AlbertoGP

A town, street name or postcode were omitted, but a highlighted note – presumably written by a postie – chirpily added ‘Royal Mail, we never fail!’ to the front of the letter.

I think the note was written by the sender because the handwriting looks the same as in the vague "woman in Cornwall shed" address.

My guess is that it was intended to motivate Royal Mail to figure it out by quoting what might have been their slogan at some point. Now the highlight could have been added by a post office worker as a way of saying "indeed we never fail". The sender's style of higlighting things seems rather to be adding asterisks.

Which one of the Markdowns should each browser support?

Alright but where is the link? Can you put in a comment?

I will try this out later, but for now the address https://mucss.org/ does not work for me. The Github link does.

In 50 years, people will be equally amazed that we could afford having our own computers on our desks.

I might be missing something, but parsing the HTML, even with the different formats, should be much simpler than the PDF form.

In 20 years I would guess they used no more than 20 formats, which is doable even if writing XPath (perhaps CSS selectors would suffice) by hand.

Do you mean that the mutual fund complex includes many funds and you get as many different formats for a same time period?

Thanks for the information, I have observed this in some of those links before (others worked, I do not know what the diffference is) and it might be the case. I am indeed outside the U.S.A.

The move to Singapore has been mentioned in several comments but he does address it in the linked piece:

Some might say: “Hang on, it’s all very well James Dyson telling Britain to support doers and makers, but he took his company’s manufacturing to Malaysia in 2002 and then set up a global headquarters in Singapore in 2019.”

The answer is worth exploring. In 2002 Dyson was expanding rapidly and urgently needed a new factory, but planning permission was refused. We were able to use empty factories in Singapore and Malaysia.

However, Dyson now employs about 2,000 people in Britain, which is about twice the number we employed at the time of the move.

I get 404 from the link.

This link shows me the paywall, I have not investigated why.

We had several Quickshot II's at home for our Commodore 64; each broke after a while and we had to get a new one.

It looked and felt fantastic and was cheap, but the garbage switch mechanism was a thin metal cross pushed down onto contacts on the board in such a way that it would inevitably snap and render the joystick useless.

I did what I could as a kid without proper materials or tools to repair them but nothing lasted.

I ended up building my own from scratch with steel and wood, reusing the cable of one of them, and could finally play without fear of breaking and leaving me high and dry.

From my experience with a previous product from Retro Games Ltd, The A500, I expect this one to be much better than the original.

The URL is wrong, the right one is https://rodgercuddington.substack.com/p/the-return-to-full-f...

UK retailers are reporting a striking reversal in dairy consumption patterns. Waitrose searches for full-fat milk increased 417%, full-fat yogurt 233%, and block butter 280% in a single month, while skimmed milk and low-fat yogurt are being left on shelves. This shift represents more than a dietary preference change – it signals a fundamental breakdown in public trust regarding nutrition guidance and reveals profound frustration with decades of conflicting advice.

This analysis examines the scientific evidence, economic factors, processing implications, and psychological dimensions driving this trend, with particular attention to how changing advice may have eroded consumer confidence in nutritional expertise itself.

That comment to which you replied, and the other thread of responses to it, are quotations of the malfunctioning and homicidal HAL computer from the movie “2001: a space oddisey”.

Around the time this website was made, I was building an application for a big company in Spain that was to run as a Java applet and required the code to be signed.

They did not yet have their own certificates so I had to make my own CA during testing and sign the code, and I wanted to make sure that they did not forget to switch to their certificates later, so instead of signing the code with my name which some bureaucrat might decide to not bother changing, the code was signed by Britney Spears.

They noticed it, got the joke and made sure to switch certificates for the release. Everything went well thanks to Britney.

Then apparently the editors renamed it to the (less interesting/more convoluted) title of the page it linked to.

It is part of the submission guidelines:

Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

A particularly interesting part that I did not expect from the title:

Before the rats encountered the detour, the research team observed that their brains were already firing in patterns that seemed to "imagine" alternate unfamiliar mental routes while they slept. When the researchers compared these sleep patterns to the neural activity during the actual detour, some of them matched.

“What was surprising was that the rats' brains were already prepared for this novel detour before they ever encountered it,”

Overall, I don’t think the LLM saved me any time. I didn’t end up keeping the code it gave me. But it got me unstuck, and that meant I actually made progress.

I haven't tried LLMs yet but this sounds valuable.

In 1984 one of the developers of Xanadu at the time, Chip Morningstar, wrote a technical description to apply for funding.

In typical Xanadu fashion it was kept secret, protected by Dark Magick:

He who transgresses against the propriety of the Information contained herein shall be Cursed! Woe unto all who reveal the Secrets contained herein for they shall be Hunted unto the Ends of the Universe. They shall be afflicted unto the Tenth Generation with Lawyers. Their Corporate Bodies shall be Broken and cast into the Pit. Their Corporate Veil shall be Pierced, and Liability shall attach to the Malefactors in personem. They shall suffer Ulcers and Migraines and Agonies Unimagined. Yea, Verily, for such shall come to pass against all who would Dare to Test the Powers of Xanadu unto their Doom.

