HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

xoxxala

892 karma · joined April 21, 2021

Chris Taylor, game designer/producer Stonekeep, Fallout 1, Star Trek Starfleet Command (Interplay)
submissionscomments
xoxxala··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
BBC is now reporting $6.3B was stolen.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwg7xp8kx4v5o

xoxxala··on Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes
My aunt had a small kitchen fire. She called 911 and asked "Could you send a firefighter with an extinguisher, please?"

The 911 operator responded "Honey, we only send them one way."

And like a dozen guys showed up.

xoxxala··on Solar panels that plug into your wall
We paid $17k ($12k after subsidies) to install 5kW in Arizona five years ago.
xoxxala··on Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
I worked tech support in the early 90s and we received more than one letter in the mail from customers asking about where the "any" key was on the keyboard.
xoxxala··on Show HN: The rarest tech books and docs you've probably never read
Not the author, but I thought the Word Postmortem was fascinating.
xoxxala··on Triple-A Minesweeper
10/10 story. I look forward to the forthcoming motion picture adaptation from Skydance directed by Michael Bay.
xoxxala··on Time Travel in Braid (2015)
The newest puzzle game from Braid's designer Jonathan Blow releases today:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/499170/Order_of_the_Sinki...

xoxxala··on Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app
I, too, was confused for the longest time, but the secret is in the names.

En dash is the width of an “n”. Em dash is the width of an “M”, so a little wider.

xoxxala··on 3D-printing platform rapidly produces complex electric machines
3d printers making 3d printers making drones is a key plotline of the Bobiverse novels.
xoxxala··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
I just finished my umpteenth reread of AFUtD. It’s one of those books I can pull off the shelf every few years and enjoy from beginning to end.

The Cradle series by Will Wight, starting with Unsouled. Kind of hard to describe, but it’s an sci-fi/Asian fantasy martial arts cultivation epic. If you liked Dungeon Crawler Carl, it may be of interest.

xoxxala··on How we learned to stop worrying and love campus surveillance
According to a quick kagi, over 90% of US high schools have security cameras.
xoxxala··on The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014)
We used to play Diplomacy at work but it caused too many hard feelings and was a distraction.
xoxxala··on People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
Mid to late 70s? Their last years were nothing but medical issues (from the smoking, plus excessive drinking) and poor health. Certainly kept me from starting to smoke.
xoxxala··on People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
My step-father’s parents smoked a carton a day. Each. They started smoking before breakfast and stopped just before sleep. Their trailer home had a 2-3’ cloud of haze below the ceiling and every surface was sticky. I’m not how many years they smoked like that, but probably decades.

As a kid, I could not breathe in there. This would have been late 70s. No way they could have afforded that habit at today’s prices.

xoxxala··on The first new cat species discovered in 100 years
> Wikipedia doesn't have a page dedicated to it yet.

Someone has been typing quickly...

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

xoxxala··on Reversing Factorio's RNG
EverQuest also used pre-generated numbers. The randomness was derived from the large number of players using the same list.
xoxxala··on I replaced my brown-noise browser tab with a menu bar app
iOS and iPadOS also have that under Accessibility-Audio Visual settings.
xoxxala··on Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries
I do something similar with boardgames. I like to import foreign language games or pick them when traveling. They don’t need to be in English for me to enjoy and appreciate them. I have games from Germany, France, Spain, Japan, China, Brazil, and the UK.

My favorite is Kolejka, a Polish game about queuing at nearly empty stores during communism.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/85325/kolejka

xoxxala··on Douglas Adams and the exterminated Doctor Who adventure
There is a new movie in the early stages of development. Some news was teased at Comic-Con in July and the directors spoke about it a few weeks ago.

"After years of an unclear future, it seemed as though “Star Trek” finally found a path back to the big screen as “Spider-Man: Homecoming” writers and “Game Night” and “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” filmmakers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley boarded the film."

https://www.darkhorizons.com/next-star-trek-film-tackles-cor...

xoxxala··on Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]
Here's an in-depth write-up of the hardware, software, manuals, variants, release prices and other info:

https://zzxio.com/about-us/sony-smc-70/

xoxxala··on IKEA made a mod for Skyrim [video]
There's a pretty famous story about Weird Al's Amish Paradise and Coolio. Weird Al got permission from the recording company and producer, but not Coolio. Coolio was not amused, initially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_Paradise#Coolio's_respon...

xoxxala··on Show HN: Make your logo extra bright on HDR screens
Technically, you only need to plonk somebody once.

https://en.everybodywiki.com/Plonk_(Usenet)

xoxxala··on CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s
I used to work for Domino's Pizza in the mid to late 80s. Our piemakers were trained for speed and could usually slap dough, sauce, cheese and throw down toppings in around 30-40 seconds per pie. The ovens were super hot and cooked pizzas in 3-4 minutes. The whole goal was to get the pizza out the door so the driver didn't have to speed. This was still during the "30 minutes or less or it's free" period.

Our franchisee held competitions between stores to see how fast employees could make six large pepperonis. Winning times were less than two minutes. And it wasn't just slop, the pies had to met a minimum quality level (proper saucing and cheesing, the right number of pepperoni slices per pie).

I helped out occasionally at a store in Garden Grove by Disneyland that often did ~1500 pizzas on Friday nights. And as a DUMP (Dayshift Manager), did a few 40-50 pie lunch orders by myself, with a couple drivers helping out on ovens, for schools or companies. Stores kept daily records so knew how many employees to schedule based on past sales - pizza sales were surprisingly consistent over time. And we required advance notice for the really big orders so we could schedule appropriately.

xoxxala··on Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner
Thanks for posting that. The picture of the garage door opening is a trip!
xoxxala··on The oldest bar in every state
I've been to the Palace in Prescott, AZ. Neat place. I was told by locals that during the 1900 fire, the patrons picked up the actual bar and carried it out of the saloon to save it.
xoxxala··on The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
Linotype machines were revolutionary. The New York Times used them for 127 years until 1978 and this documentary shows them in action for the last time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTiCTFdTd60

xoxxala··on The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert
No. We put a lot of references into Fallout, but that wasn’t one of them. (And we didn’t have any toads on the team, just a scorpion the artists used as a reference and no one was licking it.)
xoxxala··on Exploiting Volvo/Eicher's fleet platform to gain control over all users/vehicles
You might want to check out Slate:

https://www.slate.auto/en

No embeded modem.

xoxxala··on The computer that helped win World War II
The Kriegsmarine had more secure procedures for transmitting the setting key, added more rotors for more possible combinations, and eventually introduced a new Engima with four rotors instead of three. Their transmissions were more difficult to decrypt.

The Luftwaffe were far more lax in their procedures, and Hermann Goring sent many trivial messages that made it easy for Bletchley Park to decrypt.[1] From early 1940 to the end of the war, air force messages were routinely read.

[1] From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma: "Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring was known to use it for trivial communications, including informing squadron commanders to make sure the pilots he was going to decorate had been properly deloused."

xoxxala··on $100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol
Interesting article, but those videos aren’t. Not even pre-MTV quality.

While checking out the gallery, came across this image:

https://www.tryai.dev/gallery/d3725e9b-1df9-4c10-8a23-2fc705...

There’s something wrong with it, but I just can’t put my paw on the problem.

Page 1 of 7Next →