Hacker News Highlights

thewonderidiot on We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:50:13 +0000

Mike Stewart here! I led the restoration of the AGC documented on CuriousMarc's channel and co-administrate VirtualAGC. There is a lot to unpack here.

First: this is indeed a real bug in the AGC software. However, it did not go unnoticed for the whole program. It was discovered during level 3 testing of SATANCHE, and late development branch of the Command Module software COMANCHE. It was assigned anomaly number L-1D-02, and was fixed between Apollo 14 and 15. There are two known surviving copies of the L-1D-02 anomaly report:

* https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/contents_of_luminar...

The fix described in the article is partially complete, but as noted in the anomaly report there's a little bit more to it. Rather than just adding the two instructions to zero LGYRO, they restructured the code a bit and also cause it to wake up pending jobs. You can compare the relevant sections of the Apollo 14 and Apollo 15 LM software here:

* Apollo 14: https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc/blob/master/Luminar...

* Apollo 15: https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc/blob/master/Luminar...

The bug would not manifest silently in the way described in the article. For starters, LGYRO is also zeroed in STARTSB2, which is executed via GOPROG2 on any major program change: https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc/blob/master/Luminar...

This means that changing from any program to any other program would immediately resolve the issue. This is almost certainly a large part of why it took them so long to notice. Hitting BADEND while actively pulse-torquing is quite rare, and avoided by normal procedure. The scenario presented in the article can't happen since the act of starting P52 will zero LGYRO.

Moreover, in the very specific scenarios in which the bug can be triggered and remain, it results in multiple jobs stacking up attempting to torque the gyros. Eventually the computer runs out of space for new jobs -- similar to what happened on 11 -- and a 31202 (the Apollo 12+ equivalent of 1202) is triggered.

Since the issue was found before the flight of Apollo 14, a further description of how it might occur and what the recovery procedure should be was added to the Apollo 14 Program Notes: https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/LUM159_text.pdf#pag...

Some other notes:

> Ken Shirriff has analysed it down to individual gates

I've done the bulk of the gate-level analysis. :)

> the Virtual AGC project runs the software in emulation, having confirmed the recovered source byte-for-byte against the original core rope dumps.

We've only been able to do that in very specific circumstances and only for subsections of assorted programs, but never for a full program. Most AGC software either comes from a program listing, from a core rope dump, or from reconstruction using changelogs and known memory bank checksums. We've disassembled all of the rope dumps into source files that assemble back into the same binary, but the comments and labels will be different from what was in the original listing. And to be extra clear: I've never had the opportunity to dump a module containing Apollo 11 software for either vehicle. Our sole source for both programs is a pair of printouts in the MIT Museum's collection.

> Margaret Hamilton (as “rope mother” for LUMINARY) approved the final flight programs before they were woven into core rope memory.

Jim Kernan was the rope mother for Luminary at least up through Apollo 11. Margaret was the rope mother for Comanche, the CM software, and was later promoted to lead the software division. Their positions at the time of 11 can be seen on this org chart: https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/ApolloOrg-1969-02.p...

> Their priority scheduling saved the Apollo 11 landing when the 1202 alarms fired during descent, shedding low-priority tasks under load exactly as designed.

This is a huge topic on its own, but the AGC software was not designed to shed low-priority jobs. Ironically, the lowest priority job during the landing was the landing guidance itself, with high-priority jobs being reserved for things that needed quick response like antenna movements or display updates. If the computer were to shed the lowest-priority jobs, it would shed the landing guidance. This memo contains a list of all jobs active during the landing and their priorities: https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/CherryApollo11Exege...

> For example, the ICD for the rendezvous radar specified that two 800 Hz power supplies would be frequency-locked but said nothing about phase synchronisation. The resulting phase drift made the antenna appear to dither, generating roughly 6,400 spurious interrupts per second per angle and consuming roughly 13% of the computer’s capacity during Apollo 11’s descent. This was the underlying cause of the 1202 alarms.

