Hacker News: jbuzbee

New comment by jbuzbee in "Coding on Paper"

jbuzbee — Tue, 19 May 2026 02:01:43 +0000

My first job out of college in the early 80's was working on diagnostics for an old NASA computer. "What language do I use?" I asked my boss. "We don't have a compiler". OK, I thought, assembly language. "No" said my boss "We don't have an assembler". "OK" I guess I'll write machine language. "What's the development environment?" "We don't have one. There's no editor. There's no network. There's no keyboard or monitor" I had to write my diagnostics in 96 bit hex using pencil and paper and then enter my program into the computer using toggle switches on the front panel. Kids today have no idea :-) And get off my lawn!

New comment by jbuzbee in "Trump administration's whole-government AI plans leaked on GitHub"

jbuzbee — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 16:29:55 +0000

Worried about the privacy of data that the US government holds on you? It's soon to be in the hands of a quickly thrown together AI system for the entire federal government

Trump administration's whole-government AI plans leaked on GitHub

jbuzbee — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 16:29:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/10/trump_admin_leak_government_ai_plans/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44283196

Points: 17

# Comments: 4

New comment by jbuzbee in "Notes on the History of the Map Tile"

jbuzbee — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 15:48:48 +0000

I worked on a system at Martin Marietta in the late 80's and early 90's where we created tiled maps for use by the US Army. We had a large scanner we'd use to scan their maps, then we'd georectify the scan and slice the result up into tiles of 128x128 pixels which would be compressed before storing to a whopping 360 Meg hard drive. I participated in a number of Army field exercises in the US and Europe where we'd show the digital maps and graphic overlays off to troops who were using paper maps with little paper icons they move around to reflect the current situation. Our capability never went anywhere because Management wasn't really into map-maping and the Defense Mapping Agency started doing it themselves, distributing their maps on CD.

New comment by jbuzbee in "Build a Low-Cost Drone Using ESP32"

jbuzbee — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 20:18:22 +0000

"Hard to find a more American article than this." Just wait until they start taking pot-shots at them and then it will be "real" America: BOOM! "Look Ma! I done got one!"

New comment by jbuzbee in "Satellites Spotting Aircraft"

jbuzbee — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 23:31:02 +0000

Just another example of impulsive and very poor judgment from Trump. Even though he had the right to declassify this image, his only reason to do so was to taunt the Iranians - Ha Ha, your rocket blew up. The Iranians likely corrected their issue and moved on whereas now our adversaries have clear evidence of our satellite capabilities and can adjust their behavior accordingly for years to come.

New comment by jbuzbee in "Solar generates fifth of global electricity on summer solstice midday peak"

jbuzbee — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 13:15:12 +0000

Yeah - When covered in even a moderate amount of snow, output drops almost all the way off. I had thought that being black, they would melt off quickly, but that doesn't appear to be the case. As an aside, my daughter's neighbor has solar and after a big snowstorm, a foot of snow slid off his panels, right into the side of her house destroying a basement window and blowing shattered glass 5 foot into the basement.

New comment by jbuzbee in "Feathers are one of evolution's cleverest inventions"

jbuzbee — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 23:26:07 +0000

One interesting fact that I recall, and that I didn't see in the article, is that evolution in some Owls traded off silent flight for the inability to fly when their feathers are wet. When there's an extended period of wet weather, owl fledglings may starve because their parents can't hunt.

New comment by jbuzbee in "Matter 1.2 – New device types and improvements"

jbuzbee — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 02:41:10 +0000

Yeah, you typically need some sort of hub unless you run Home Assistant. My understanding is that it doesn't need any hub for Matter support.

New comment by jbuzbee in "Matter 1.2 – New device types and improvements"

jbuzbee — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 01:43:12 +0000

Yeah - you can even pass your own python, go, bash, etc. "on/off" script as a parameter to the example matter-device so you can get away with no code changes at all. You can get help at the listed discord server.

New comment by jbuzbee in "Matter 1.2 – New device types and improvements"

jbuzbee — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 01:18:44 +0000

If you can do Typescript, matter.js makes it trivial to at least create a virtual matter device. Five minutes to clone the repo, build, run and pair with Google, Apple, Alexa, SmartThings, etc. The one caveat is certification. With Google you need to register as a developer so it allows an uncertified device. The others just give a warning.

See: https://github.com/project-chip/matter.js

New comment by jbuzbee in "The pneumatic tube mail system in New York City"

jbuzbee — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 00:20:07 +0000

Those bank-teller tubes are still in use in the Denver suburbs.

New comment by jbuzbee in "The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge"

jbuzbee — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 01:43:16 +0000

Enjoyed the story and it reminded me of another bridge over I-225 that I wondered about and drive under occasionally in the Denver area. The bridge is much wider than a typical pedestrian bridge and there is really "nothing" on either side. I don't know if it's true, but the story I eventually found is that when I-225 was being built in the 70's it cut a farmer's field in half so he got a personal bridge that he could drive across in his tractor! Of course now, the farmer and his fields are long gone. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.6415158,-104.8783965,87a,35y...

New comment by jbuzbee in "Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)"

jbuzbee — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 02:50:11 +0000

Olathe had POpular 4 and STate 2

New comment by jbuzbee in "Why was the F-117 retired so quickly?"

jbuzbee — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 23:15:17 +0000

If you search on youtube, you can see that some F-117s are still flying. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UUOJBBNfZY&ab_channel=Youtu...

New comment by jbuzbee in "EsPiFF: An ESP32 in the Raspberry Pi form factor"

jbuzbee — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 22:07:36 +0000

I use this in a little raspberry pi project. For persistence, I occasionally copy data to a writable partition and then at boot, after the ram overlay is mounted, I copy it back.

New comment by jbuzbee in "Waymo's collision avoidance testing"

jbuzbee — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 00:15:05 +0000

I don't know the answer, but are these numbers comparable? I would assume that Waymo is talking about crashes while in self-driving mode, is that true for Tesla as well or are they just talking about all miles driven, self driving mode and manual?

New comment by jbuzbee in "Tales of the M1 GPU"

jbuzbee — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 19:30:50 +0000

I was just getting ready to say the same thing and was wishing for a plugin that would replace all exclamation points with a period. That would make reading much easier

New comment by jbuzbee in "Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad"

jbuzbee — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 16:15:36 +0000

I just got done searching for an accessory for a specific model of car on Amazon. My results prominently included items (ads) for accessories for a different model of car that would not fit my car. How does that help anyone? Wasted money for the company buying ads. Wasted time for me trying to figure out what is really applicable. And if I wasn't careful, I'd have ordered the wrong thing and would have to return it wasting everyone's time and effort. I guess Amazon got their money for showing me the ad. Worth it? I wouldn't think so, but I'm not one of the richest person in the world like Bezos - My lack of vision?

New comment by jbuzbee in "Build a passive radar with software-defined radio"

jbuzbee — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 23:14:28 +0000

I worked on a downstream consumer of a passive radar system years ago and was amazed at its capabilities. We had it set up on a tennis court outside of Farnborough UK during a bi-annual air show and it was able to track all the activities of the various planes going through their routines. And I recall seeing commercial aircraft out in the English channel, 50 miles or so away. I don't know what became of the system, but there's an old marketing brochure online here: http://www.mobileradar.org/Documents/Silent_Sentry.pdf