Hacker News Reader

sehuggon Invaders game in 512 bytes

There are a couple of other neat tricks, like drawing invaders in the pixel color of their array index, so that a complicated collision detection routine is not neccessary.

sehuggon U.S. Says Russia Might Be Setting Off Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons

Dispute Over Russian Testing Divides U.S. Nuclear Experts (2001) - https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/world/dispute-over-russia...

It's well-known that John Bolton hates arms treaties, see this 2009 op-ed: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/opinion/26bolton.html

And this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703618504575459...

And this: https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659911920/bolton-affirms-u-s-...

And this: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2016/09/26/w...

While the CTBT has not entered into force, a monitoring system has been set up around the world with sensors to detect nuclear explosions, whether they are in the atmosphere, underwater, or underground. Twenty-five of the system’s monitoring stations detected the September 9 North Korean nuclear test.

If your admin is itching to abandon multiple nuclear treaties, I'd like more than a "probably" at a speech at a think tank, given that we have an international monitoring system.

EDIT: Comprehensive thread from @ArmsControlWonk: https://twitter.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/11338146849627914...

sehuggon Chinese developers fear the tech war will cost them access to GitHub

Is this just about Github Enterprise Server? If so, the article doesn't really make that clear, and it seems like a red herring. AFAIK Microsoft does not currently restrict access to Github.com to any country, and they even make a censorship-friendly version of LinkedIn for the PRC.

sehuggon The 25¢ Apple II Real Time Clock (1981)

Ah, thanks -- I must have missed that issue! :)

sehuggon The 25¢ Apple II Real Time Clock (1981)

WWVB (the NIST atomic clock signal) encodes at 1 bit per second, it would be easy to hook a receiver up to the cassette port and decode this -- I'd guess someone even tried this back in the day. Though you have to wait 60 seconds for a full timestamp, and doing it in the background might be tricky.

sehuggon ‘If I disappear’: Chinese students make farewell messages amid crackdowns

"How China buys the silence of the world’s human rights critics": https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/21...

Even in the 90s, when this was a prominent issue in American minds, when the State Department would offer the occasional "stiff rebuke", politicians told us that trade would inevitably move China toward an open democratic society.

sehuggon The 25¢ Apple II Real Time Clock (1981)

Yeah, with just a XOR checksum this would be pretty dangerous even for reads. Of course, in those days you could probably sell someone a $50 FIFO buffer to work around the disk controller problems :)

sehuggon The 25¢ Apple II Real Time Clock (1981)

I mean -- timestamp your files in ProDOS? Control your sweet X10 home automation setup? Clock your employees in and out? Run your BBS?

sehuggon The 25¢ Apple II Real Time Clock (1981)

Nope. You can't even write a busy loop that syncs with the frame rate because the ][ lacks a VSYNC flag. Some modern demos manage to read the beam position, though -- they look at values on the bus left over by the video circuitry when the bus is floating (the "vapor lock" hack)

sehuggon New Swiss studies claim 5G increases body temperature of insects

Paper here (not sure if this is the one cited by the article, but sounds like it): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22271-3

sehuggon Vignette: add photos to your contacts by searching public social media profiles

Thanks for the nightmares I'll be having tonight about URLs with commas.

sehuggon Nissan says Leaf batteries will outlast the car by 10-12 years

It's common for a major component to break after 10-12 years and its repair costs exceed the resale value of the vehicle. On my last car, it was the AC compressor. OTOH, some models like the 90s Toyota Camry seem to last forever.

Also, car maintence costs have exceeded inflation over time: https://www.officialdata.org/Motor-vehicle-maintenance-and-r...

sehuggon I don't know how CPUs work so I simulated one in code

Shameless plug -- hardware engineering students are using the online 8bitworkshop IDE to study and design custom CPUs in Verilog: https://8bitworkshop.com/redir.html?platform=verilog

sehuggon US has underestimated Huawei, says founder

The relationship between Huawei and the Chinese government is a little blurry: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3372669

sehuggon Hertz bug leads to people being erroneously arrested and jailed

They've been sued and have settled multiple times. This was reported in the article linked in the OP from a year ago.

sehuggon White House launches tool to report censorship on social media

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/04/25/twitter-cant-ban-ra...

sehuggon Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

HN has discussed HackerRank and the like before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15182952

sehuggon Helium Shortage Is Hurting Parties and the Pharma Industry

A big reason for the shortage is that about 75% of all the helium comes from just three places: Ras Laffan Industrial City in Qatar, ExxonMobil in Wyoming and the National Helium Reserve in Texas, according to gas-trade publication Gasworld.com.

In Texas, the reserves are being depleted, while at the same time overall demand for the gas has been growing.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/09/helium-short...

"In 1996, the US Congress decided to sell off the strategic reserve and the consequence was that the market was swelled with cheap helium because its price was not determined by the market. The motivation was to sell it all by 2015"

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/discovery-of-massive...

sehuggon Svgbob: Convert your ASCII diagram scribbles into happy little SVG

I've been using this PHP project for diagrams in my books: https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg

sehuggon Coffee Cups Are Next

Yeah, these seem to get less filthy than Yeti tumblers. For those who tend to take small sips at regular intervals, insulated is the way to go.

sehuggon Speedgate: World’s First Sport Generated by AI

It's not even the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter

sehuggon Speedgate: World’s First Sport Generated by AI

Looks like they're using Keras to generate random phrases, then winnowing them down to the best few, which they extrapolate into a functional sport rulebook with their human brains.

Could have probably done this with a Markov chain as well. "apt-get install dadadodo" for instance.

sehuggon At 30, Game Boys live on in unexpected ways

You just have to pry open your Zelda cart to solder on a new battery for the static RAM :)

sehuggon What is ZIL anyway?

Versu was one such attempt, with an engine designed by the Sims 3 AI developer: https://versu.com/about/

Though I'd guess that's more of a sophisticated GOFAI than RNNs.

sehuggon Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games

This is definitely how I do all my LaTeX projects.

sehuggon GameBoy CPU Manual (2013) [pdf]

Utterly without? https://github.com/gbdev/awesome-gbdev

Have you tried the SDCC C compiler? I use it for 8bitworkshop. It has a Gameboy CPU target.

sehuggon No one, not even the Secret Service, should randomly plug in a strange USB stick

That's -3 points for a +3 opinion

sehuggon No one, not even the Secret Service, should randomly plug in a strange USB stick

I'm of the opinion that a POTUS that carries a unsecured iPhone against the recommendations of his staff (and overrules their security clearance decisions for his son-in-law) isn't going to fire anyone due to quibbles over OPSEC.

sehuggon Filing Your Taxes Is an Expensive Time Sink. That’s Not an Accident

They may be referring to the Republicans' decades-long campaign to suffocate the IRS, which has resulted in more audits for the poor and fewer for the rich, more easily allowing wealthy taxpayers to drag them on past the 10-year statue of limitations: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted

sehuggon Trinity Nuclear Test Site Open House – Saturday, April 6

When I visited years ago, some folks brought a spectrometer and analyzed some samples. Spoiler: Lots of radioactive elements around. A memorable part of a Radiation Vacation.