The frequency-lock prevents phase drift, so the phase is essentially fixed once the power supplies are up. Ironically, however, the bigger issue is that one reference was 28V while the other was 15V. Initial testing on actual Apollo hardware suggests that at least for Apollo 11, this voltage difference was the key contributor rather than the phase difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT33c70EIYk

ttul on Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:44:58 +0000

In my small island community, I participated in a municipal committee whose mandate was to bring proper broadband to the island. Although two telecom duopolies already served the community, one of them had undersea fiber but zero fiber to the home (DSL remains the only option), whereas the other used a 670 Mbps wireless microwave link for backhaul and delivery via coaxial cable. And pricing? Insanely expensive for either terrible option.

Our little committee investigated all manner of options, including bringing municipal fiber across alongside a new undersea electricity cable that the power company was installing anyway. I spoke to the manager of that project and he said there was no real barrier to adding a few strands of fiber, since the undersea high voltage line already had space for it (for the power company’s own signaling).

Sadly, the municipality didn’t have any capital to invest a penny into that fiber, so one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.

A few weeks later, the cable monopoly engaged a cable ship and began laying their own fiber. Competition works, folks. Even if you have to fake it.

dublin on George Goble has died

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:22:23 +0000

I contacted him a number of years ago about his R-12 replacement for my old 1975 Ferrari, rather than converting it. It worked perfectly - better than Freon-12, even. Which is the only reason the EPA refused to allow it to be widely used. His web site (ghgcool, IIRC, I'm sure long gone by now) taught me that you can also mix butane and isopropane as a superior drop-in substitute for R-12, but he didn't pursue that approach because he knew that the EPA would kill it on safety grounds - even though it was only slightly more flammable than R-12 with the required compressor oil mixed into it.

George was a really interesting guy, a true hacker's hacker, and I truly enjoyed talking with him.

sponaugle on George Goble has died

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:43:46 +0000

Sad to hear! I worked for George for all of my undergraduate time at Purdue. He was an amazing boss with such a passion for all things unix. For a while he had the UNIX license plate on his minivan.

tantalor on George Goble has died

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:34:38 +0000

Lighting a charcoal grill with liquid oxygen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjPxDOEdsX8

tren on Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:21:11 +0000

My Dad wrote an article about this 25 years ago or so: https://aoi.com.au/LB/LB705/ (How the Neanderthals became the Basques). He would really get a kick out of people reading it (he's 90 now). His website goes back to 96' and it shows.

srean on Researchers find 3,500-year-old loom that reveals textile revolution

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:47:16 +0000

I am always pleasantly amused that many HN folks share with me a love for weaving, knitting and knotting; not to mention ropes.

Dang had once posted a long list of HN discussions on these topics.

I think there is something about them that squirts a little bit of dopamine in our pattern seeking, puzzle solving brains.

For me, one of draws was how does the symmetry of the woven pattern get weft into the cloth. Multi-shaft looms does it differently from, say, a Kashmiri rug.

When I had joined HN decades ago I had no idea that there would be this shared interest. Frankly, there were no reason for this to be the case.

Then one day this happened

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44462404

broadsidepicnic on ICAO issued new power bank restriction on flight

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 23:35:58 +0000

Pilot here.

While I definitely approve this and consider the limit to be one too many, I wish ecigarettes would be rather the target as soon as possible. Those are dangerous, and lately the most potential culprit for lithium related problems aboard.

chsun on CERN uses ultra-compact AI models on FPGAs for real-time LHC data filtering

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:04:40 +0000

One of the authors (of one of the two models, not this particular paper) here. Just a clarification, these models are *not* burned into silicon. They are trained with brutal QAT but are put onto fpgas. For axol1tl, the weights are burned in the sense that the weights are hard-wired in the fabric (i.e., shift-add instead of conventional read-muk-add cycle), but not on the raw silicon so the chip can be reprogrammed. Though, for projects like smartpixel or HG-Cal readout, there are similar ones targeting silicon (google something like "smartpixel cern", "HGCAL autoencoder" and you will find them), and I thought it was one of them when viewing the title.

Some slides with more info: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1496673/contributions/6637931/a... The approval process for a full paper is quite lengthy in the collaboration, but a more comprehensive one is coming in the following months, if everything went smoothly.

