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Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

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Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#241
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try taking a 1MB compressed text file (with some interesting text), cutting it in half, and replacing the second half with random numbers, then uncompress it.

What happens?

It tries to decrypt the random data using the corpus built on the original data.

so the end of the file looks like:

"Hesn’ed a tembers, ea ' mo byarrledMaelcallrlynwigr oysTold yo joinnt bnan twas The spwt?" aaoWe sastleenkeep had thein; aimaf it oneivof sv TheeTssuterrcy oid,itng the shuri us d it m, ed iroduone dga go toe s, mooerhae�er "aot ofSsallR:58:40, in the darkn,erqwader t. "Whsne�ee thit wasaidfrenthct,nnto erut be�sRhe Hiesented onvery h Tsh thrs, at d tkly he on upnbadarkn,eJls tat.iwheitu rs p.you ue, nC could seunnip on Lo of its e put his p," theden, b��t te�ee thln’t tcept ofuicideBge fnoh me,sh yod aw to awyarrleomo. rare Hutofases vred ve s"s. "Hicsuty sely’s lher uri and watcosThe yfiile.cn, aub, baelcumsemit wChcycleis the ��d taJ hair b"

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#242
post #241
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens?

It tries to decrypt the random data using the corpus built on the original data. so the end of the file looks like: "Hesn’ed a tembers, ea ' mo byarrledMaelcallrlynwigr oysTold yo joinnt bnan twas The spwt?" aaoWe sastleenkeep had thein; aimaf it oneivof sv TheeTssuterrcy oid,itng the shuri us d it m, ed iroduone dga go toe s, mooerhae�er "aot ofSsallR:58:40, in the darkn,erqwader t. "Whsne�ee thit wasaidfrenthct,nnt…

wow that's cool thanks

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#243

Algorithmic art and pen plotters - super fun and wonderful community.

Ooooooo, any good links to share? I picked up a Draftmaster II at auction and someday I'll get it working I promise...

I'd also love to know this.

I had a fascination with the (to me) gigantic plotter at my Dad's workplace (they did a lot of architectural and engineering drawings on it). I had completely forgotten about this until these comments came along, and now I'm trying to work out where I can put one at home :)

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The amount of concatenative language interpreters I've abandoned is a bit embarassing. Earlier this week, I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu Linvega where he was doing a bunch of digging into minimal programming languages. He spent a lot of time looking into Forth and other concatenative languages and he said he found a lot of implementations of the languages, but very little code written in them. It was as i…

> I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu Linvega where he was doing a bunch of digging into minimal programming languages. Do you have a source of this video?

Organizer here!

This talk will be published in a few days, fully-annotated at the Conference Guide [0] where you can download presentations for free. Sign up for the newsletter [1] to stay up-to-date (we're indie and the extra eyeballs help.)

Anyhow, the other comments linked the raw streams already :)

[0] https://guide.handmade-seattle.com

[1] https://handmade-seattle.com/newsletter

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#246
Orbiter spaceflight sim - learning orbital mechanics, modifying add-on spacecraft and learning how to program my own. http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

NASA flight software source code for Apollo and other spacecraft. Emulator: https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/yaAGC.html Code: https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc

Probably the most realistic Space Shuttle simulator ever created (runs in FlightGear). https://wiki.flightgear.org/Space_Shuttle

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#247

Disclaimer: I am in no way encouraging or advocating for software piracy. The warez scene in 90s and early 00s was fun to follow. I consider the NFO files a legitimate form of art, not to mention the skills for unpacking and keygen-ing or cracking of the protected software. https://scenelist.org/

Yessss, this was so fun. I still have backups of all my own nfo files that I was credited for cracks in ;) razor, pdm, myth.

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#249

I'm a big fan of distributed systems (papers and implementations) and alternate networks. Fun projects that are active right now: - Usenet (yes, it's still alive!) - NNCP (friend-to-friend e2e encrypted network, doesn't need IP, can be airgapped) - Yggdrasil (an IPv6 overlay mesh network) - Retroshare (friend-to-friend P2P encrypted network with Chat, Messaging, and filesharing, and more) - Urbit (weird, distributed…

Check out Holochain[0] and the some of the projects in that space. They have some horrendous marketing and, unfortunately, the word "chain" in the title but they are also making some funky/radical P2P stuff.

Basically, according to my understanding, every "agent" gets their own immutable blockchain (a la solid[1] pod) that's stored on a DHT and hApps (an assemblage of personal smart-contract like functions) running in a WASM runtime on your local machine modify and interact with this chain. There's also some scheme in place to make your peers do validation and punish bad agents. And most interestingly, no tokens in sight. (in the core at least. they're using those for some adjacent projects...I think).

[0]: https://www.holochain.org/ [1]: https://solidproject.org/

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#250
I help a friend repair old vacuum tube radios, transmitters, etc. Myself, I'm afraid of anything with more than 12 volts, but he's shown me that even smoke coming out of a radio isn't a show-stopper as it helps you track down the problem. I've learned the subtle hatred of silver-mica capacitors, and invented a technique to track down the leaky ones.

Also, we fixed a few HP 5061 Cesium Beam Atomic clocks. So I'm now a Quantum Mechanic ;-)

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