It was believed to have been lost forever but in 2019 he found the only known remaining copy, a printout he had at home buried in old stuff, and posted it with OCR in his blog. He wrote:

At the time, we regarded all the internal details of how Xanadu worked as deep and dark trade secrets, mostly because in that pre- open source era we were stupid about intellectual property. As a consequence of this foolish secretive stance, it was never widely circulated and subsequently disappeared into the archives, apparently lost for all time. Until today!

I took it and made a cleaned-up augmented HTML edition, with additions like Engelbart’s structural statement numbers which allow linking to individual paragraphs:

https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/201904240732/Xanadu%20Hy...

It includes a glossary of terms and detailed explanation of the content addressing “tumblers”, and is the best technical description of Xanadu that I know of.

It is indeed the 11th of September, here is the German Government's page about it: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/leichte-sprache/11-se...

That man, Rex Malik, participated in (among other things) the 1982 BBC series “The Computer Programme” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme), typically in a small section at the end on an episode but also as narrator in other parts and is credited as “Programme Adviser”:

Episode 1 - “It’s Happening Now”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtMWEiCdsfc

Episode 4 - “It’s on the Computer”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkXqb1QT_tI

Episode 5 - “The New Media“: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GETqUVMXX3I

Episode 10 - “Things to Come”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLL7HmbcrvQ

I tried it out to see if I would want to use this instead of miniz which I am using at the moment, but the example seems to be missing some includes.

I filed an issue with the details: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/stb-zip/issues/1

Edit to add: I see now that you also did the Uprintf submission from a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44960664) which had some baffling bugs, and then you mentioned that you were using AI for some of it. That might explain the missing parts here too.

Ah, this fixes the problem I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44501362 and was also reported in an earlier reply by someone else there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44508433

Thanks!

The bottom-right camera view of Jonathan Blow and its audio do not match exactly the timing of the screen capture that fills the image. There are several seconds of delay.

It can be seen clearly at this point: https://youtu.be/RIYGaSBKy3w?t=1652 The most obvious moment is when he raises his hands gesticulating but the screen capture shows him moving the cursor in Emacs.

That confused me in some earlier points where he was mentioning things that were not visible on the screen until later.

Still, the talk is worth watching. I am particularly interested in the use of metaprogramming to ease debugging by gaining visibility on what the program is doing.

Edit: the delay has been reported in the YouTube comments and they say they will fix it and re-upload.

There are play, stop, fast forward, and rewind buttons on top and a volume dial and Bluetooth button on the side, along with a headphone jack and USB-C port.

... You cannot use it as an audio recorder.

I get now what the Voynich Manuscript says, in a way that might not satisfy all the code-crackers and linguists out there. Its enigmatic script doesn't say anything, and yet it says everything. Your communication needs to include connection: otherwise, with any luck, people may only someday debate not what you said, but whether you said anything at all (6).

Volunteer Site Managers Needed

I am looking for 2 or 3 interested individuals to eventually take over the website. I am 68 years old and my lifespan and health diminish each year. If you think you might be interested blease contact me through the contact-us page.

Rockbox is a free replacement firmware for digital music players.

The Morpho language. Morpho is a programmable environment for shape optimization and scientific computing tasks more generally. Morpho aims to be:

- Familiar. Morpho uses syntax similar to other C-family languages. The syntax fits on a postcard, so it's easy to learn.

- Fast. Morpho programs run as efficiently as other well-implemented dynamic languages like wren or lua (Morpho is often significantly faster than Python, for example). Morpho leverages numerical libraries like BLAS, LAPACK and SUITESPARSE to provide high performance.

- Class-based. Morpho is highly object-oriented, which simplifies coding and enables reusability.

- Extendable. Functionality is easy to add via packages, both in Morpho and in C or other compiled languages. Packages can be downloaded, installed and distributed via the morphopm package manager.

MIT License

Languages: C 98.8% Python 0.7% CMake 0.5% Batchfile 0.0% Makefile 0.0% Objective-C 0.0%

https://github.com/Morpho-lang/morpho

That builds libmorpho.so, the CLI is at:

https://github.com/Morpho-lang/morpho-cli

I’m not involved in this project in any way, just trying it out because it sounds interesting.

A foil balloon was enough to take out multiple fabs in Germany

I didn't know about that incident; more details here:

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/wayward-balloon-c...

Jumping straight to what makes the Xiaomi Modular Optical System possible, Xiaomi’s proprietary LaserLink technology helps the module connect to the phone with ultra-fast 10Gbps optical data transfer. [...]

This LaserLink optical communication module transmits raw data as a near-infrared laser through the lens to the phone’s image signal processor (ISP) in nanoseconds without delay or compromise in quality.

Sony aimed for something similar in 2013 with their QX camera series (https://www.photographyblog.com/reviews/sony_ilce_qx1_review), but those were complete cameras including battery and SD-Card slots that communicated wirelessly via NFC or WiFi with the mobile phone so there was a lot of redundant functionality.