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gall

89 karma · joined October 30, 2011

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gall··on Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04)
A warning about the linked copy: this isn't the standard text of Bradbury's story. I compared it with three other circulating copies and this version is only about 1,016 words versus ~2100. Notable omissions:

- the opening description of the empty house and the clock repeating into the silence

- almost the entire passage about the house's paranoid defenses, including its reactions to animals

- the dog searching the room for its owners, the pancake smell that attracts it, and the cleaning machines disposing of the body

- most of the nursery sequence, the artificial meadow, insects, animals, sounds, smells, jungle rain, receding landscape

- the cigar, warmed beds, much of the house's evening routine

- the fire consuming the Picassos and Matisses

- most of the extended description of the house dying

- much of the final image of dawn, rubble, etc

Worse, some passages are crudely compressed rather than deleted, e.g. the elaborate breakfast disposal, the chemical firefighting robots description.

Anyone encountering the story through this post should find another copy. This one appears to be an unlabelled, severely abridged, and rather badly corrupted version.

gall··on Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
The date filters seem to be ignored for certain search terms and not others. Searching for, say, "dune before:2019-04-05" filters as expected, but searching for current events proximate terms like "iran" or "donald" returns results that disregard the date ceiling completely.
gall··on Scientists Have 'Hacked Photosynthesis' in Search of More Productive Crops
Yes, have a look at the work of Erb, Schwander, and others at the Max Planck institute on the CETCH cycle, for example.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6314/900.full

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a23938/fix-c...

gall··on Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
Are the touchbar Macbook Pros still experiencing widespread screen delamination? I thought that was specific to the previous generation.
gall··on Termux: terminal emulator and Debian-style userland as an Android app
Or if you'd rather not fork, check out this write up of an approach to getting Orgzly to sync via termux and Tasker: https://2li.ch/home/syncing-org-files
gall··on New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection
Hairspray won't do it alone, but hairspray mixed with lipstick and perfume will be toxic, and untraceable.
gall··on Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy (2015)
I wonder if this proposal will be remembered by our successors and their counterparties when the time comes.
gall··on Launch, Land, Repeat
Blue Origin has actually been around longer than SpaceX. Both companies were also rans of the first XPrize.
gall··on In Memoriam: Ian Murdock
Would the increase in time critical public awareness had that thread not been deleted have made a difference? Perhaps the chance that it could should outweigh the urge for propriety in future admin decisions.
gall··on Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds
Check out Greg Egan's Permutation City in which sort of the opposite happens.
gall··on How Munich switched 15,000 PCs from Windows to Linux
What astounds me is that this project is called LiMux and not Munix.
gall··on Why we revert to original titles
The distinction between comments and link titles feels a little false because there's no obligation to link to the root of the primary source document chain, if there even is a canonical primary source for a given story. A submitter could legitimately wrap a link in a thin blog post on their own site and achieve the same effect.
gall··on The Turkish Coffee Syndrome
I wonder if the disdain is for the idea of machine made Turkish coffee, or because there's some factor creating variance in the bubbling times for which the machines aren't compensating.
gall··on Black Perl
Here's a little something in Python that I spent the last few hours writing:

  def unfalse_poem():
      (None is True) and False
      for subject in [complex(True,False)]:
          subject is not object
          for certainty in [complex(False,True)]:
              certainty is not Exception
              certainty is not license
              subject and certainty
              reduce and coerce
              coerce and reduce
              while certainty.real: unexamined
      for certainty in [complex(False,True)]:
          return certainty is not certainty.real is not certainty
gall··on Cameron Proves Greenwald Right
Does anyone have experience with corporate policies regarding the movement of data through airports? I'm curious about the prevalence of the wipe everything and repopulate the hard drive via sftp at destination approach.
gall··on The best programmers are the quickest to Google
I feel the same way about my bash history.
gall··on What to do when a customer says “Fuck you”
The difference between this and the Southwest Airlines example is that the latter comes off as touching loyalty to one's employees, which is nice pr if the anecdote becomes public. If the team member handling the abuse takes it upon him or herself to politely snub the client in the same way, it makes the entire organization seem a little snooty. Whether or not this is justified is, of course, besides the point.
gall··on The University of California Logo Controversy
A design that has to rely on the objectivity and dispassion of the collective Media, that has to be taken in the appropriate context as one part of a complicated "identity system" and on whose behalf laypeople are chastised for their immature visceral reactions, is probably just shitty.
gall··on [dead]
I'm disturbed by how emotionally indignant both the Aurora and Garret articles are in contrast with the original Ted Tso remarks. My personal expectation of a community of technically sophisticated individuals is that all convictions be subject to critical examination and nothing be taboo. I'd be much more comfortable interacting professionally with someone like Tso whose point-of-view is rationally presented, whether or not I agree with him, then with people who come across with shrill disapprobation and the intention of blackballing colleagues for their public opinions.
gall··on Mastering Linear Algebra in 10 Days: Astounding Experiments in Ultra-Learning
My best bursts of rapid learning are almost always project/puzzle driven. I didn't, for instance, set out to master FFT directly, but it seemed like something that could improve my abysmal performance on a Project Euler that I was working on, so I looked into it. I question (open-mindedly, not snarkily) the efficiency of ploughing through a course or series of courses. On the one hand there's the possibility of cross-pollination that having all sorts of cool bits of knowledge and techniques fraternizing in one's head for as long as possible promotes. On the other hand, there's the sense that the most efficient learning sequence is the one that matches the actual sequence of problems as they present themselves. Just-in-time learning of helicoptering, but if and only if you find yourself in a rooftop gunfight, as it were. Of course, then the issue becomes predicting forthcoming problems with enough lead time to learn the solution.
gall··on RIP Hans Camenzind, Inventor Of The 555 Timer
This was two months ago.
gall··on Ask HN: You're in an empty room. How do you generate a random number?
Consider the spin of any electron in the room. Do not measure it.
gall··on The Future is not Real-Time
The automatically appended "You should follow me on twitter _here_" is a great punchline.
gall··on Best Desktop Keyboards
I'd love to find an analogue for the feel of a mechanical keyboard in a laptop keyboard. Something with at least 3mm travel and the actuation point at 2mm.
gall··on Life is Not Always An Engineering Problem.
With all due civility, this is stupid. The fact that we as a species are short staffed and short on time doesn't mean that engineering strategies are inappropriate. On the contrary, they're the only game in town. Triage and problem selection are themselves algorithms with defined optimisation criteria. That you take issue with the selection of those criteria (e.g. elegance, aesthetics) by people trying to solve their personal pain points doesn't repudiate the framework.
gall··on Hacking Twitter and being suspended in less than 2 days and 300 tweets
Why didn't you guys resume after your account was reinstated? It sounds like an automatic suspension kicked in until someone on staff had a chance to manually check things out and make the determination that it was okay.
gall··on Bypassing the Password: Seeking Ways to Make the Computer Password Obsolete
In the United States, an authentication scheme that doesn't rely on mental contents wouldn't be subject to self-incrimination protections against compulsory decryption.