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staplung

2,435 karma · joined June 10, 2014

Software Engineer in SF.
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staplung··on NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
What if I like magenta? Or brown?
staplung··on Dark Castle
You can also play it in the browser in Infinite Mac: https://infinitemac.org/1991/System%207.0

(Worked somewhat better for me than the classicreload version)

staplung··on Artemis II is not safe to fly
In total, a little over one dozen astronauts died on shuttle flights (14). No astronauts died during Gemini or Mercury. Three died in a test on Apollo 1. The shuttle failure rate was nowhere close to 1/10. In fact, it was 1/67 (2 failures out of 134 flights).
staplung··on Militarized snowflakes: The accidental beauty of Renaissance star forts
The Tower of London arguably qualifies as a fort built to protect its inhabitants from the city. In its original form, its most impressive and formidable defenses faced London.
staplung··on VisiCalc Reconstructed
Cool article but I think the write-up no longer matches the actual code. Snippets in the article use `*p->p` a lot. The *p is a parser struct defined above as

  struct parser {
    const char* s;
    int pos;
    struct grid* g;
  };

Notice there is no `p` member within. Assume the author meant `*p->pos`? And indeed if you look at the code in github the parser struct is defined as

  struct parser {
    const char *s, *p;
    struct grid* g;
  };
So there's the missing `p`, even though it's no longer an int. So I presume the member variable was once known as `pos` but got renamed at some point. Some of the snippets did not get updated to match.
staplung··on North Korean's 100k fake IT workers net $500M a year for Kim
The numbers in the headline seem odd. They imply that each (fake|fraudulent) worker only nets $5000 per year for Kim. I know the system has some inefficiencies where people behind the scenes are helping the "employee" with the work and there are cost of living expenses, taxes etc. but that seems like a pretty low take.
staplung··on IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display (2019)
And the reason they were modeled after the dollar bill size is because there were already many types of systems for storing and organizing them. That came in handy for the census.

The old BBC Connections series has a segment with James Burke using the old census tabulators.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0&t=2640s

staplung··on C++26: The Oxford Variadic Comma
Of course since the old syntax is merely deprecated and not removed, going forward you now have to know the old, bad form and the new, good form in order to read code. Backwards compatibility is a strength but also a one-way complexity ratchet.

At least they managed to kill `auto_ptr`.

staplung··on Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
Can someone explain why helium is used for these purposes, as opposed to some other noble gas? I think there's more argon (it's about 1% of the atmosphere) than helium so is helium somehow special, or is it just cheaper, despite being rarer and non-renewable?
staplung··on Bubble Sorted Amen Break
Cool, but I don't see how it's sorting anything. It just seems to play a randomized arrangement of the slices. You can re-randomize as much as you like but there's no sort option as far as I can see.
staplung··on I used pulsar detection techniques to turn a phone into a watch timegrapher
It uses the built-in one. But as discussed in the article they ran into the problem where even when you try to force using the internal mic, iOS will silently switch to the mic on a pair of AirPods if there's a pair connected.
staplung··on I used pulsar detection techniques to turn a phone into a watch timegrapher
I don't think it would work because the accelerometer updates are at too low a frequency. Apple's developer info says:

``` Before you start the delivery of accelerometer updates, specify an update frequency by assigning a value to the accelerometerUpdateInterval property. The maximum frequency at which you can request updates is hardware-dependent but is usually at least 100 Hz.

```

100Hz is way too slow. Presumably some devices go higher but according to the article the peak signal is in the 3kHz to 15kHz range.

staplung··on Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets
Unfortunately, it's not just elected officials that are problematic for prediction markets. The Secretary of War, for instance is not an elected official nor are leaders of the armed forces and there is definitely a prediction market for war. Multiply this by every powerful appointee and every career bureaucrat and see what kind of picture that paints.
staplung··on Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
I'm a little surprised Meta is even bothering to fight this. I mean the argument looks farcical to me be IANAL and weirder things have happened. If they do end up losing they'll have to pay however many millions to their law firms plus whatever the in or out of court settlement end ups being.

