Hacker News: tetris11

New comment by tetris11 in "The computer that helped win World War II"

tetris11 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:19:26 +0000

Hogwash. Humans are masters of innovation, and are highly motivated to solve problems. None of these men worked from the ground up, but built on the groundwork laid down by others (Turing especially).

The world was arguably also less complex back then, so there was plenty of low-hanging fruit to snatch in terms of information theory

Don't let the Hideo Kojima's of the world fool you into believing they did everything themselves. It's an effort of many, many who do it for the love of the craft and are content to receive no praise for it

New comment by tetris11 in "The computer that helped win World War II"

tetris11 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:13:27 +0000

Had they not used a reflector pin in the encryption (simplified encrypting/decrypting a message using the same rotor configuration) it would have been far harder to crack, because the pin ensured that no letter could ever encode itself and that greatly reduced the search space

New comment by tetris11 in "The computer that helped win World War II"

tetris11 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:10:17 +0000

The National Museum of Computing (just up the road from Bletchley Park) has a working Colossus

New comment by tetris11 in "Ask HN: What livestream do you keep open in a tab?"

tetris11 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 23:08:48 +0000

My doorbell camera. It's like sitting on the stoop watching the world go by

New comment by tetris11 in "Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample"

tetris11 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:24:11 +0000

crosses fingers "Low hanging fruit, low hanging fruit, low hanging fruit..." hyper-ventilates

New comment by tetris11 in "5 Cups of coffee per day (up to 400 mg of caffeine/day) is safe for most adults"

tetris11 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:06:59 +0000

> The Association receives more than 85% of its revenue from sources other than corporations. These sources include contributions from individuals, foundations and estates, as well as investment earnings and revenue from the sale of our educational materials. Corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations to the Association. The Association has strict policies to prevent any donations from influencing its science content and policy positions.

New comment by tetris11 in "Camera Chase Vehicle"

tetris11 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:00:58 +0000

I would love to see a First person view of that tumble

New comment by tetris11 in "Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy"

tetris11 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:33:08 +0000

"Staufen darf nicht zerbrechen!"

New comment by tetris11 in "Lobste.rs is now running on SQLite"

tetris11 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 23:43:44 +0000

Oh wow. Off-topic but quite refreshing to see a site not absolutely plastered in AI posts

New comment by tetris11 in "DOGE is done. What happened to its records?"

tetris11 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 20:44:07 +0000

> What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.

Yep. You used to apply for a few relevant grants ahead of time, wait for your talented grad student to wait a few months whilst they continue their summer project, and you'd have an answer on whether or not you can take them on right as they finish.

Now? You apply continuously for a whole host of different grants, some of which are tentatively related to your field, at least a year in advance and hope that at least one of them pans out so that you can hire a potential grad student who might just wait around enough for the funding to come through.

The competition for funding is fierce, and I'm seeing a depressing pattern of profs taking on post docs who secured their own funding and needed a complimentary signature, to then take it from them and kick them out as soon as the money comes through

New comment by tetris11 in "Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels"

tetris11 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:14:51 +0000

I'd go the other way and say Cyberpunk was meant to be capitalism taken to its logical extreme (unregulated industries rife with corruption, with markets/regimes perturbed only through acts of violence and espionage).

As life begins to imitate art, we're met with a The Thick Of It type situation where the satire of reality is no longer applicable and would be further diminished by continuing it

> "Time and again, The Thick of It led and reality fell in behind."

New comment by tetris11 in "China lands reusable rocket for first time, state media says"

tetris11 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 12:25:51 +0000

I guess that explains the timing of the SpaceX IPO

The SBC hobby is dying (Geerling, 3 months ago) [video]

tetris11 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:12:09 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeX22LnKdFY

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48857592

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by tetris11 in "No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026"

tetris11 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:22:14 +0000

Or XKCD. I love patch day.

New comment by tetris11 in "The most unbelievable things about life before smartphones (2020)"

tetris11 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:15:28 +0000

Agree. I watch a bit of BBC Archive every now and then, and what strikes me most is how people are essentially the same on almost the exact topics we discuss today. Here's a video that films a pub conversation in 1983:

https://youtu.be/6yfE9Ihr8F0&t=686

Same fears, same talking points, same loud personalities stealing the discussion with conspiracy rhetoric and the rational ones in the room quietly disagreeing.

And why is the public so politicized? Why because they read all the same papers from their trusted sources, same as we do now.

I don't think the technology has fundamentally changed us, and I'm near certain that you could go back 2000 years and experience the same level of discourse.

New comment by tetris11 in "Show HN: Hacker-News Buddies"

tetris11 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:05:59 +0000

Super cool! I notice the projection captures the seperation better than the clustering does though. How did you cluster?

New comment by tetris11 in "Show HN: Hacker-News Buddies"

tetris11 — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 15:09:21 +0000

I like it! I'm just missing from the corpus for some reason...

Quick glance: TF-IDF, cosine-similarity, the only thing missing is a nice UMAP :-)

New comment by tetris11 in "Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe"

tetris11 — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 12:58:56 +0000

You would expect more background pixel fuzz when centering an image kernel over an artefact.

In Hubble, that fuzz was marked. With Webb, far less so.

I think these are real true positives

Solar Panels: AC vs. DC (2008)

tetris11 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 09:24:08 +0000

Article URL: https://rimstar.org/renewnrg/solarpwr.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48744259

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by tetris11 in "Knoppix"

tetris11 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:55:15 +0000

Similar experience at my early uni days in UK - no PC at home and lugging around a heavy laptop wasnt so easy, so I had Slackware on a USB stick and would routinely go to the computer clusters to boot it up over the Windows mess they had.

The physics dept. was full of GNU evangelists, so thankfully they had real Linux machines. Everywhere else though, Microsoft had sunk its claws into