Regarding the exact algorithm: there are a few versions of the models deployed. Before v4 (when this article was written), they are slides 9-10. The model was trained as a plain VAE that is essentially a small MLP. In inference time, the decoder was stripped and the mu^2 term from the KL div was used as the loss (contributions from terms containing sigma was found to be having negliable impact on signal efficiency). In v5 we added a VICREG block before that and used the reconstruction loss instead. Everything runs in =2 clock cycles at 40MHz clock. Since v5, hls4ml-da4ml flow (https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01463, https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04535) was used for putting the model on FPGAs.

For CICADA, the models was trained as a VAE again, but this time distilled with supervised loss on the anomaly score on a calibration dataset. Some slides: https://indico.global/event/8004/contributions/72149/attachm... (not up-to-date, but don't know if there other newer open ones). Both student and teacher was a conventional conv-dense models, can be found in slides 14-15.

Just sell some of my works for running qat (high-granularity quantization) and doing deployment (distributed arithmetic) of NNs in the context of such applications (i.e., FPGA deployment for <1us latency), if you are interested: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00645 https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04535

Happy to take any questions.

sombragris on What came after the 486?

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:01:23 +0000

I remember fondly the AMD K6/2 architecture. It was the CPU of a ultra-budget priced Compaq Presario laptop that got me through graduate school back in the day.

Some years later, back in my home country (Paraguay) I met a lady who had a side business being a VAR builder of desktop PCs. In my country, due to a lot of constraints, there was (and is) quite a money crunch and people tried to cheap out the most when purchasing computers. This gave rise to a lot of unscrupulous VAR resellers who built ultra-low quality, underpowered PCs with almost unusable specs at an attractive price while making a pretty profit. You could still get much better deals in both price and specs, but you had to have an idea about where to look.

Well, back to this lady. She said that during the early 2000s she was on the same line of business, selling beige box desktop PCs at the lowest possible prices. But she said that she loved the AMD K6 and K6/2 architectures because they provided considerable bang for the buck. The cost was affordable, and yet performance was good. Add some reasonable amounts of RAM and storage and you could have a well-performing PC at a good price. The downside, as she said, was that the processors tended to generate lots of heat and thus the fans had to be good. This was especially important in a very hot country like Paraguay. But the bottom line was that AMD K6 line enabled her to offer customers a good deal.

This made me appreciate what AMD did with K6. They really helped to bring good computers to the masses.

willio58 on Chuck Norris has died

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:34:39 +0000

There was a period of like 2 years when I was a kid where chuck Norris jokes were all the rage on the playground and I made an iPhone app that listed them all.

Jokes like “Chuck Norris is able to slam a revolving door.”

Anyway, I “built” this stupid app when I was like 13, copy-pasted like 300 jokes in there and a random one would show every time you tapped the screen.

Chuck Norris’s estate blocked the app from going live. I wish I had printed that rejection out and framed it.

jjmarr on Waymo Safety Impact

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:36:02 +0000

Waymo saved my life in LA.

When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.

In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over.

Most human drivers would've t-boned the car at 50+ km/h. Maybe they would've braked and reduced the impact, which would be the right move. A human swerving probably would've overshot into oncoming traffic. Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely.

Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.

jes5199 on “Your frustration is the product”

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:53:00 +0000

I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously)

but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try

we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop

GMoromisato on LotusNotes

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:40:04 +0000

I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.]

Lotus Notes was, I firmly believe, a glimpse of the future to come. In 1996, Lotus Notes had encrypted messaging, shared calendars, rich-text editing, and a sophisticated app development environment. I had my entire work environment (email, calendar, bugs database, etc.) fully replicated on my computer. I could do everything offline and later, replicate with the server.

And this was two years before the launch of Google and eight years before GMail!

In the article, the author speculates that the simplicity of the Lotus Notes model--everything is a note--caused it to become too complicated and too brittle. I don't think that's true.

Lotus Notes died because the web took over, and the web took over because it was even simpler. Lotus Notes was a thick client and a sophisticated server. The web is just a protocol. Even before AI, I could write a web server in a weekend. A browser is harder, but browsers are free and ubiquitous.