And you just know that whatever they end up paying will be so tiny that it will just be seen as the cost of doing business. From a corporation's perspective it's always better to break the law and maybe pay a tiny fine (if you get caught and can't argue your way out of it) than it is to follow the law and miss out on profit/revenue/strategic advantage etc.

staplung··on Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
Not knocking the article in any way but from the headline I was expecting - perhaps hoping - this would be about some innovation in filesystems research like it was the 90's again. That's not what this is.

It's about how filesystems as they are (and have been for decades) are proving to be powerful tools for LLMs/agents.

staplung··on MeshTNC is a tool for turning consumer grade LoRa radios into KISS TNC compatib
LoRa is short for Long Range. It's basically about providing a physical layer for networks over radio using spread spectrum modulation. It's got long range, even for fairly low-power devices, but also low bandwidth. Think IoT stuff. LoRaWAN is a layer above in the network stack (MAC) and runs on top of LoRa.

TNC is "terminal node controller". They're kinda sorta like modems for radios. KISS TNC is a particular protocol for communication between a radio and a TNC.

staplung··on The Sling: Humanity's Forgotten Power
The sling seems like it has a steeper learning curve and colorful failure modes, like breaking a sliding glass door or somesuch. You might have better luck with a fairly low draw-weight bow and some blunt rubber-tipped arrows.

My guess is that deer wouldn't be frightened by a drone but the sound is pretty annoying. Maybe it would be a good Pavlovian conditioning trigger to pair with some other deterrent.

Could you put sprinklers out there?

staplung··on Text classification with Python 3.14's ZSTD module
Ah, okay. Didn't realize that. I used either zlib or gzip long, long ago but never messed with the `zdict` param. Thanks for pointing that out.
staplung··on Text classification with Python 3.14's ZSTD module
This has been possible with the zlib module since 1997 [EDIT: zlib is from '97. The zdict param wasn't added until 2012]. You even get similar byte count outputs to the example and on my machine, it's about 10x faster to use zlib.

  import zlib

  input_text = b"I ordered three tacos with extra guacamole"

  tacos = b"taco burrito tortilla salsa guacamole cilantro lime " * 50
  taco_comp = zlib.compressobj(zdict=tacos)
  print(len(taco_comp.compress(input_text) + taco_comp.flush()))
  # prints 41

  padel = b"racket court serve volley smash lob match game set " * 50
  padel_comp = zlib.compressobj(zdict=padel)
  print(len(padel_comp.compress(input_text) +  padel_comp.flush()))
  # prints 54
staplung··on Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock
This is cool but it seems like it would be liable to drift. I.e. it "knows" the correct time but doesn't have any way to figure out that it's been driving the movement fast or slow by some number of milliseconds. Eventually, that will pile up to the point that it's not any better than running the thing off of batteries.

As the author points out, the cheap quartz mechanism has no way of reporting the position of the hands (other than the hands themselves) and that you have to set the PULSETIME constant by the right number of milliseconds. If you're off by even a millisecond, that's going to accumulate quick enough that it would make a difference over even a single day, wouldn't it?

EDIT: as some have pointed out, the Lavet stepper theoretically accounts for this in that it steps exactly one tick after so many oscillations. That number of oscillations does not change so that's all you need to get right.

However, that basically just kicks the can down the road a bit in that if each step is not exactly 1/60th of a circle or bits wear down or get sticky or you have analog noise in there you will presumably still have a source of biased drift that you won't be able to detect. But maybe those affects are small enough that they don't matter for a wall clock.

staplung··on Why is the sky blue?
In The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll recounts an episode from the oral defense of his astrophysics PhD thesis. A bunch of people ask questions but one prof holds back until...

""" “I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he says, carving his way through the Eberhard-Faber. “Why is the sky blue?”

My mind is absolutely, profoundly blank. I have no idea. I look out the window at the sky with the primitive, uncomprehending wonder of a Neanderthal contemplating fire. I force myself to say something—anything. “Scattered light,” I reply. “Uh, yeah, scattered sunlight.”

“Could you be more specific?”

Well, words came from somewhere, out of some deep instinct of self-preservation. I babbled about the spectrum of sunlight, the upper atmosphere, and how light interacts with molecules of air.

“Could you be more specific?”

