Hacker News: alt219

New comment by alt219 in "Alien World Chemistry Found Inside Meteorite That Struck New Jersey Home"

alt219 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:52:00 +0000

From what I understand about this story, the homeowner had the presence of mind to immediately attempt to preserve the meteorite, which is what made subsequent analysis possible.

Presumably other fragments landing outdoors with no one around taking similar steps to preserve them, even if they were to be recovered, would not be as valuable for study because of their exposure to the natural environment of Earth.

New comment by alt219 in "Underarm bowling incident of 1981"

alt219 — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 15:54:24 +0000

Not to take anything away from Maridona's overall excellence, but his goal was 100% illegal, just none of the referees saw his handball.

Underarm bowling was still allowed when this incident occurred and was therefore legal, just considered very unsportsmanlike and outside the spirit of the game.

New comment by alt219 in "Underarm bowling incident of 1981"

alt219 — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 15:46:32 +0000

As an American it has taken me nearly half a century of occasionally watching cricket to barely comprehend what that sentence means. I love it.

New comment by alt219 in "Mercedes‑Benz starts large‑scale production of electric axial flux motor"

alt219 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:42:49 +0000

> As an aside, the most powerful F1 engine ever put on the track was made by modifying the little 4-banger m10 found in the BMW 2002. Fun fact.

Supposedly BMW lacked a dyno that went high enough so it's an educated guess what the actual hp was, but definitely over 1,300hp... from a 4-cylinder (turbo charged, and only lasted a few laps, but still) engine!

New comment by alt219 in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

alt219 — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:13:19 +0000

More money & power than sense. Hubris, greed, malice, psychopathy. One, some or all of these combined in various proportions.

New comment by alt219 in "IBM Confidential: System/360 File Organization [video]"

alt219 — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:29:23 +0000

I'm not a graphic arts expert, but the lettering and charts in this presentation appear to be done by hand.

And since this was an internal IBM presentation for salesmen and engineers, the priority likely wouldn't've been on using a polished presenter, just making the information available.

New comment by alt219 in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

alt219 — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:39:41 +0000

Some anecdata: in the area I'm from in the northeastern US which has a large number of manufacturing/tool & die companies of all sizes, and with a large Polish diaspora, 80% of the most skilled machinists are Polish (or 2nd or 3rd gen descendants), at least that was the case when I was working with these business between 20-30 years ago. Many of the best engineers at these business are Polish as well.

New comment by alt219 in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

alt219 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:35:33 +0000

Why not just `scp ~/.tmux.conf remotehost:`?

New comment by alt219 in "EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security"

alt219 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:07:49 +0000

1.1.1.1 has 4 1’s, as in 4/1, as in April 1 (or so I assume).

New comment by alt219 in "Cocoa-Way – Native macOS Wayland compositor for running Linux apps seamlessly"

alt219 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 14:08:29 +0000

PuTTY is absolutely available for Linux. On Debian-based distros it’s just a `sudo apt install putty` away. But why?

New comment by alt219 in "$912 energy independence without red tape"

alt219 — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 22:37:02 +0000

Two things come to mind: 1) if any arcing occurs, a metal enclosure will shunt to ground and (hopefully) trip a breaker; 2) in the event of an overload, plastic melts which might result in a fire.

New comment by alt219 in "Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites"

alt219 — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:27:24 +0000

Sadly, I have a family member who is susceptible to these types of scams. They’ve been duped too many times to count. They’re overly eager to believe they’re exceptional and that good fortune is due them. No amount of explaining has had any impact on their beliefs for the past fifteen years. It’s heart-wrenching.

New comment by alt219 in "Apple needs a Snow Sequoia"

alt219 — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 01:22:15 +0000

Except for when the placement of the icon strip with the trashcan symbol changes to the bottom of the context menu because of the location of the context menu on the screen. Bonkers. No idea why the UI committee would’ve okayed that one.

New comment by alt219 in "Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design"

alt219 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 01:56:33 +0000

> Imagine having to raise your arm to swipe, pinch and tap across an ultra-wide screen several times per minute. Touch works best on small surfaces, even if it looks impressive on a bigger screen.

I regularly find myself wishing pinch zoom were available on my large multi-monitor setup, even if i only used it occasionally, i.e. to augment interactions, not as a replacement for other input methods. As a (poor) substitute, I keep an Apple trackpad handy and switch from a mouse to trackpad to do zooming. Sadly I’ve found not all macOS apps respond to Magic Mouse zooming maneuvers.

New comment by alt219 in "Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe"

alt219 — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 20:43:16 +0000

According to the article, they were arms dealers.

New comment by alt219 in "The James Webb Space Telescope – making 300 points of failure reliable"

alt219 — Sun, 09 Jan 2022 18:03:40 +0000

Minor pedantic point—kelvin is the unit of measure of the Kelvin scale. There is no degree K, just K.

New comment by alt219 in "Decoding James Webb Space Telescope"

alt219 — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 13:01:40 +0000

The protocol is called SpaceWire[0][1]. Not sure about the details of where sensors are located.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceWire [1]: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030025278/downloads/20...

New comment by alt219 in "The 'specialness spiral:' Why we label ordinary objects as too special to use"

alt219 — Sat, 09 Oct 2021 21:00:39 +0000

Some history of The Milk:

https://alum.mit.edu/slice/investigating-milk-mits-historic-...

New comment by alt219 in "Ask HN: What is the oldest image online in which the link is not broken?"

alt219 — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 12:59:15 +0000

I actually owned that book circa 1996 and used Kermit in a production system transferring files via dialup between a manufacturing facility in Mexico and their US-based headquarters. It was incredibly fragile. No idea now why Kermit was chosen, but it was a horrible tool for the job.

New comment by alt219 in "Laptop stolen from Pelosi's office during storming of U.S. Capitol, says aide"

alt219 — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 23:28:31 +0000

The professor was bluffing [0].

Apparently it was deemed a random theft [1].

[0]: https://www.engadget.com/2005-04-25-laptop-thief-not-scared-...

[1]: https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/09/15_lapt...