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nortlov

105 karma · joined December 4, 2013

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nortlov··on How SpaceX streamlined the Raptor engine
Slight aside, he also has driven capability that was challenging to justify existence for, and was later removed re: Dragon 2 propulsive landing via SuperDracos, landing legs, and the ballast sled. I'm sure the Dragonfly programs matured their abort programs, but surely, that was a ton of time and effort wasted.

You win some, you lose some.

nortlov··on US Customs supervisor busted for stealing hardware from Homeland Security PCs
Border Patrol’s IT department more forward looking than the rest of the government..? sign me up! I’ve been using the same laptop for nearly 5 years now. It’s painfully slow and does not meet the needs of the latest Teams updates.
nortlov··on Ask HN: What was the last task where only a frontier model could do it?
6 months behind is probably a bit rich, I find the frontier models more capable in sustained agent and compiler tasks. Simple tool-chains and basic reasoning seems more or less on par across the board, at least for my use cases.
nortlov··on Rare medieval bookmark exceeds expectations at auction
Yes! A method to easily understand completion status without having to open a book to verify progress.
nortlov··on The desperation of NYTimes
I jumped into a NY Times games sub for a year; couldn’t find the cancel button after a couple minutes of fiddling and ended up doing a CC chargeback in 60 seconds.
nortlov··on The Hunt for Dark Breakfast
Schrödinger’s egg?
nortlov··on Doom has been ported to an earbud
Carmak made extensive use of AI during Doom development: Approximate Interpolation.
nortlov··on Fighting back against biometric surveillance at Wegmans
Surely archived footage would be ripe for automated analysis once the tools are commercialized.
nortlov··on GM Reward Loophole Explained: Cars Paid Off in Seconds
It’s always the same playbook with these rewards programs. Marketing invents a gimmick, the internet stress-tests it, finance freaks out, and the company quietly rewrites the TOS.

Enjoy the free Escalade.

nortlov··on Rats filmed snatching bats from air
You might be right. The paper mentioned the rats preferred hunting near the light barrier but also mentioned they probably climbed the fabric for an aerial advantage (they didn’t seem to prefer hunting near the light barrier once the fabric was removed).
nortlov··on Rats filmed snatching bats from air
Two thoughts come to mind:

- the rats are effectively as blind as the bat in the dark, are they relying purely on sound and air currents to gauge their attack?

- and what a fantastic new path for pathogen transmission.

nortlov··on 6G Wireless Networks to Use Satellites as Base Stations
Putting 6G base stations in orbit is cool, I see that the next level begins when satellites, like Starlink, stop acting like relays and mesh networks relaying bits (Layer 2/3) and instead start computing bits in space to reduce latency, overhead, and turn orbital hardware into legit network infrastructure (Layer 4-7).
nortlov··on Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations
> To address the potential loss of important long-running conversations, users will still be able to edit and retry previous messages to create new branches of ended conversations.

How does Claude deciding to end the conversation even matter if you can back up a message or 2 and try again on a new branch?

nortlov··on Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
https://archive.ph/20250507120041/https://nymag.com/intellig...
nortlov··on The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
My take away is that the overall labor per customer decreases because workers are spending less time on non-cooking/serving tasks. The paper implies the efficiency gain is in how labor is used rather than production or serving efficiency. This seems like an anticlimactic conclusion.
nortlov··on Find the oldest line in your repo
I imagine future engineers as archaeologists of software development, in a way, digging through ghost comments like fossils in the code.
nortlov··on Wooden satellite heads to space in Mars exploration test
The Polaris Dawn mission took a violin to orbit: https://www.thestrad.com/lutherie/how-do-you-take-a-violin-t...

In addition to vacuum exposure to address outgassing, they'd probably hit wood with some sterilization process (gamma radiation as one example) to ensure any microbes in the wood are dead before landing on another planet.

nortlov··on Insider trader had all the answers
Tangentially related: https://youtu.be/RM1gfvAsrg8
nortlov··on Engineers investigate another malfunction on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket
https://www.aei.org/articles/moores-law-meet-musks-law-the-u...
nortlov··on The Delusion of the Polygraph
Wish I had seen your post before I resorted to ChatGPT.

https://chatgpt.com/share/2400c631-fc68-4f95-b4e7-861324a3dc...

nortlov··on Organic Maps is a free Android and iOS offline maps app for travelers
Offline maps introduced in iOS17: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213829
nortlov··on Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?
The Casio F-91W doesn’t account for the year, it showed today’s date as Thursday, March 1st.
nortlov··on [dead]
Malta
nortlov··on NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars
For sure, that’s another way to decompose “bigger rotors”. It would probably be appropriate to dive into a conversation about Ingenuity’s design goals, requirements, and the trades performed to end up with what they got.
nortlov··on NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars
In a thin atmosphere, lifting a heavier payload needs bigger rotors or increased RPM, which increases power demands and structural stress. The challenge is to keep the vehicle light enough to fly while also making it sturdy enough to carry the payload and survive environments.
nortlov··on Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?
Some models (RWD?) are equipped with LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries. Tesla recommends setting a charge limit of 100% and, as you mentioned, charging up to 100% at least once per week.

https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/10ji8yk/l...

nortlov··on Goldman is looking for a way out of its partnership with Apple
https://archive.ph/sp4sl
nortlov··on Manipulative Consent Requests
Thanks. One of my Pi-hole filters is blocking this page.
nortlov··on Lufthansa bans AirTags in checked luggage
If transmissions truly are a problem, I would hope they’d protect passengers and vehicles (e.g. faraday cage luggage compartments) rather than hoping customers do not leave dangerous devices such as AirTags in their luggage.
nortlov··on Chess is just poker now
Bobby Fischer seems to disagree with you: https://youtube.com/watch?v=P349BdHUxlc&t=11s
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