation where the input was 'good enough' most of the time. And so the Bad Things and hallucinations would still get through

There's the 'long tail' aspect to ephemeral stardom and what people get from it. Most musicians I know (and I know a lot from the local music scene) want foremost to perform. Money and fame would be really great, but getting up in front of an audience is what they most want to do.

A lot of 80's and 90's bands come through the 200-500 cap venues where I mostly work. People like Midge Ure, Nik Kershaw. They're still happily performing and touring despite (as far as I know) not being in Billboard top 100 for some time (tm)

So the fact of having been super-famous once and then not again is probably disappointing but not crushing, and no reason for other people not to try for the 15 minutes of fame

does anybody know what the music accompanying the full video was? It seemed familiar but I couldn't place it. Maybe AI generated?

Maybe, among other things, more widespread and easily ingested news has something to do with it. Centuries ago, foreign news was what happened two villages over, and you only knew about that because of some wanderer that came and told you, because you couldn't read and there were no newspapers to read anyway. And it your world was limited to a radius of a few tens of kilometres, then most of the time, in that world, everything wasn't going to hell in a handbasket.

Now, it's easier to find that there's lots of things happening across the entire world, so it's more likely to feel that 'everything's turning to shit.'

I've got my father's. Still in the original box.

I learned to use a normal linear slide rule at school, but every time I look at this I have to read the manual to sort out how to use it. I'd like to fix it in my head so I could whip it out at work when calculations are needed. Just for geek points

I guess we could make some reasonable evidence about hiring approaches based on HN hirers: What percentage of hires using your favourite technique/interview question do you think worked out as a success?

My rate is around 50% good, 50% I wish I hadn't hired.

Anyone else want to fess up?

I think they pave 100 m, wait til it's dried (next day, perhaps) then drive the bridge 100 m up the newly paved bit and start again. No break

yup. I can do 0402, and I've poor eyesight and hands that shake more than I'd like.

Trying to _really_ understand the postgres query planner's `EXPLAIN` output. We have long-running embarrassingly parallel processes where the throughput will sometimes completely tank. Got worse when we upgraded to PG16.

Trying to compare good query plans with bad ones, and then work out what changes we need to make to the slow queries is ... interesting.

After getting really frustrated with the syntax of the command line of a telephone exchange, entering, in frustration, 'sod off' got the response 'SOD is not on'.

I'm back working on my lighting desk [0]. Got the new boards manufactured and each has basic code on. Now looking at swapping out the i2c communications the main controller was using for CAN-bus that the new boards use. Hoping to get the system turning lights on and off in a month or so.

I realised most of my motivation problems were depression-related, and getting treatment for that made it possible for me to get back to work on this project

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35737795

I think there's a large Maori population in Aotearoa that would disagree with this. Heyerdahl's theory was discredited a while ago

Park Road Post used it to clean up the sound in the Beatles Get Back videos. I don't know the details, and I haven't seen the original or Get Back, but apparently the sound in the original was terrible. They used 'AI' to do things like pick out George's (or whoever it was) voice from the rest so they could EQ it separately

Lord of The Rings used some huge external green/blue screens. One I know of was the scene in Return of the King where there's a dead oliphaunt and, IIRC, Eowyn fighting the Witch King. But there were lots of others.

I love that they're using analog control for the galvos. I'm just struggling with a totally simple digital control loop for motors and I'm really regretting I didn't go with my first inclination and use op-amps

Not the original commenter but I'd include:

Vanity Fair by Thackeray

Mr Johnson by Joyce Cary

Lavengro and Romany Rye by George Borrow

The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies by Douglas Hofstadter et al.

Identity Crisis by Ben Elton

I can't find the reference, but:

There's a building somewhere with the digits of pi painted on a ceiling. I presume it celebrates someone (maybe 18th Century) who calculated N digits. One of the numbers is painted larger and a different colour because it marks where the person first went wrong in the calculation

I, and the rest of our dev team use Linux, and found Teams ok when there was a stand-alone client for it, but the browser-based stuff they forced on us a year or so ago was horrible. The notifications were particularly atrocious, to the point of making the whole thing unusable.

The .deb of the stand-alone package disappeared, so it seemed we were stuck with the pain of the browser-based stuff. Then I remembered archive.org and found the .deb. If anyone else is in a similar situation, it's at https://web.archive.org/web/20221130115842/https://packages.... Thanks, archive.org

My cousin designed the paper tape reader. Just before he died in 2004 he said that as far as he knew it was still the fastest optical reader in the world.

He was one of the main reasons I got into electronics and then programming

And he was one of the models for Horatio Hornblower, created by CS Forrester. They're great reads and I understand that their descriptions of Napoleonic sea battles are fairly accurate

I've just had two engineered stone counter tops installed. In both cases (different companies) the fitters came and made a template from thick card of the exact size for the top. the tops arrived and fit precisely. One had to have holes for cut in, but I didn't hang around to see if they fitter used PPE

> Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?

My daughter, doing a journalism course assignment, once asked Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span (not a _huge_ artist, but reasonably well known towards the end of last century) about this. Maddy's comment was basically the same. She'd rather you bought something legally, but if it's not available (some of their back catalogue had disappeared) then Maddy thought it was fine to 'pirate' it.

Agree that it was a catastrophe by the article's definition, but the author specifically says 'since 1500', which excludes the Mongol Wars (from what I understood from your linked page)

My first thought when I started reading TFA was that the list of catastrophes to consider would be biased because more recent events have better records. Maybe that's why the author decided on the 1500 cut off?