Hacker News Reader

santixon Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

Jacked: The Unautorised Behind-the-Scenes Story of Grand Theft Auto - David Kushner

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

santixon How Tube Amplifiers Work

Also https://www.youtube.com/@UncleDoug

santixon Space After Periods (1993)

https://docs.w3cub.com/latex/_005cfrenchspacing.html

santixon Building a programming language in twenty-four hours

Check out https://craftinginterpreters.com/

santixon Passenger with “no idea how to fly” lands plane after pilot incapacitated

There's also "7-7: we're going to heaven; 7-5: somebody else wants to fly; 7-6: radio needs a fix".

santixon OpenBSD: Hibernate Time Reduced

The code change on GitHub: https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/56bc0efbd80da2ff595e44...

santixon A Steve Jobs masterclass from a decade ago

The full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps

santixon A History of Visa

That's cool. Apart from the article being good, the design of your page is very nice.

santixon Olivia MFSK

I would love to read an ELI5 explanation on how it is possible to decode something that is under the noise floor.

santixon Robert A. Caro on the means and ends of power

I haven't read the book (yet), but I believe this talk is a good intro: https://www.c-span.org/video/?196682-1/the-power-broker

santixon Flightradar24 – how it works

There's also a community-based ADS-B site: https://www.adsbexchange.com/

santixon The cult of rotary mixers

For I second I thought it could be about faucets.

santixon Fish shell 3.0

I was hoping to see that they added a `time` command, which is something that makes me change to bash every once in a while.

santixon Sway: i3-compatible Wayland compositor – 1.0-beta.1 released

And also its documentation is excellent.

santixon Must-See Tech Talks for Every Programmer (2014)

Alan Kay - Normal Considered Harmful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc

santixon Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

MSN Messenger and/or ICQ.

santixon Paul Allen has died

I caught that movie already started on a TV channel once and saw like the last third of it. I didn't know the band, and all the while I thought it was a parody similar to Spinal Tap. It wasn't until the ending that I realized everything was a true story.

santixon The 555 and How It Got That Way

And for a list of applications what better than Forrest Mims' handwritten Engineer's mini notebook: https://archive.org/details/Forrest_Mims-engineers_mini-note...

santixon Jobs at Google (1999)

I like how you could send your resume as a text file but it better be ASCII.

santixon Electronic Circuit Simulator in the Browser

Nice site!

That example circuit is called a resonant circuit and the oscillation that is seen after the power supply is removed happens because both the capacitor (C) and the inductor (or coil, L) store energy—in electric and magnetic fields, respectively—and start feeding each other.

santixon FAA pushes back on Boeing exemption for 787 safety flaw

He mentions it here: SQLite: The Database at the Edge of the Network with Dr. Richard Hipp - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jib2AmRb_rk

santixon Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

I was surprised at the minimum requirements. I don't know if I'm not up to date with current games, but from the style of it I thought it would be much lighter.

santixon Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?

"The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner.

santixon Released and Certified: Qt Safe Renderer

How do those standards compare to aviation? Are there similar certifications that would allow to use a software implementation like this?

santixon Tiny Core Linux

I used to run Coyote Linux[1] (then BrazilFW) from a floppy on a 133MHz Pentium with a couple of MBs of RAM.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_Linux

santixon Color Television: NTSC Tutorials

Cool video.

I found another interesting one: Why is TV 29.97 frames per second? [0], which refers to NTSC's frame rate.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GJUM6pCpew

santixon The Casio AL-1000

Cool website. I sometimes miss searching for a topic and finding personal sites like this, with interesting content and to the point.

santixon A Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System

There's a cool Systems We Love talk about that:

https://systemswe.love/archive/san-francisco-2016/you-are-no...

santixon Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?

Good one.

At the bottom of page 3 it says that on UNIX V7 they added an unbuffered (-u) option to cat and then removed it on V8. Does anybody know why they removed it?

I checked out the man for the GNU version and it says

  -u     (ignored)