Hacker News: contingencies

New comment by contingencies in "Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?"

contingencies — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:19:13 +0000

IMHO Bauhaus was about design for functionalism and 'getting the job done' efficiently. When viewed in this sense, a Bauhaus frontend might be gopher, an old Nokia phone, or the unix command line.

A modern tent is arguably the evolution of the Bauhaus spirit applied to structure. Tents do suck in comfort compared to pre-Bauhaus European buildings, but if you're going to carry a building to the top of a mountain, they're not a bad option!

ie. Pre-Bauhaus = It costs what it costs. Tradition reigns. Bauhaus = Mass manufacturing and material properties in-scope for design, resulting in often better design when holistically considered.

New comment by contingencies in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

contingencies — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:49:33 +0000

Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. - Henry Spencer .. via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

New comment by contingencies in "Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis"

contingencies — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:35:58 +0000

He who controls the data controls the learner. - @pmddomingos

In this case the data is the AI output and the learner is the executive.

New comment by contingencies in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

contingencies — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:07:10 +0000

CIA: Corruption Institute of America

New comment by contingencies in "Childhood Computing"

contingencies — Mon, 25 May 2026 08:44:29 +0000

Indeed: config.sys autoexec.bat, EMS, HIGHMEM, and all those terrible early sound blaster drivers, mouse drivers, network drivers... I think the one I found hardest to get running was Quarantine. But it was definitely one of the best games. So imaginative for the era. And Australian! With music from some later famous bands! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwO8XWbB1Pk&list=PLA5hK1g6CN... https://www.playdosgames.com/play/quarantine

New comment by contingencies in "Usborne 1980s Computer Books"

contingencies — Sun, 24 May 2026 18:20:21 +0000

Lua/Love2D?

New comment by contingencies in "Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers"

contingencies — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:26:09 +0000

Suggested monetization strategy: porn.

New comment by contingencies in "Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)"

contingencies — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:14:56 +0000

Central planning and heterogeneous large scale distributed agriculture don't mix.

New comment by contingencies in "Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)"

contingencies — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:08:45 +0000

Being raised by KMT and switching to CCP via the US matches this general narrative. But perhaps 'pragmatist' is more appropriate than 'opportunist'. After all, there were only so many countries with a missile program and resources for someone who speaks Mandarin and English and had a family who didn't want to learn Russian. In the interpretations I've been given, Taiwan at that stage was a mess. I think he was probably deeply hurt by the purge and would have stayed in the US and contributed further if it wasn't for the tide of McCarthyist nationalism. The US in the current era definitely has similar tones, which I have personally encountered. This warning piece comes late and may fall on deaf ears.

New comment by contingencies in "I Found Ultra-Pure Quantum Crystals in an Abandoned Mine in the Atacama Desert"

contingencies — Tue, 19 May 2026 10:27:12 +0000

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

New comment by contingencies in "Étienne Ghys: The Shape of Letters: From Leonardo da Vinci to Donald Knuth"

contingencies — Mon, 18 May 2026 08:46:15 +0000

French + fonts = B612 @ https://github.com/polarsys/b612

New comment by contingencies in "Hindenburg’s Smoking Room"

contingencies — Mon, 18 May 2026 06:16:32 +0000

Possibly also: in toilets antifreeze such as methanol diluted in water can be used for freeze protection at low concentrations but is flammable and hazardous at higher concentrations.

New comment by contingencies in "Plato's Cave and the Rise of the Highly Educated Radical"

contingencies — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:46:08 +0000

Having lived in China for an extended period (most of two decades) and traveled India for months, I think a "15 years behind" narrative is highly misconstrued, even at that point. I first visited China in '98 and India in 2000. India was laying its first fiber optics in New Delhi, while China was kicking out European suppliers after having mastered its own cellular equipment, cloned Cisco and began to broadcast free to air IP protocol suite TV documentaries to 1.4 billion people. By the 2010s China had hosted the Olympics and had a space station and a viable navigation satellite constellation, a high speed rail network, an aircraft carrier and was advancing domestic airline production. India was then and is now permanently behind China with a completely disparate and arguably negative trajectory: there's no viable temporal offset narrative. In my view the biggest issues in India are treatment of women, the caste system, corruption and poverty.

New comment by contingencies in "The Tree House: A voyage to the source of a backyard dream"

contingencies — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:05:28 +0000

Suggest a pneumatic system. Motion detected = high velocity puff.

New comment by contingencies in "The Tree House: A voyage to the source of a backyard dream"

contingencies — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:40:33 +0000

Just saw the spectacular picture of that Papuan treehouse in the same National Geographic yesterday!

Online courtesy of the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/edg-ng-1981/edg%20NG%201996-02%2... (People of the Trees, p. 34)

New comment by contingencies in "Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter"

contingencies — Wed, 13 May 2026 23:27:08 +0000

Unfortunately that general part of the world has a lot of ethno-religious conflict normalized from birth. Monotheistic zealotry, current conflicts, Greece/Turkey, former Yugoslavia, etc.

New comment by contingencies in "Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter"

contingencies — Wed, 13 May 2026 23:25:37 +0000

It is vastly more likely, historically speaking, for the EU to pass such forward-looking legislation in the public interest.

New comment by contingencies in "I hate soldering"

contingencies — Tue, 12 May 2026 11:07:51 +0000

Anti-Schematic fantastic

Hacked the physical: pentastic!

Got the pump-wickin' stickin',

Who didn't turn off the bench?

Where's the 100x lens Gibson?

IC damage and bits of French

Master fine STM RPI ATM 329

Fuckin' A to the Zed

Fill your lungs with lead

Y'all shit's funded by

Venture rebrands for A&I.

New comment by contingencies in "YC's Biggest Scandals"

contingencies — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:11:36 +0000

Selling shovels baby! For a bonus move, create spatiotemporal nexus[0] for sheep-like investors to baaa together.

[0] demo day

New comment by contingencies in "Light without electricity? Glowing algae could make it possible"

contingencies — Sat, 09 May 2026 03:31:59 +0000

Mushrooms too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalotus_nidiformis