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Pete_D

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en.wikipedia.org 6y ago

Eternity II Puzzle

Pete_D
2pts0
www.bbc.co.uk 6y ago

The silent epidemic of America’s problem with guns

Pete_D
6pts0
en.wikipedia.org 6y ago

List of Chess Variants

Pete_D
1pts0
fgiesen.wordpress.com 6y ago

Write combining is not your friend (2013)

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2pts0
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 6y ago

Metacognition in the Rat (2007)

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1pts0
www.ibm.com 6y ago

Songs of the IBM (1935) [pdf]

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2pts0
www.computer-history.info 6y ago

The Radiation Printer

Pete_D
2pts0
www.thoughtco.com 6y ago

Penicillin and Antibiotics

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2pts0
zacharyvoase.com 6y ago

Monads, or Programmable Semicolons (2014)

Pete_D
75pts71
www.resilience.org 6y ago

The Next Ten Billion Years (2013)

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2pts1
stuff-things.net 6y ago

That dd trick and the ballad of SIGINFO (2016)

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3pts1
sanctum.geek.nz 6y ago

Using Ed (2012)

Pete_D
3pts0
craigmod.com 6y ago

Charcoal

Pete_D
2pts0
en.wikipedia.org 6y ago

Fire Piston

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2pts0
www.nytimes.com 6y ago

Luca, the Ancestor of All Living Things (2016)

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2pts0
www.gov.uk 6y ago

UK Government Design Principles

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2pts0
norvig.com 6y ago

Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle (2006)

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202pts95
iotic.com 6y ago

Averia – The Average Font

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3pts0
github.com 6y ago

C preprocessor tricks, tips, and idioms (2015)

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78pts12
www.catb.org 6y ago

Compactness and Orthogonality

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1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: Do you keep an engineering notebook?

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51pts21
www.gnu.org 7y ago

The X Window System Trap

Pete_D
3pts0
sanctum.geek.nz 7y ago

Better Bash History (2012)

Pete_D
267pts83
theconversation.com 7y ago

The curious relationship between altitude and suicide (2017)

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3pts1
en.wikipedia.org 8y ago

Pseudo-anglicism

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1pts0
hyperallergic.com 8y ago

What does “outsider artist” even mean? (2012)

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39pts34
idlewords.com 8y ago

Scott and Scurvy (2010)

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96pts10
www.rapp.org 8y ago

Bedford and the Normalization of Deviance

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58pts21
www.cs.utexas.edu 8y ago

E.W. Dijkstra Archive: The End of Computing Science? (EWD1304) (2000)

Pete_D
2pts0
www.unixguide.net 8y ago

What do Unix command names stand for?

Pete_D
362pts153

The terminal can optionally catch some characters and convert them to signals. By default, ^C sends SIGINT, ^\ sends SIGQUIT, and ^Z sends SIGTSTP. Programs can disable that for their own purposes (stty -isig) and you can rebind them to other characters if you want (stty intr, stty quit, stty susp) but I don't know why anyone would these days.

Amiga icons really felt like they were miles ahead of the competition and I'm surprised more of their possibilities didn't take off in other OSes.

- could change the icon for individual files/folders

- could have differently-sized icons

- different icons for unclicked + clicked state

Genuine question from someone looking at toying with graphics programming who had never heard of WebGPU before today: does this mean I should hold off on learning WebGL? How different are the two?

I didn't appreciate how big of a deal washing machines were until mine broke down and I had to do all my laundry in the bathtub for a couple of weeks waiting for a replacement. Hand-washing is a lot more of a workout than you'd expect, and getting things dry without a spin-cycle afterwards is a pain too.

There are lots of fun ways to smooth out short-term variation in game randomness. This article shows a few used by various Tetris games, with one of them being your deck-of-cards approach: https://simon.lc/the-history-of-tetris-randomizers

One of my favourite techniques not listed there is weighting the probabilities by distance, so individual outcomes get more likely the longer you've not seen them (making the gamblers' fallacy real, I guess).

Let's Destroy C 6 years ago

Off topic, but in today's bitter and divided world, it's reassuringly wholesome that people can still get together to recite the alphabet in GitHub comments.

cold showers can be dangerous for people with per-existing heart conditions

I think cold showers trigger the diving reflex[0] ("most noticeable effects are on the cardiovascular system, which displays ... in humans, heart rhythm irregularities"). I don't have a real source for that, but I tried cold showers a few times and found it impossible to breathe when I had cold water spraying on my face, like I could feel my airway closing involuntarily. Warm/hot water doesn't do that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_reflex

Thanks! Recognizing and remembering tones is one of the things I struggle with most, so I'd use this a lot.

