Hacker News: vallismortis

New comment by vallismortis in "M4.6 Earthquake – 2 km ESE of Berkeley, CA"

vallismortis — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 12:29:36 +0000

It was centered half a mile from Berkeley Lab at 2:56am, on the Hayward Fault. Knocked out the elevators in my building and one other building, but other than that no obvious issues. We've been told to be on alert for anything that looks off. Hard to predict how this affects some of the Lab equipment.

FWIW, I've been expecting something like this. The Pacific Rim ("ring of fire" or whatever you want to call it) has been overly active, and that second 7+ magnitude earthquake in Kamchatka was definitely not a coincidence. That said, earthquakes are not my area, but it is a topic we talk about in terms of catastrophic failure of storage systems as "Hayward Fault Tolerance" where we have tertiary backups in a region outside of the earthquake zone.

New comment by vallismortis in "Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe"

vallismortis — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 17:23:12 +0000

For what it's worth, there was an earlier "Cyber Cafe" just off the campus of Michigan State University in the early to mid-90s called Emerald City Cafe. They had 128k ISDN connections to MichNet/Merit by 1994 (when I started going there), and by late 1995 had 3MBit TCI Cable Modem connections.

It wasn't a nightclub-style cafe like the one in the article, but it was really cozy, open until 11:30pm weeknights (1am weekends), and had excellent coffee. Plus the next room over was an arcade / laundry. It's a bummer I can't find an article about it. Just good memories.

https://www.cablevision.co.cr/review/1995/12.html

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

New comment by vallismortis in "Since the '60s, Ford has stored cars underground in a Kansas City cave"

vallismortis — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 02:46:04 +0000

Do they have any 2003 Explorer Sport Tracs down there? Because they have the only 1L2Z-3551729-AAPTM parts remaining in existence that haven't been destroyed by sun damage. It would save me a lot of time on this project: https://sporttrac.org/threads/gen-1-roof-trim-reproduction.1...

New comment by vallismortis in "Experimental blog that is only available to read through a feed reader"

vallismortis — Fri, 03 May 2024 21:13:18 +0000

I love XSL. There are some problems that it is absolutely stellar at solving. NCBI recently changed their JATS schema. No need to change any code, just modify the stylesheet and everything hums along as if nothing changed.

New comment by vallismortis in "Group accused in $225K 'dice sliding' cheating scheme at Las Vegas casino"

vallismortis — Mon, 29 May 2023 02:47:58 +0000

Nevada, seriously. This is an 'electronic craps table' where the House controls _literally_ all aspects of the game, and the players are being prosecuted for 'playing wrong.'

New comment by vallismortis in "Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm"

vallismortis — Mon, 29 May 2023 02:39:19 +0000

Twenty years ago, I moved from Michigan (a state that uses fluoride) to Mississippi (a state that doesn't use fluoride). My dentist at the time told me that I was going to end up with tooth decay if I stayed down there for more than a few years. Sure enough, five years later I moved back to Michigan and ended up with a cavity in an unusual place. My (new) dentist in Michigan was completely unsurprised.

He said there are two problems with tooth decay in Mississippi:

1. They don't use fluoride in their water. 2. No decent dentist would ever work in Mississippi.

Fifteen years later, with no changes in dental hygiene in my entire life, and I've had no other problems with my teeth. Anecdotal evidence, maybe. But that is my experience.

New comment by vallismortis in "Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?"

vallismortis — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 23:30:47 +0000

This is exactly the conversation the wealthy want us to have. A buddy of mine left a job recently. He worked in IT security for a plastics company that you would all recognize. In his last month, he had a meeting with one of the VP's, who said (direct quote from the meeting):

"Biden really ruined the yachting industry."

OK. What does that person do? Does he work in IT? No. Does he work in production? No.

He collects seven figures a year for presenting a particular persona for a successful company.

Think on that before you start comparing middle/lower class occupations. I'm not saying its wrong, I'm just trying to provide another magnitude of contrast to the issue.

