Hacker News: vmilner

New comment by vmilner in "Jennifer Aniston and Friends Cost Us 377GB and Broke Ext4 Hardlinks"

vmilner — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:30:26 +0000

It's not as good as ed: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

New comment by vmilner in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

vmilner — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:54:57 +0000

The estimable (inestimable?) Daniel Estevez wrote excellent blogs on the Voyager comms protocols.

https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/

New comment by vmilner in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

vmilner — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:50:31 +0000

Edwin Berlekamp significantly reduced (by half I think) the number of transistors required for the Reed-Solomon error correcting code by telling them to use a non-standard 'primitive element'

New comment by vmilner in "JPEG Compression"

vmilner — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:23:05 +0000

The weirdest thing to me is that the quantisation matrix isn’t symmetrical in the top left to bottom right diagonal.

New comment by vmilner in "Lost Doctor Who episodes found"

vmilner — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:34:37 +0000

“Secret Army” (the “straight” inspiration of the comedy “Allo Allo”) - a dramatised version of the Belgian Comete line that returned allied airmen to Britain still stands up as a superb series from the 70s.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8ae0po

New comment by vmilner in "EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say"

vmilner — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:08:11 +0000

> For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.

I wonder if that's 19 Jan 2038. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

New comment by vmilner in "Pike: To Exit or Not to Exit"

vmilner — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:00:36 +0000

I thought this was going to be an article by Rob Pike on control flow in golang...

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

vmilner — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:39:29 +0000

"And so the Y10K problem was born"

New comment by vmilner in "Six Math Essentials"

vmilner — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:45:50 +0000

"The title is the same as that of a very well-known book by Professor L. E. Dickson (with which ours has little in common). We proposed at one time to change it to 'An introduction to arithmetic', a more novel and in some ways a more appropriate title; but it was pointed out that this might lead to misunderstandings about the content of the book."

            G.H. Hardy and E. M. Wright "An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers"

New comment by vmilner in "The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)"

vmilner — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 10:46:31 +0000

Looks like they're here:

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/info/exercises.html

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flphandouts.html

New comment by vmilner in "The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)"

vmilner — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 23:38:48 +0000

Unlike the commercial audio CDs of the lectures the recordings here have the chat before and after the lecture which is fun.

My favourite lecture is the standalone "The Principle of Least Action" at

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html

Audio: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html#Ch19-audi...

New comment by vmilner in "Fjord – A Unix-like OS built from scratch"

vmilner — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 18:45:14 +0000

Browsing this on my iPhone shows me garbage and tells me if im not an AI scraper to contact Codeberg. Goodbye.

New comment by vmilner in "221 Cannon is Not For Sale"

vmilner — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:59:09 +0000

For UK readers, the government land registry alert service can alert you if anyone attempts to mortgage sell properties youve registered with it:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/property-alert

New comment by vmilner in "Fighting back against biometric surveillance at Wegmans"

vmilner — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 02:27:18 +0000

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/06/shopper-face...

New comment by vmilner in "Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?"

vmilner — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 23:37:05 +0000

Definitely listen to the 1981 radio version if you like them.

Bilbo's Last Song scene here(spoiler warning for those who haven't read it as its at the end of the book).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIsHshR1Ig8

New comment by vmilner in "Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?"

vmilner — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 23:30:57 +0000

'The Housekeeper and the Professor' by Yoko Ogawa

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

is a beautiful novel about a mathematician with a short term memory condition, that should appeal to HN readers.

New comment by vmilner in "Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?"

vmilner — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:47:09 +0000

I enjoy

https://destevez.net/about/

from a Phd maths guy, who's worked in satellite comms, and blogs on software defined radio and comms protocols (eg error correction and radio modulation, often in space related contexts, eg decoding Voyager comms).

New comment by vmilner in "Coursera to combine with Udemy"

vmilner — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 17:43:00 +0000

My alma mater (University of Nottingham UK) has just stopped all music and modern language teaching, which (for a very popular, respected, large campus institution) seems a bad sign for universities generally.

New comment by vmilner in "Hundreds quarantined as measles outbreak accelerates in the South"

vmilner — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 22:33:38 +0000

I think it means 'Given a district of 300,000 people in Britain (in 1986)...'

New comment by vmilner in "Hundreds quarantined as measles outbreak accelerates in the South"

vmilner — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 22:25:49 +0000

Roald Dahl said it best:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles:_A_Dangerous_Illness

'Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunised, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year. Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another. At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections. About 20 will die. LET THAT SINK IN. Every year around 20 children will die in Britain from measles. So what about the risks that your children will run from being immunised? They are almost non-existent. Listen to this. In a district of around 300,000 people, there will be only one child every 250 years who will develop serious side effects from measles immunisation! That is about a million to one chance. I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunisation. (Dahl 1986)[4]'