I’m describing how air molecules have dipole moments, the wave-particle duality of light, scribbling equations on the blackboard, and . . .

“Could you be more specific?”

An hour later, I’m sweating hard. His simple question—a five-year-old’s question—has drawn together oscillator theory, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, even quantum mechanics. Even in my miserable writhing, I admired the guy… """

staplung··on Show HN: Printable Classics – Free printable classic books for hobby bookbinders
Very cool, thanks for putting this up.

Couple of observations:

- the page size drop down doesn't display any units (e.g. "6 x 9"). I assume there're all in inches but it would be a little more helpful if it said so and/or included a common name (e.g. US Letter) if one exists for that size.

- you might want to look into page imposition[1] something that's basically essential for any kind of stitched binding (as opposed to "perfect binding"). Full-blown imposition software is often ridiculously expensive and can have quite a few options so it's definitely both an engineering and UI challenge. In the meantime, Bookbinder JS[2] is a great site that I think runs entirely client side and can transform any PDF.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition

2: https://momijizukamori.github.io/bookbinder-js/?paperSize=LE...

staplung··on A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
I think the most likely end fate of the Hoover dam is that humans dismantle it. Eventually, Lake Mead will silt up enough to make the hydro plant useless (it will take centuries to silt up completely but silt will choke the plant long before that). De-silting the reservoir is not a realistic option.

Hopefully, we'll have alternate means of power generation that nullify the dam's economic viability long before then but water supply and flood mitigation are other functions that need consideration. Silt will eventually destroy those functions as well however.

staplung··on A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
Not really. The axis of the earth's rotation is not affected by plate tectonics and the star map is recording where the earth's northern axis is pointing as precession slowly moves it around a circle. The star map could certainly move around or get broken up by plate tectonics over that timescale but it's not really aligned with anything in a meaningful way so that doesn't matter.

The stars themselves will move - relative to us - and eventually some of them will disappear but nothing much is expected on that front for much longer than 10ky timeframes.

staplung··on A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
The star map comes up at the end of Joan Didion's essay "At the Dam":

""" I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not though much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.

"""

staplung··on Boston's subway system replacing 1890s-era wooden catenary system
I actually did already know that factoid but was struggling (am still) to see how it relates to a wooden trough that merely holds cables.

Another interesting factoid about the catenary: Robert Hooke proved that it takes on the shape (though inverted) of the ideal arch, in terms of supporting loads above it. La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is filled with them.

staplung··on Is C++26 getting destructive move semantics?
Sounds like the answer is no.

"For trivial relocatability, we found a showstopper bug that the group decided could not be fixed in time for C++26, so the strong consensus was to remove this feature from C++26."

[https://herbsutter.com/2025/11/10/trip-report-november-2025-...]

staplung··on Microsoft makes Zork open-source
MDL is also from MIT and supposedly stood for More Datatypes than Lisp. According to wikipedia "MDL provides several enhancements to classic Lisp. It supports several built-in data types, including lists, strings and arrays, and user-defined data types. It offers multithreaded expression evaluation and coroutines."

Seems that most of it's novelties were eventually added into LISP proper.

staplung··on CRDTs: Convergence without coordination
The "conflict-free" part of the name is misleading. The conflict "resolution" means having some deterministic algorithm such that all nodes eventually converge to the same state, but it won't necessarily mean that the end state looks like it's conflict-free to a human. The algorithm you choose to implement will determine what happens in the editing case imagined; various answers are possible, perhaps most of which would be classified as conflicting changes by a human who looked at the final result. The pitch for CRDTs is "we won't trouble you with the replication details and will eventually converge all the changes. The tradeoff is that sometimes we'll do the wrong thing."

That tradeoff is fine for some things but not others. There's a reason why git et al require human intervention for merge conflicts.

The article is doing a classic bait-and-switch: start with a motivating example then dodge the original question without pointing out that CRDTs may be a very bad choice for collaborative editing. E.g. maybe it's bad for code and legalese but fine for company-issued blog posts.

staplung··on Show HN: I've built a tiny hand-held keyboard
Totally rad.

Now you just need and Oculus and you can turn yourself into Johnny Mnemonic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzRjtvMQds4&t=63s

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