Hacker News: f2f

New comment by f2f in "C implementation of Tic-Tac-Toe in a single call to printf"

f2f — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 07:53:29 +0000

thanks. now i have nightmares.

New comment by f2f in "John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code"

f2f — Tue, 19 May 2020 02:02:21 +0000

not only contributing!

https://github.com/bob-beck/foundation-web/commit/a005fbc9e4...

New comment by f2f in "Oil plummets 30% as OPEC deal failure sparks price war fears"

f2f — Sun, 08 Mar 2020 23:23:00 +0000

what are you talking about? we all got rich from all that Klein Money in 2008. still reverberating in the economy as we collectively decided not to buy booze and steak and instead invested them all /s

New comment by f2f in "Go-flavored Pascal: A small embeddable self-hosting Pascal compiler for Windows"

f2f — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 04:03:56 +0000

Robert Griesemer, from the Thompson/Pike/Griesemer triumvirate that created Go, did his PhD under Wirth.

New comment by f2f in "Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating systems"

f2f — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 05:02:42 +0000

the article mentions plan9 but says that it left a lot to be desired due to unstructured text input/output interface.

i want to note that Inferno, the other OS that came from Bell-Labs in the 90s did have a typed shell called alphabet:

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/1/sh-alphabet.html

mayhaps you'll find this interesting.

New comment by f2f in "How Canada's military reacted to seeing Pokemon Go players trespassing"

f2f — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 20:05:13 +0000

the locations are identical to the ones users submitted for ingress, the previous game niantic did.

for that you didn't need much vetting and because the popularity was low nobody cared so much. most likely some servicemen (servicepersons?) submitted the spots.

New comment by f2f in "Soviet Santa"

f2f — Thu, 26 Dec 2019 01:31:42 +0000

"дядо мраз" in bulgaria. we also celebrated xmas with a quiet family vegetarian dinner, not having such a massive clampdown on religion, and "mraz" delivered presents on new year's. after 1989 things came back to normality and he's now called "дядо коледа". new year's is just a drinking holiday :)

New comment by f2f in "John Wheeler’s H-bomb blues"

f2f — Sun, 08 Dec 2019 05:54:15 +0000

another day, another person on the interwebs attacking what is clearly a suggestion (with a supporting narrative) thinking it's presented as gospel.

the typesetting in the pdf is clearly superb to my tastes. there are many ways to present he same dish. i prefer the fancier that can be enjoyed longer.

New comment by f2f in "John Wheeler’s H-bomb blues"

f2f — Sun, 08 Dec 2019 02:37:30 +0000

One suggestion: go with the PDF and not the web page. Grab a comfy recliner and just tune out for a while. The difference between the layouts of the magazine article and the webpage are atrocious. Shows you what we've lost in this modern age :(

I'll buy his book. It will go along with many others I've accumulated from that era, such as a 'A Short History of Nuclear Folly'. Atom bombs and planes is what that time was all about, for me.

New comment by f2f in "Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years"

f2f — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 03:14:11 +0000

oh, you mean since Roswell? ok.

New comment by f2f in "Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan"

f2f — Mon, 28 Oct 2019 02:58:38 +0000

Currently #1 in "Best Sellers in Computing Industry History" on amazon, which is somewhat of a weird category :)

Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

f2f — Mon, 28 Oct 2019 02:30:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21373800

Points: 502

# Comments: 139

New comment by f2f in "Secretive military spaceplane lands in Florida after record-long orbital flight"

f2f — Mon, 28 Oct 2019 00:03:05 +0000

the article mentions hexafluoride. but LANL did (and probably still does) hydrazine. source:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2690378

(used to intern, and subsequently work there, although not as a chemist, of course. i'm not that smart)

and if you want to pedant that the patent wasn't issued to los alamos nat'l laboratory... well, in '54 things were different :)

New comment by f2f in "Secretive military spaceplane lands in Florida after record-long orbital flight"

f2f — Sun, 27 Oct 2019 23:13:48 +0000

There was this amazing article in 2010 about "chemical compounds i will not work with". Tetrafluorohydrazine was one of them:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...

and mentions briefly that hydrazine is produced at los alamos for national security purposes.

New comment by f2f in "The Octopus: An Alien Among Us"

f2f — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 23:06:48 +0000

wouldn't that be fun?

New comment by f2f in "The Octopus: An Alien Among Us"

f2f — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 05:00:07 +0000

you're going to love Peter Watts' "The Things":

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

it's 1982's "the thing", from the perspective of the, well, thing :)

New comment by f2f in "Cache Attacks on CTR_DRBG"

f2f — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 04:17:11 +0000

yes. fips compliance says "use what we tell you to use. want government contracts? be fips compliant."

it's a source of a lot of online discussion as the compliant algorithms aren't the best available. here's to bureaucracy!

New comment by f2f in "Cache Attacks on CTR_DRBG"

f2f — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 18:15:26 +0000

anything that is FIPS compliant will use one of the mandated DRBGs, there are two others besides CTR_DRBG.

BoringSSL implements CTR_DRBG with AES for example: https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/+/fed35d32245ee...

New comment by f2f in "Creeping normality"

f2f — Sat, 10 Aug 2019 22:03:00 +0000

> What is up with all of these wikipedia entries making the front page of hacker news? Has it always been so and I’m mis remembering thinking this is something new?

Hehe, there's another name for what you're describing: baader-meinhof effect...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader%E2%80%93Meinhof_effect

Everything has a name nowadays. Taxonomies are almost complete :)

New comment by f2f in "Yaegi – Yet Another Go Interpreter"

f2f — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 05:20:44 +0000

a bit less:

    $ cat > t.go
    package main
    func main() {}
    $ go build t.go
    $ ls -l t
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 f2f  staff  1101432 24 Jul 23:19 t