Hacker News: DriftRegion

New comment by DriftRegion in "NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating"

DriftRegion — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 06:08:55 +0000

Thanks, I enjoyed that.

Kola Superdeep Borehole

DriftRegion — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:54:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.davidsmythe.org/kola/kola.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189616

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by DriftRegion in "Ask HN: How much emphasis to put on unit testing and when?"

DriftRegion — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 15:51:46 +0000

Writing unit tests is futile exercise without a specification.

The software under test is always modeling something -- business logic, a communications protocol, a control algorithm, a standard, etc. Behind each of those things is a specification. If a specification doesn't exist then the software is called a prototype. For sustained long term incremental development a specification must exist.

The purpose of unit tests is to assert specification-defined invariants at the module interface level.

Unit tests are durable iff the specification they uphold is explicit and accessible to developers and the scope of the test is small. It's futile to write good tests for a module which has ambiguous utility.

priors: I worked in embedded SW and am now a PhD student.

Segmented Turning Designer

DriftRegion — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:23:39 +0000

Article URL: https://cdelker.bitbucket.io/segbowl/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605359

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by DriftRegion in "Political Chinese Culture at Meta"

DriftRegion — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 02:35:00 +0000

The problem is management. Managing bilingual teams is challenging.

New comment by DriftRegion in "Vaclav Smil on why there will be no energy transition"

DriftRegion — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 03:59:20 +0000

I found the linked article to be difficult to follow. Vacliv Smil wrote a book called Energy and Civilization (2017) in which he argues that the ability to harness energy is what makes civilizations thrive and enables the production of culture.

New comment by DriftRegion in "Bazel and Glibc Versions"

DriftRegion — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 18:44:16 +0000

Thanks for sharing. As a non-google bazel user this is quite helpful.

New comment by DriftRegion in "Ask HN: Best codebases to study to learn software design?"

DriftRegion — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 19:39:40 +0000

Start with the question: what is the problem that you want to solve? Next, find codebases that solve that problem and study how they do it.

Good design is so deeply tied to the domain details. Wonham's Internal Model Principle applies to code.

Example: I wanted to solve the problem of unit testing for embedded targets. I found open source projects that do this and read the code critically to see how and why it is written. As I build my own approach, I revisit theirs to learn more as my understanding of the domain deepens.

New comment by DriftRegion in "Micro Wheeled legged Robot"

DriftRegion — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 21:42:31 +0000

NASA branded things have been big in China since as early as 2019, peaking in 2021.

https://fashion.sina.cn/s/fo/2019-04-28/detail-ihvhiqax54682...

https://www.zhihu.com/question/337494558

https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/931153568796681979/answer/...

New comment by DriftRegion in "Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim"

DriftRegion — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 16:33:50 +0000

Mapping escape to caps-lock makes much more sense after looking at the ADM-3A keyboard layout. Cool write-up!

New comment by DriftRegion in "Oliver Heaviside and the theory of transmission lines (2021)"

DriftRegion — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 15:45:14 +0000

I just finished reading this one. It was fantastic. I particularly enjoyed the spicy editorial excerpts from The Electrician ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electrician ).

New comment by DriftRegion in "State Space Explosion: The Reason We Can Never Test Software to Perfection(2021)"

DriftRegion — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 06:54:37 +0000

This is a wonderfully concise description of why software testing, especially GUI testing is cursed by dimensionality.

Type checking, borrow checking, invariants, hell even MISRA rules are all constraints imposed to reduce unmanaged state in programs. I like them for software reliability because they can help keep the complexity demon locked in the crystal.

New comment by DriftRegion in "Blue Origin New Glenn Mission NG-1 – Live"

DriftRegion — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 07:46:31 +0000

"if we're adding time to the clock, it means that the team thinks that there might be a possibility that they can sort it out"

New comment by DriftRegion in "Blue Origin New Glenn Mission NG-1 – Live"

DriftRegion — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 07:32:12 +0000

Anyone know more about the payload? Here's what I've found: It's carrying the "Blue Ring Pathfinder Payload", part of the "Dark-Sky 1 Mission"

> Dark-Sky 1 is jointly funded by DIU and Blue Origin. [5]

DIU is "The Pentagon’s commercial technology arm, the Defense Innovation Unit"

[1] https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blue-ring-pathfinder-payload

[2] https://www.diu.mil/latest/companies-selected-for-diu-orbita...

[3] https://www.meritalk.com/articles/diu-orbital-logistics-awar...

[4] https://www.geekwire.com/2024/blue-origin-ring-darksky-1/

[5] https://spacenews.com/defense-innovation-unit-awards-three-c...

New comment by DriftRegion in "Stop Trying to Schedule a Call with Me"

DriftRegion — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:29:00 +0000

I've had a couple of experiences in the past month where I do respond to the enthusiastic sales engineer's check-in with a genuine product question, only to receive an immediate, lengthy, and subtly wrong LLM generated response. It feels gross.

New comment by DriftRegion in "Toyota rethinks its bet on hydrogen"

DriftRegion — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 19:59:56 +0000

> By all appearances, it just seems like an absolute no brainer....I really dont get it

I understand the policy around hydrogen (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated $8 billion to hydrogen production) as a technological pivot for the United States which leads the world in oil and gas extraction and logistics tech. The US has a lot of gas handling experience.

Optimistically, green hydrogen will diversify the energy supply, bringing "energy resilience", a key policy buzzphrase. Batteries and pumped hydro are undeniably superior in round trip efficiency, but hydrogen does have some desirable properties such as relative ease of overland transport, very long term storage, and being a chemical precursor for some industrial processes.

Pessimistically, green hydrogen is a way for oil and gas companies to siphon many taxpayer dollars while doing superficial work similar to the compliance EVs of the 90s and 00s.

I'm optimistic mainly because my PhD in electrical engineering is being funded partly with the green hydrogen taxpayer dollars. Shout-out to my fellow taxpayers and my advisor's grant writing skills! I'm working on power electronics which are fundamental in renewable energy and by extension green hydrogen electrolysis.

New comment by DriftRegion in "Can we communally deprecate git checkout?"

DriftRegion — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 06:09:26 +0000

The article writes:

> they had not asked me to explain git, they had asked me to explain GitHub

This is often the case for me as well.

Hey, at least git owns it by calling the shell commands "porcelain" (with git itself being the plumbing -- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6976473/what-does-the-te... ).

The core value proposition of GitHub, GitLab, etc is to provide a nice GUI atop git. That's huge. I think that user-studies to improve one of the many existing foss git GUIs would be much better use of brain than deprecating git checkout.

New comment by DriftRegion in "Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?"

DriftRegion — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 05:59:06 +0000

> Remember than when the AIDS epidemic broke out. The doctors and labs didn’t help much. People took things in their own hands and tried stuff, and in the end, they found things that worked.

What? how did people take things into their own hands?

New comment by DriftRegion in "Toyota rethinks its bet on hydrogen"

DriftRegion — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 05:55:39 +0000

Hydrogen electrolyzers perhaps makes sense as a backup load: something that can be turned on when there's too much electricity production (as is increasingly the case in renewable-heavy grids). But then what to do with the hydrogen?

Fertilizer? sure. Heating? maybe.

Cars? the infrastructure still has a long way to go. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Mirai/ for the deets.

New comment by DriftRegion in "XiangShan – Open-source high performance RISC-V processor"

DriftRegion — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 01:49:56 +0000

I like that the microarch names -- Yanqihu (雁栖湖), Nanhu (南湖), and Kunminghu (昆明湖) -- are lake-themed. Coffee lake? Skylake? no, Kunming lake.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_codenames