HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

swhitt

152 karma · joined February 23, 2009

software developer in Houston, TX, USA.
submissionscomments
swhitt··on Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep
I love this, and I wanted to use it when I was suffering from a bit of sleeplessness in the past month or so. Unfortunately, my brain gets stuck in a loop trying to figure out when the audience noise loops. There's one guy who makes the same holler every N seconds.
swhitt··on I caught Google Gemini using my data and then covering it up
I’m pretty sure this is because they don’t want Gemini saying things like, “based on my stored context from our previous chat, you said you were highly proficient in Alembic.”

It’s hard to get a principled autocomplete system like these to behave consistently. Take a look at Claude’s latest memory-system prompt for how it handles user memory.

https://x.com/kumabwari/status/1986588697245196348

swhitt··on Buried in Infrastructure Bill Is a Mandatory Backdoor Kill Switch for Your Car
There's typically a button to toggle it on/off somewhere near the steering wheel.

I got a new car a couple of months ago that has this, and was experiencing similar issues on rural Texas farm roads. I just had to look up where mine was and turn it off temporarily.

swhitt··on Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties
New internal email from President Reif:

To the members of the MIT community,

After recent events centered on the Media Lab, I know there is a tremendous sense of pain, sadness and disappointment across campus and throughout our global community. We all want answers.

For now, I write to share two important updates. Last Saturday, we retained the law firm Goodwin Procter to perform a thorough investigation of the facts surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s interactions with MIT. This work has already begun. We have asked the firm to explore all donations received by MIT, both those that came directly from Jeffrey Epstein and his associated foundations, and any donations that may have been received at the direction of Jeffrey Epstein. In addition, the investigation will cover who at MIT may have been aware of the donations. We have instructed Goodwin Procter to follow the evidence where it leads, and we are counting on this independent investigation to ascertain the facts. As I noted on Saturday, the firm will report back to me and to the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, MIT’s governing board.

If you have information relevant to the investigation that you would like to share with the law firm, please email REDACTED.

To be thorough, such an investigation will take time, on the order of a month. Although media reports will continue to focus on the issues during this time, I am hopeful that the MIT community will avoid forming a final judgment before the process is complete and will respect the privacy of members of our community who may have become involved in this matter in the course of doing their jobs for MIT.

Once we have the results, and once our separate internal review of our current processes on gift acceptance is complete, we will be able to understand what happened and what needs to change. Supporting the members of the Media Lab must now be at the center of our attention. The Provost has asked the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning to work with the Media Lab community on interim leadership for the lab and a search for the next director. The interim plan will be finalized shortly, and we will share the news as soon as possible, along with other plans to support the lab community. I know this is a difficult and disorienting moment. But I have profound faith in the MIT community to learn from these events and find a constructive way forward.

Sincerely,

L. Rafael Reif

swhitt··on Support for U2F security keys
All services except for AWS.
swhitt··on Apple Is Listening
The main rumor these days (well, it's been a rumor for quite a few years) is that they'll be dropping Intel and switching to house-designed ARM chips across the board.
swhitt··on Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX Investigation Preliminary Report
https://www.satcom.guru/2019/04/stabilizer-trim-loads-and-ra... does a pretty good job of summarizing it I think. It sounds incredibly difficult to do.
swhitt··on Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX Investigation Preliminary Report
Manual Stabilizer Trim

Excessive airloads on the stabilizer may require effort by both pilots to correct the mis-trim. In extreme cases it may be necessary to aerodynamically relieve the airloads to allow manual trimming. Accelerate or decelerate towards the in-trim speed while attempting to trim manually.

https://www.pilot18.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/B737NG_FC... page 312 (8.16)

swhitt··on Why Amazon is eating the world (2017)
Unfortunately they no longer offer a free month of Prime for a late delivery - I believe too many people were taking advantage of that perk.

