Hacker News: staplung

New comment by staplung in "A fundamental principle of aeronautical engineering has been overturned"

staplung — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:20:37 +0000

The headline is perhaps overstating things a bit but they do discuss how this is different than e.g. rivulets

''' This technology is fundamentally different from the “rivulet (shark skin) process,” which is known as a typical aerodynamic drag reduction technology. The rivulet process mimics the fine longitudinal grooves in shark skin, and by carving grooves approximately 0.1 mm wide along the direction of airflow, it aligns the vortices that occur near the wall surface of turbulent airflow areas. DMR, on the other hand, delays the switch from laminar to turbulent flow by means of random and minute irregularities. The flow zones it affects and the mechanisms it employs are based on completely different concepts. '''

New comment by staplung in "Starship's Twelfth Flight Test"

staplung — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:46:03 +0000

I wonder what's holding them back from attempting to land...on land (as opposed to another splashdown in the ocean). They must have their reasons but there have got to be engineers dying to get their hands on a returned vehicle to see exactly how the tiles held up and if there's any other damage that doesn't show up so easily on the video feed.

New comment by staplung in "Think Linear Algebra (2023)"

staplung — Sun, 10 May 2026 16:25:22 +0000

Allen Downey (author of the above) has a number of books on computer science-y things. You can buy hardcopies but I think all of them are also just freely available.

Here's a few:

Think Complexity

https://github.com/AllenDowney/ThinkComplexity2

Think DSP

https://github.com/AllenDowney/ThinkDSP

Think Stats

https://github.com/AllenDowney/ThinkStats/

Think Bayes

https://github.com/AllenDowney/ThinkBayes2/

New comment by staplung in "Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school"

staplung — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:51:52 +0000

  I and the public know
  What all schoolchildren learn
  Those to whom evil is done
  Do evil in return.

W.H. Auden

New comment by staplung in "Show HN: Trust – Coding Rust like it's 1989"

staplung — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:22:08 +0000

Have you tried Fresh? Has everything you listed and more

https://getfresh.dev/

New comment by staplung in "Someone allegedly used a hairdryer to rig Polymarket weather bets"

staplung — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:27:47 +0000

They said that Cobra would never acquire the pieces of the Weather Dominator. Now we’re doomed!

New comment by staplung in "The USB Situation"

staplung — Sat, 02 May 2026 23:55:35 +0000

Per Dave Barry

"The plug on this device represents the latest thinking of the electrical industry's Plug Mutation Group, which, in a continuing effort to prevent consumers from causing hazardous electrical current to flow through their appliances, developed the Three-Pronged Plug, then the Plug Where One Prong is Bigger Than the Other. Your device is equiped with the revolutionary new Plug Whose Prongs Consist of Six Small Religious Figurines Made of Chocolate. DO NOT TRY TO PLUG IT IN! Lay it gently on the floor near an outlet, but out of direct sunlight, and clean it weekly with a damp handkerchief."

A Falcon 9 rocket will hit the Moon this summer at 7x the speed of sound

staplung — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:32:43 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/a-falcon-9-upper-stage-will-strike-the-moon-in-august/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975239

Points: 1

# Comments: 5

Sub two-hour marathon record broken

staplung — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:08:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.espn.com/olympics/trackandfield/story/_/id/48598786/sabastian-sawe-wins-london-marathon-record-1st-finish-2-hours

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911887

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by staplung in "Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy"

staplung — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 23:38:09 +0000

Sadly, the article says nothing about how old the fragment is or how it compares to other early copies of the Iliad. Somewhat amazingly, the earliest complete copy of the Iliad is from around 950 C.E.

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

New comment by staplung in "Show HN: Gova – The declarative GUI framework for Go"

staplung — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:27:42 +0000

Intro code snippet has two buttons ("+" and "-") in an HStack. Expected them to be arranged horizontally but in the accompanying screenshot they're stacked vertically. Is that intentional?

New comment by staplung in "Blue Origin's rocket reuse achievement marred by upper stage failure"

staplung — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:50:25 +0000

The failure of the upper stage is a bummer. If it triggers a months-long review, that will almost certainly bump back the schedule for the prototype Blue Moon lander launch.

New comment by staplung in "The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker"

staplung — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 17:20:20 +0000

Honest question: how do you track stars during daylight? Is it the case that at the operational altitude of the B-52, bright stars are always visible?

New comment by staplung in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"

staplung — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 22:14:50 +0000

What if I like magenta? Or brown?

New comment by staplung in "Dark Castle"

staplung — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:13:24 +0000

You can also play it in the browser in Infinite Mac: https://infinitemac.org/1991/System%207.0

(Worked somewhat better for me than the classicreload version)

New comment by staplung in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

staplung — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:21:56 +0000

In total, a little over one dozen astronauts died on shuttle flights (14). No astronauts died during Gemini or Mercury. Three died in a test on Apollo 1. The shuttle failure rate was nowhere close to 1/10. In fact, it was 1/67 (2 failures out of 134 flights).

New comment by staplung in "Militarized snowflakes: The accidental beauty of Renaissance star forts"

staplung — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:10:48 +0000

The Tower of London arguably qualifies as a fort built to protect its inhabitants from the city. In its original form, its most impressive and formidable defenses faced London.

New comment by staplung in "VisiCalc Reconstructed"

staplung — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 03:56:47 +0000

Cool article but I think the write-up no longer matches the actual code. Snippets in the article use `*p->p` a lot. The *p is a parser struct defined above as

  struct parser {
    const char* s;
    int pos;
    struct grid* g;
  };

Notice there is no `p` member within. Assume the author meant `*p->pos`? And indeed if you look at the code in github the parser struct is defined as

  struct parser {
    const char *s, *p;
    struct grid* g;
  };

So there's the missing `p`, even though it's no longer an int. So I presume the member variable was once known as `pos` but got renamed at some point. Some of the snippets did not get updated to match.

New comment by staplung in "North Korean's 100k fake IT workers net $500M a year for Kim"

staplung — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:57:36 +0000

The numbers in the headline seem odd. They imply that each (fake|fraudulent) worker only nets $5000 per year for Kim. I know the system has some inefficiencies where people behind the scenes are helping the "employee" with the work and there are cost of living expenses, taxes etc. but that seems like a pretty low take.

New comment by staplung in "IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display (2019)"

staplung — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:14:19 +0000

And the reason they were modeled after the dollar bill size is because there were already many types of systems for storing and organizing them. That came in handy for the census.

The old BBC Connections series has a segment with James Burke using the old census tabulators.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0&t=2640s