Hacker News: sjackso

New comment by sjackso in "Of mice and men and Magdalen: C. S. Lewis’s Oxford"

sjackso — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:29:21 +0000

Davidman had a lot of influence on the writing of "Till We Have Faces," but it was published before her death. "A Grief Observed" is the book Lewis wrote about the grief that followed.

New comment by sjackso in "The U.S. may be missing human cases of bird flu, scientists say"

sjackso — Thu, 02 May 2024 18:15:35 +0000

The 1918 influenza pandemic killed tens of millions, disproportionately affecting young and healthy adults. Does that not qualify as super-deadly?

New comment by sjackso in "Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation"

sjackso — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 15:59:26 +0000

As a datapoint, yesterday's lockout affected my Apple ID that is based on a ~25-year-old mac.com address.

New comment by sjackso in "Infocom-zcode-terps: Historical source code for Infocom's Z-machine interpreters"

sjackso — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 03:38:48 +0000

The creator of this github repo is the same person who publicly called for the release of the infocom adventures after Microsoft acquired Activision. (HN discussion from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37893794)

I don't see mention of a license in the repo, but I wonder if informal permission was given to make the sources public?

New comment by sjackso in "Euclid's First Images"

sjackso — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 05:54:54 +0000

Ah, yes-- but if you shop around, you can find a telescope of that aperture for less. Here's one for a mere $132k!

https://explorescientificusa.com/collections/optiques-fullum...

New comment by sjackso in "IceCube – South Pole Neutrino Observatory"

sjackso — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 04:33:43 +0000

Christchurch is the logistics hub and support base for the US presence in Antarctica, so I believe all US facilities on the continent conduct their work in that time zone.

Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea

sjackso — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 21:59:28 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/10/microsoft-consumes-activision

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37893794

Points: 203

# Comments: 160

New comment by sjackso in "Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)"

sjackso — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 20:20:20 +0000

Maybe this has been fixed in recent models, but ten years ago it was easy to experience baffling laptop sleep states if you happened to set a working macbook down on top of another, similarly-sized macbook with its lid closed.

New comment by sjackso in "CHART: Completely Hackable Amateur Radio Telescope"

sjackso — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 23:46:10 +0000

The effort-to-results ratio is definitely better on the visible light side. Pictures are exciting, and much easier to explain.

A lot of smart amateurs discuss all things astro at the Cloudy Night forums; the subforum where topics such as radio astronomy are discussed is here: https://www.cloudynights.com/forum/88-scientific-amateur-ast... Could be worth a look if you're seeking ways to contribute to the area.

New comment by sjackso in "I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)"

sjackso — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 17:24:21 +0000

Similar experience here. I went to a new dentist who had one of those machines and he told me I needed at least nine fillings. I declined and found someone else. Over 16 years and multiple moves/new dentists since then, maybe three of those teeth have actually needed fillings.

New comment by sjackso in "Physicists produce neutrino images of Milky Way galaxy"

sjackso — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 21:53:07 +0000

The detector is made of thousands of light sensors arranged in a a km-scale 3D grid. When a neutrino interaction causes a flash of light inside this volume, multiple sensors detect the photons with nanosecond-level time resolution. So a 3D map can be made of where the light started and how it moved over time.

For a macroscale analogue, imagine a large 3D grid of microphones all recording sound. If you fired a cannon from inside this grid and looked at the waveforms from all the microphones, you could work out where the cannon was, and also form a pretty good guess of what direction it was pointed.

New comment by sjackso in "The Bathyscaph Trieste: Technological and Operational Aspects (1962)"

sjackso — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 20:29:57 +0000

I recall reading about the craft using gasoline as an incompressible floatation fluid, but I hadn't realized the scale: 100 tons of gasoline, making up 2/3s of the craft's mass.

New comment by sjackso in "No Man's Sky Now on Mac"

sjackso — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 18:19:25 +0000

The timing and text of this announcement certainly suggest that they've been gearing up to be a launch title on Apple's headset.

Which makes me wonder if Apple's been funding development, perhaps for some time.

New comment by sjackso in "How Micro Drill Bits Are Made [video]"

sjackso — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 20:24:13 +0000

A local hobby shop sold a kit with ten bits, 1.0mm down to 0.1mm, which I bought on a lark several years ago.

The middle sized bits are occasionally useful to (carefully!) finger-drill a tiny hole through a plastic part. They're rigid, very sharp, but pretty breakable if you're not careful.

The 0.1mm bit is so small that it's upsetting even to look at. I've never taken it out of the case.

New comment by sjackso in "Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?"

sjackso — Wed, 25 May 2022 18:25:11 +0000

Good news - you are describing a game that exists! It's called Overload and is the spiritual successor to the Descent series, written by the original creators of that series.

There is a small but active multiplayer community. (Find it on the community Discord server.)

https://playoverload.com

New comment by sjackso in "The counterintuitive rise of Python in scientific computing (2020)"

sjackso — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 20:13:44 +0000

To make matters worse, university staff software engineering jobs usually pay 1/3 to 1/2 of comparable jobs in industry (even after excluding FAANG-level outlier salaries), and in most cases offer no meaningful career progression.

I think universities will never be able to compete for engineering talent until they can create attractive career paths for people who aren't professors.

New comment by sjackso in "The Ur-Quan Masters"

sjackso — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 06:09:46 +0000

Sunless Sea comes to mind.

New comment by sjackso in "Home Lab Hardware Guide"

sjackso — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 20:38:57 +0000

I have a little experience with both the old and new Supermicro stuff. The new x10 IPMI experience is a lot like the old x9 java app experience, except you don't have to dig out an ancient computer to make it work. (Which feels great by comparison!)

New comment by sjackso in "D2X-XL – an OpenGL modification of the classic video game Descent 2"

sjackso — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 04:20:30 +0000

Double and triple chording is part of what makes the Descent-series games (as well as Overload) so interesting.

Your ship moves freely in all directions, and your speed is proportional to the square root of the number of independent directions you're moving in. Fly forward, speed is one unit; fly forward + sideways, speed is 1.41 units; fly forward + sideways + vertically, speed is 1.73 units.

There's a long, challenging learning curve to making best use of this mechanic.

New comment by sjackso in "“I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)"

sjackso — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 21:44:16 +0000

Alternative to escape in vi and vi-alikes: control-[

I recommend committing this to muscle memory. It takes two fingers, but is more comfortable than reaching for escape on most keyboards.

I prefer mapping caps lock to control rather than to escape, but that's another good alternative. But in any case it's nice to have another option for quitting vim in case something terrible has happened to your escape key, as it sometimes can (sigh) on modern laptops.