New comment by vallismortis in "AT&T drops out of FCC speed-test program so it can hide bad results"

vallismortis — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 23:35:59 +0000

Every encounter with AT&T has felt like a scam to me. I tried a mobile hotspot two years ago on a 14 day free trial. One bar of signal, so I returned it the same day I received it. It took them 14 days to "process" the return, and I ended up with a $285 bill (activation fee, two months service). Last year, I was trying to find a carrier that would work with my Sierra Wireless WLAN card, and ended up repeating the same horrible experience - this round cost me $180. Next, I tried Cricket Wireless, which uses the AT&T network. No activation fee, $35/month, works flawlessly. Its not the network, its the company.

New comment by vallismortis in "The Wright Brothers: Pioneers of Patent Trolling"

vallismortis — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 20:09:14 +0000

I've never seen the Wright brothers beaten up like this. One brother died trying to improve their invention, and the other died in extreme poverty in a small apartment after suffering from a car accident for years. He had received tons of awards from the industry, but those were meaningless to him. He was more interested in documenting the history of his brother's contributions. The general vibe of this thread is incredible to me.

New comment by vallismortis in "Better World Books and the Internet Archive Unite to Preserve Millions of Books"

vallismortis — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 22:19:35 +0000

I've had really good experiences with Better World Books. However, I do wonder how they source some of their stock. I've bought several books from them that have historical value and never should have left the Smithsonian.

New comment by vallismortis in "Show HN: A minimal Fortran TCP client and server"

vallismortis — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 00:53:06 +0000

Wow, ageist much? My wind model is F77.

New comment by vallismortis in "Windows 11 could run on Linux"

vallismortis — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 09:26:24 +0000

Ok, you're crazy. The GPL licensing issues alone would be a nightmare for them, and possibly unsolvable from their business perspective.

New comment by vallismortis in "McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs"

vallismortis — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:52:02 +0000

Welcome Manna.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

New comment by vallismortis in "OpenBSD was right to disable hyperthreading [video]"

vallismortis — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 00:26:18 +0000

I'm still not - um - disabling, ah, hyperthreading, because, I'm paying for, ah, 4 cores on a 2 core ah, processor.

New comment by vallismortis in "Much fridge food ‘goes there to die’"

vallismortis — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 16:09:06 +0000

A lot of produce is already molding by the time it gets to the shelves, it just isn't visible to the consumer. I would love to see that problem fixed.

New comment by vallismortis in "Misinterpreting hurricane forecasts"

vallismortis — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 22:37:58 +0000

That won't fix the problem. The NHC uses an ocean model, but the transition across Florida requires the application of a hybrid land/water model, which results in a large divergence when the results of the different models are combined. Fortunately, someone from Mississippi State University developed such a model in 2004. It successfully predicted the exact path of Hurricane Katrina over a week in advance of landfall. That weather model is used for XM Sattelite Weather and the Gulf Coast Hurricane Index, but the NHC still hasn't adopted it after 15 years.

New comment by vallismortis in "Sunsetting Hire"

vallismortis — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 09:55:49 +0000

Two great examples are the goo.gl URL shortener and the custom site search widget. These two services actively break parts of the internet when they stop working.

New comment by vallismortis in "When the Public Feared That Library Books Could Spread Deadly Diseases"

vallismortis — Sun, 25 Aug 2019 13:45:08 +0000

I once received a book in the mail that contained about half a dozen live scorpions in it. The environment isn't as hostile as you might think.

New comment by vallismortis in "When the Public Feared That Library Books Could Spread Deadly Diseases"

vallismortis — Sun, 25 Aug 2019 00:28:04 +0000

I have a library of old (1870's-1930's) books on bacterial and fungal taxonomy, and I'm cautious not to breathe too deeply when I handle some of them. Many of these may have been used in non-sterile microbiology labs, likely including my copy of A Manual of Tropical Diseases (signed by Catellani himself). Bacterial spores (e.g., Bacillus, can survive in dehydrated states indefinitely). Some of the notes in margins, covers, bookplates and stamps show snapshots of where these have been.

New comment by vallismortis in "Levenshtein Distance"

vallismortis — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 20:52:05 +0000

One step further (multi-layer Manhattan distance) will also get you optimal DNA, RNA and protein sequence alignment (Myers, Gotoh and others, 1977-1981). The edit path (often discarded) can be repurposed for simulating RNA and protein folding, as well as calculating DNA melting points (used for DNA-DNA hybridization studies).