The last few times I've bothered to complain I've been offered a $5 credit instead.

swhitt··on Reverse Culture Shock
Here's the scene from Selena, it's pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw5bA8cVF-E
swhitt··on Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
His real name is Leonard so probably not.
swhitt··on Typedrummer
http://typedrummer.com/6haxm2
swhitt··on SpaceX CRS-6 Launch Webcast
> 1 second launch window

Why is it so precise?

swhitt··on OS X Screencast to animated GIF
Now we just need ShareX for OS X (and have it deal with the damn hidpi screenshots correctly).
swhitt··on Saturn V Flight Manual (1969) [pdf]

  You don't have permission to access /ap12fj/pdf/a12_sa507-flightmanual.pdf on this server.
swhitt··on How We Measure
Can you print your own cheques? All you need to know is your account and routing numbers.
swhitt··on Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club
Oh great. I have the TetriNET theme song midi stuck in my head now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j02bbkyuYw#t=6
swhitt··on Btcd: A Full Alternative Bitcoin Implementation, Written In Go
When this was posted on reddit there was a bit of confusion as the title lead people to believe this was about an alternate cryptocurrency (like litecoin, feathercoin, etc).

It's actually a complete reimplementation of the Bitcoin protocol, which can be used as an alternative to the bitcoind/bitcoin-qt (the official Bitcoin p2p clients) JSON-RPC interface.

swhitt··on Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out
Didn't GitHub's progress-bar screen while you were waiting for a fork used to say "Hardcore forking action!" or something like that? I think I have a shirt that says something along those lines too. Weren't those guys celebrated for their incredible humor?
swhitt··on Bitcoin blockchain issue - Mt Gox Bitcoin deposits temporarily suspended
It was great to see in action, but given the way the system is right now it wasn't that incredible.

The maintainers of the biggest pools are all very active in the community; it would just take 2-3 of the big mining pools to say "hey, let's go back to 0.7" for this to be resolved automatically.

swhitt··on Bitcoin blockchain issue - Mt Gox Bitcoin deposits temporarily suspended
The choice was made for backwards compatibility. People are still running version 0.3-0.7 of bitcoind and up to this point that was not a problem. If we decided the 0.8 fork was canonical we'd lose a big chunk of the userbase.
swhitt··on Bitcoin blockchain issue - Mt Gox Bitcoin deposits temporarily suspended
Most pools don't distribute funds to their users until 120 confirmations have been reached so none of the coin that they mined will show up in their users' accounts. The only way this could cause problems is if the pool's maintainer is somehow still mining on the 0.8 branch which would not happen as the 0.7 branch blockchain has surpassed it in length.

If you are solo-mining and you found a block on the 0.8 branch of the fork, the standard client prevents spending newly minted coin with less than 120 confirmations. It will be the same as what happens when you get any other orphaned block, the funds will just disappear.

swhitt··on Need Bitcoins? This ATM takes dollars and funds your account
The reason why SatoshiDICE can do this is because they include the output of the bet transaction as one of the inputs to the win/lose response transaction.

If part of the bet transaction is doublespent there's a good chance it won't make it into a block. If the bet transaction doesn't make it into a block, the response transaction won't either and is therefore worthless.

swhitt··on Dear Apple: Please set iMessage free
Under settings on the iPhone there's the option to completely wipe the phone. Before you give your phone to someone else you should do this. Otherwise you were still logged in to his iMessage account.
swhitt··on Fl0wer.png.html
Ah! My browser! I lost my thesis :(
swhitt··on Remembering a relationship, one chat at a time
Holy crap. Normally stories like this don't affect me very much. I'm on my lunch break, on the verge of sobbing. Is somebody cutting onions?

Part of me wants to delete all of my chat logs so that I can never relive this stuff if something were to happen to my SO. But then I'd lose all of that, and the thought of losing those memories is terrifying.

swhitt··on Physicist cuts plane boarding time in half
Height distribution? I'd much prefer a wingspan-based distribution. There's nothing like getting stuck in a middle seat between two broad-shoulderd gentlemen.
swhitt··on Physicist cuts plane boarding time in half
United/Continental does this (basically). First class first, followed by their frequent-flier-tiered passengers. From then on, it's back to front.
swhitt··on An open letter to Kevin Rose from Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian
s/orange/orangered