Viewing profile — summa_tech

It certainly tarnishes the shine to have a per-OS-version table of offsets to patch ;(

It always feels a bit like lost magic. But at the same time, it's also something that was only enabled by the very high determinism of these old home systems. The design relies on …

Excellent explanation. I'd like to add that no light source can lie outside the horseshoe of the CIE xyz diagram: pure wavelengths are points on the curved line, everything that mi…

Well, it's complicated. As I understand, one of the polio vaccines - the oral one - has an unusual quirk. The live virus used in it can reproduce and spread in low-vaccination comm…

Imagine a power splitter + phase shifter that produces a correct phase shift for each element in a phased array to produce a directional beam from one radio transceiver. Now this c…

Right! I think a lot of people, who have not done a lot of "things you can kick" engineering, have a very romantic view of it. Especially the relationship with whoever is nominally…

As a matter of fact, Nature does regularly publish papers about wetting properties of water. In fact, it just published one last week, from Nature Physics: https://www.nature.com/a…

If you can read more than one language, try reading translations into two or three different ones. It'll give you a different view of a book you enjoy: the translations will all ha…

On most modern Apple SoCs, including these two, there's an IOMMU dedicated to the USB complex (called the USB DART, perhaps DMA Address Remapping Table). However, Boot ROM on these…

Sure, StarCraft is kind of a hybrid when you think about it. The guaranteed-hit model, the extremely simplified low vs high ground approach to determine if a shot is possible, etc.…

Chess presents a comparatively small and, importantly, discrete set of choices at any moment. So it feels like it's a solvable logic puzzle: like it should be possible, at any mome…

He's basically repeating his mistake - underestimating the relevance of technological progress - from 28 years ago, except now it's explicitly in service of his political bias. For…

It's difficult to consider Krugman's takes seriously after his very flawed 1998 predictions. Perhaps he's uniquely poorly suited to understanding the role of technology in economic…

It became obvious / accepted wisdom that a moderately successful startup exit is the only way to have a decent future as a living person. This used to be only one of many paths ava…

Neat! What do you think about adding a "-2, -1, 0, +1, +2" agreement scale to each quote and showing the average instead of votes? I think many of those are pretty subjective, and …

Once you understand how a program works, get someone else to write it for you. Then, you will quickly find out your understanding was insufficient.

I don't think I've seen anything sufficiently RAM-like. The classic sense amplifier architecture tends to make this impractical. I guess modern Flash can store a few levels but tha…

Tubes can also just be very _clever_ in a way that transistors generally are not. For instance, counting tubes that would contain a decimal counter in a single glass bubble (that's…

Pretty good detail in this article! But what really surprises me is how some ideas just keep coming back. When I wrote a binary translator, I ended up having to keep a translated r…

That was a fun site to browse. I really enjoy fixing / hacking on non-disposable equipment (lab, test, optics, etc.) and there are some well-done write-ups in there.

USSR, yes. But the ISS was launching during a time when USSR no longer existed and Russia was fairly isolated. Hence, "obviously": US at that time had many close allies, but Russia…

I think it's an attempt to express that the station consists of only two segments: Russian (ROS) and US (USOS), but the US invited its allies to work together on its segment. So pa…

Good point. Or repair rows (like Virage/Synopsys STAR).

Hacker News is still skewed towards people interested in programming languages (as opposed to actually programming). Probably some sort of Y-combinator Lisp heritage. There's also …