A couple of comments: for 水果, it only accepts shŭi gŭo, not shúi gŭo. I know that is technically correct, but the voice synthesis sounds it out with the sandhi. More a question of philosophy I guess, but thought it was worth mentioning.

Also, it might be nice to have an option that hides the characters, so you're forced to rely on hearing rather than just knowing that e.g. 多 is dūo.

Looking forward to seeing what else you do with it!

Shrooms seem to be the next wave of legalization an in some ways it seems like it is already partly legal.

Weirdly, fresh shrooms were legal in the UK right up to 2005, when they were put in the same category as heroin and cocaine. I remember walking past shops openly advertising them. (Peyote cactuses too, which according to Wikipedia are still legal.)

Here's a strategy that might help. I mostly read HN logged-out on my lunch break. If I see something I want to comment on, I email it to myself for when I get home. Usually, by then, the urge has passed or I've realised that whatever comment I was going to make was actually dumb.

If that won't help because you can't resist the temptation to log in, I guess you could try "banning" yourself using the noprocrast setting in the HN profile?

Scripting tmux 7 years ago

This is a common property of software with BSD-ish roots. For example, neither does OpenSSH's ssh.

They also tested with synthetic caffeine and coffee-extracted caffeine, but didn't find much difference. Page 6 of the study has a graph, and this excerpt:

3.2. Caffeine, independently of its origin, abrogated lipid accumulation via regulation of lipogenic genes in vitro

Mate tea and fractionated caffeine and decaffeinated samples were assayed for their anti-adipogenic potential in 3T3-L1 adipocytes (Fig. 3). Synthetic caffeine (SC) and caffeine extracted (CO2 super-critical extraction) from coffee (CC) were also evaluated. All samples but DM [decaffeinated mate] significantly (p < 0.05) reduced lipid accumulation (from 20.6 to 40.7%) (Fig. 3A).

We already knew caffeine had various effects on fat metabolism, so the most interesting part of the study is probably the "but not other phytochemicals in mate tea" part.

I totally believed that was real until I clicked through to some of the other last-post links.

The reason you need to install a karaoke captioning library if you want to change your desktop wallpaper

Why using a can opener backwards doesn’t close the can back up

Best haircuts for Wi-Fi reception

Losing weight in 14 minutes a day with PostgreSQL

XMPP was supposed to solve all those problems when it came out in the early 2000s.

The really frustrating thing is that it almost did. I swear I remember at some point in the mid-2000s being able to send a message from Google Chat to Facebook. I think the option was hidden behind some account flags to enable external messages, but it was there.

I remember (but can no longer find) an article on the history of mince pies, which claimed that since foods were exempt from prohibition, people were making mince pies that were so soaked with brandy that they were around 14% ABV.

My non-technical parents have been Mint for years with minimal problems. One thing that makes life easier is that they were okay with me enabling sshd for the cases when they want me to investigate something for them.

(An incidental benefit of a Linux household - the calls from "Microsoft" become a lot funnier and less scary.)

They offer data for direct download in finer resolution[0], here are the relevant figures from HS6 rev. 2007 (2008 - 2017) - Product Trade by Year and Country (6 digit depth):

    $ awk 'NR == 1 || ($1 == 2017 && $2 == "usa" && $3 ~ /3002../)' < year_origin_hs07_6.tsv
    year    origin  hs07    export_val      import_val      export_rca      import_rca
    2017    usa     300210  396430658.00    59890506.00     2.838   0.258
    2017    usa     300220  1581667842.36   5492721193.76   0.829   1.734
    2017    usa     300230  735316335.89    15520567.21     2.725   0.035
    2017    usa     300290  24682749156.47  20875470805.73  2.452   1.249
So, $396M, assuming that 300210 is the sum of all the ones with "blood" in the descriptions from your HS code reference.

"Human or animal blood" seems like an odd choice of abbreviation for "Human blood; animal blood for therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic uses; antisera, other blood fractions, immunological products, modified or obtained by biotechnological processes; vaccines, toxins, cultures of micro-organisms (excluding yeasts) etc"[1], but hey.

(Though America still has a problem with exploiting poor people for blood products, even if it's not a billion dollar industry.)

[0] https://oec.world/en/resources/data/

[1] https://www.foreign-trade.com/reference/hscode.htm?cat=5