cynwoody

6 ms·

1.
by cynwoody 3y ago
HF radio reflects off the ionosphere's F-layer, located about 100-200 miles up. To get from Chicago to Frankfurt requires several hops between the ionosphere and the earth's surface. The hop length is one or two thousand miles. Sa
2.
by cynwoody 3y ago
"Encrypted" is too strong a word. But the code talkers needed a way to represent English that didn't have a natural Navajo equivalent. So they developed a vocabulary of 411 Navajo words to stand for common military terms. E.g
3.
by cynwoody 4y ago
> But as I said, things are changing. So far we're moving the "backend" stuff to .Net/C#. Delphi and C# share a chief architect, Anders Hejlsberg, who left Borland for Microsoft in 1996[0]. [0] https://en.
4.
by cynwoody 4y ago
Yes, Tom Scott is one talented YouTuber. See, for example, his video on microwaving frozen hamsters back to life[0], in which he interviews the 101-year-old J. E. Lovelock, the scientist who did the work back in the fifties. [0] https:&#x2F
5.
by cynwoody 4y ago
Right below the author's comment, "Regardless of a grid’s size, the current flowing through it oscillates in perfect synchrony, at exactly the same frequency, throughout the whole grid," he presents a map of Western Europe&#x
6.
by cynwoody 4y ago
It's not useful for mag tape or wire recordings, but archaeologists have available a technique that can date artifacts like campfires, pottery kilns, and burned out adobe houses within the last 10,000 years. It's called archaeomag
7.
by cynwoody 4y ago
Apparently, as the GP points out, the article author meant to write asterisk where he wrote plus. uint16(50_000) * uint16(50_000) is uint32(2_500_000_000), which turns out to be int32(-1_794_967_296), the garbage result the author cites.
8.
by cynwoody 4y ago
The Library of Congress claims† to host 21 petabytes of digital content. That would take†† a little over a minute and a half to send over the link described in the article, assuming, of course, that the content has been put in a ready-to-se
9.
by cynwoody 4y ago
From 1897 to 1953, New York City operated a pneumatic tube mail transport system. It consisted of 27 miles of tubing connecting 23 post offices and carried 95,000 letters per day, amounting to 30% of the city's mail volume. The caniste
10.
by cynwoody 5y ago
The Russian site also appears wide open. Example: https://yandex.ru/video/search?text=navalny%20putin%27s%20pa...
11.
by cynwoody 6y ago
In the US, we have ZIP+4, which appends an additional four digits to the five-digit ZIP code. It's mainly used by bulk mailers, as part of qualifying for reduced postage rates. Like the British postcode, important addresses have their
12.
by cynwoody 7y ago
I just do ZZ, if I want to save the buffer, or ZQ if I was just looking, or I messed up (I'm a vim newbie).
13.
by cynwoody 7y ago
> It's already absolutely impossible to send someone a link to a pdf you've found through google, this would make it impossible to send any link. Do you have an example of that behavior? I wanted to know "what is a lure in
14.
by cynwoody 7y ago
A few years ago, the IRS came after Boris Johnson, then the mayor of London, now the PM, for taxes on the gain from the sale of his house in London. He was born in NYC, you see, making him an American citizen. He ended up paying the tax and
15.
by cynwoody 7y ago
Voting does work with JS disabled, just not well. The page reloads and re-renders with the UI changes (up-down buttons hidden and unvote link added). However, the reload takes noticeable time, and you lose your scroll location, which is dis
16.
by cynwoody 7y ago
Mac OS versions prior to OS X used ':'. Mac OS X, initially released on 24 March 2001, uses '/', like other Unix-derived systems. Also, like other unices, OS X uses '\n' as the line ending. Prior Mac OSs u
17.
by cynwoody 8y ago
It seems the article's author won the 2017 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for 'using fluid dynamics to probe the question "Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?"' The prize announcement[0] cites the current article. Al
18.
by cynwoody 8y ago
> Always hated the name of that store. It sounds like a euphemism for Planned Parenthood. Back in 1994, Bezos wanted to call his new company "Cadabra," as in the magic incantation "abracadabra," but he quickly had a f
19.
by cynwoody 8y ago
I have an American Express Blue Cash Preferred, with a $95 fee, and a Fidelity Rewards Visa, with no fee. The AX card rebates 6% on groceries, 3% on gas, and 1% on everything else. The Visa pays 2% on everything else. No silly quarterly sch
20.
by cynwoody 8y ago
>Nobody but Red Hat makes any money off the Linux kernel. You forgot about Canonical. But the real point is, in the wild, the Linux kernel predominates. Every Android user is a Linux kernel user. Every Chromebook user is a Linux kernel u
21.
by cynwoody 8y ago
Holy crap! 1123 comments and the damned article link doesn't work! Might someone have something to hide? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xrEsOXE... Judge for yourself!
22.
by cynwoody 8y ago
>Basically, don't worry about it. Mark Twain said, “Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born — a hundred million years — and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember
23.
by cynwoody 8y ago
I'm sure GRU possesses the technical chops to put in place safeguards to guarantee against ever connecting other than through the VPN. They should do that and then hire Kaspersky to come over and audit their setup.
24.
by cynwoody 9y ago
It appears the old site is https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/ , and the new site ("in early beta") is https://softwaredaily.com/ . The two sites appear to contain the same set of podcasts. You ca
25.
by cynwoody 9y ago
Many thanks! Yours is a very superior treatment of the strace topic.
26.
by cynwoody 9y ago
I call that enacting the nuclear option. It's almost guaranteed to win the war with ad-tech! It should be enacted for sites with run-away ad engines that spin up your CPU fans and make scrolling laggy. Of course, the problem with nucle
27.
by cynwoody 9y ago
A wire takes place in real time, whereas an ACH goes into a batch which is cleared later, like a paper check. If you want the funds transferred instantly and with certainty, use a wire and pay the fee for the real-time service. If not, use
28.
by cynwoody 9y ago
I just tried it using Chrome 57: var i = document.createElement('img'); i.src= "https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.gif"; document.body.insertBefore(i, document.body.firstChild); The image ap
29.
by cynwoody 9y ago
In Google Translate (English to Russian), "Ukraine" and "the Ukraine" both give the same result, namely "Украины". Not surprising, given Russian lacks the definite article "the". However, "the Ou
30.
by cynwoody 10y ago
>You also should have a unique number on each ballot that you can later use to look up how your ballot was recorded. The standard objection to such a practice is that it facilitates vote buying / selling / coercion by giving th

More ›