Hacker News: ricksunny

New comment by ricksunny in "Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0"

ricksunny — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:33:06 +0000

Is uninstalling homebrew still as much of a mess as it was when I tried to do it in 2022 (when it left behind a messy install footprint on my Mac)?

New comment by ricksunny in "The Cypherpunk Library"

ricksunny — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:31:00 +0000

then I will work on uploading them to Hoogle Drive. So watchbthis spsce (or register for the unofficial Hacker News replies-monitoring feature.)

New comment by ricksunny in "The Cypherpunk Library"

ricksunny — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:58:54 +0000

The crypto-oriented 4Seas coworking in Chiang Mai set up a very nice exhibit to cypherpunks as laid against the history of cryptography. I took pictures as the exhibit is supposed to have been taken down by now:

https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/113373898014727437041/pl...

I have photos of the individual exhibit pieces too if anyone's interested.

New comment by ricksunny in "Backpressure is all you need"

ricksunny — Sun, 31 May 2026 13:31:58 +0000

lol your comment sounds like a Claude apology

New comment by ricksunny in "Declassified CIA Cartography Maps from the 1980s"

ricksunny — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:41:29 +0000

Wake me up when they offer an unredacted, unadulterated map of S4.

New comment by ricksunny in "The analog computer museum's online library"

ricksunny — Mon, 25 May 2026 22:32:11 +0000

The ability for producers of write-ups on 20th c. technology history / computer history to write Vannevar Bush out of the history books by way of ignorant omission never ceases to amaze me. Especially in this case of an anthology on analog computing.

New comment by ricksunny in "Security researcher says Microsoft built a Bitlocker backdoor, releases exploit"

ricksunny — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:48:10 +0000

Why is 'conspiratorial' posed as a prime facie _bad thing_ to posit?

New comment by ricksunny in "Colossus: The Forbin Project"

ricksunny — Sun, 17 May 2026 08:41:00 +0000

I cottoned onto the film a couple years ago after Ready Player One’s Ernest Cline recommended it on a Weaponized podcast. I like that the exterior facility shots were filmed at Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. In the film context I really would construe it as projecting some sort of Cold-War era “secure government science facility” architectural archetype. When one learns about the career arc of E.O.Lawrence, the stylistic allusion to Cold War science feels all the more fitting. Viz. Lawrence Livermore lab has the reputation today of being the more secure, clandestine lab, while nearby Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL) has the reputation of being the stand-up academic science lab that welcomes international academic all-comers. But prior to Lawrence Livermore’s founding (like while Edward Teller was closer to the then Berkeley Rad Lab, now LBL). And so for several years, 1940s to at least the early 1950s, Berkeley Rad Lab would have been possessed of what would become those same Livermore-esque secure spooky Cold War science vibes.

New comment by ricksunny in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

ricksunny — Thu, 14 May 2026 17:04:40 +0000

Vaswani, A., et al. (2017) Attention Is All You Need. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Long Beach, 4-9 December 2017, 6000-6010.

Generally understood to be an output of Googlers.

New comment by ricksunny in "The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)"

ricksunny — Wed, 13 May 2026 12:55:57 +0000

Thoughts on Bell Labs' alum Karl Nell? Having intimated (avoiding formally stating) that some of the things he was read-into came as part of his time there.

New comment by ricksunny in "GitHub is sinking"

ricksunny — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:22:36 +0000

I like the "written by human" banner at the bottom - that's a first for me and will be glad to see others adpot similar.

>Written by human All opinions are my own and not those of a large language model. Everything I write is one hundred percent human. Because I care!

New comment by ricksunny in "US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos"

ricksunny — Sun, 10 May 2026 08:17:44 +0000

That’s probably it, thank you!

New comment by ricksunny in "US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos"

ricksunny — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:43:33 +0000

For some reason, unlike most other commenters, yours doesn’t present the downvote button. I thought this might be a privilege of very high karma like other downvote-missing commenters i see sparsely lower down, but your karma is lower than mine and I get downvoted frequently enough. I’d like to understand HN’s community management functions better.

New comment by ricksunny in "Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test"

ricksunny — Tue, 05 May 2026 13:25:23 +0000

I hope you manage to get some rest after the tiring tribulations people pose on forums.

New comment by ricksunny in "Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test"

ricksunny — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:44:46 +0000

It is not my intention to induce fatigue in anyone, though I am impressed that a reply comment in a forum is capable of doing so.

New comment by ricksunny in "Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test"

ricksunny — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:13:05 +0000

Would it? Or would it be treated as an errant experiment by either the journal or the experimentalists themselves, foregoing publishing until they had a result that was better aligned with established norms? Rightly or wrongly, I expect that stakeholders would tend to invoke Sagan’s ECREE over the course of the publication process.

New comment by ricksunny in "Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test"

ricksunny — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:32:29 +0000

If it had failed, would we be hearing about it in Science before the researchers continued testing it until it passed? (i.e. is this a blindspot in our collective epistemology?)

New comment by ricksunny in "We still don't have a more precise value for "Big G""

ricksunny — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 07:43:12 +0000

Y’know, I went and looked at the current Wikipedia page for the Cavendish experiment. There’s apparently more nuance than my simple outline offers, particularly as G wasn’t treated as an isolated quantity till decades after his experiment.

Linking directly to section anchor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_experiment#Reformula...

There is less description than I would like, but I am happy to have been made aware of the discrepancy at all.

New comment by ricksunny in "We still don't have a more precise value for "Big G""

ricksunny — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:59:30 +0000

Several years back when I first learned about the Cavendish experiment, I was indeed surprised that he was able to measure anything related to gravity without using a planetary-scale mass as one of experimental masses.

New comment by ricksunny in "We still don't have a more precise value for "Big G""

ricksunny — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:06:00 +0000

By ascertaining an approxiamte value of G , perhaps? After that, you know M_earth, and already knowing Earth’s geometry, one arrives at average density rho.