The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could. And because it was free. The web won because it was open.

girvo on Warranty Void If Regenerated

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:05:05 +0000

I will say this is one of the few pieces of prose I've read that was AI generated that didn't immediately jump out as it (a couple of inconsistencies eventually grabbed me enough to come to the comments and see your post details which mention it - I'd clicked through from the HN homepage), so your polishing definitely worked! Quite a neat little story

anonymsft318 on Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:27:21 +0000

As a Microsoftie of more than a decade... Yeah, I see this.

We have an internal system called Cosmos[0] that does a great job of processing huge quantities of data very fast. And we sat on it for years while the rest of the industry moved to Spark and its derivatives. We finally released it as Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) but did a shit job of supporting/promoting it.

We built Synapse, and it's garbage. We've now got Fabric which I guess is the new Synapse. I wouldn't really know because I probably have five different systems that I use that basically do large-scale data processing, and yet Fabric isn't one of them; who knows, maybe it will become the sixth?

We've had numerous internal systems for orchestrating jobs, and it wasn't until Azure Data Factory that we finally released something externally that we sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really use internally. (To be fair, some teams do use it internally, but we're not all rowing in the same direction.)

I regularly deal with multiple environments with different levels of isolation for security. I don't even know how it's all supposed to work -- I have my regular laptop and a secure workstation and three accounts that work on the two. Yet I have to do some privileged account escalation to activate these roles; when I'm done, there's no apparent way to end the activation early, so I just let it time out.

These things are but a fraction of the Azure offerings, but literally everything I have used in Azure makes me absolutely HATE working in the cloud. There's not a single bright side to it AFAICT. As best as I can tell, the only reason why Azure makes so much damn money is because Microsoft is huge and can leverage its size into growth. We're very much failing up here.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/big-dat...

tzs on Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:32:13 +0000

> The Xbox One has been emulated though (well not emulated, it's a compatibility layer like Wine).

The parenthetical is not needed. It is OK to call Wine an emulator. The "Wine Is Not an Emulator" thing came about later and was essentially a marketing change. How it came about is interesting.

The first suggestion to change the meaning of the word from a shortening of "windows emulator to the not an emulator backronym was in 1993 over concern that "windows emulator" might run into problems with Microsoft trademarks, but no action was taken.

Over time the not an emulator usage became an accepted alternative. The Wine FAQ in late 1997 for example said:

  The word Wine stands for one of two things: WINdows
  Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are right.
  Use whichever one you like best.

The release notes stopped calling it an emulator at the end of 1998. The 981108 release notes said:

  This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator.

The 981211 release notes said:

  This is release 981211 of Wine, a free implementation of
  Windows on Unix.

As far as I have been able to tell from my recollections of that time and what I was able to find when I looked into it later is that this happened for two reasons.

1. Wine was useful for more than just running Windows binaries on Unix. It could also be used as a library you could link with code compiled on Unix as an aide to porting Windows programs to Unix.

2. Hardware emulators that emulator old systems like GameBoy or Apple II had become popular. Many people were only familiar with that kind of emulator, and those (the emulators, not the people!) tended to be slow.

That was fine when your emulator is running on a machine with a clock speed 300x that of the machine you are emulating and that has a much more efficient CPU, but when you tried to use a hardware emulator for something comparable to your machine it was usually unbearably slow.

People only familiar with such hardware emulators might see Wine described as a Windows emulator and think it was doing hardware emulation and not even give it a try. By dropping calling it an emulator Wine sidestepped that problem.

geocrasher on Six ingenious ways how Canon DSLRs used to illuminate their autofocus points

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:57:28 +0000

My uncle Richard is one of the inventors on Honeywell’s early phase‑detect autofocus. Patent US4333007A, which figures out both the direction and amount the lens needs to move instead of hunting.

Modern systems like Canon’s Dual Pixel AF in bodies such as the EOS R5 are very direct descendants of that idea, just implemented on‑sensor with far more processing power.

Every time I see an article such as this, I beam with pride. (Pun intended).

ralferoo on $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:00:06 +0000

I remember an anecdote our robotics lecturer told our university class in 1995, which was about how in the west we try to make expensive things that are the absolute best of technology and how the other side didn't have that luxury and relied on ingenuity.

He described a cold war Russian missile they had somehow obtained and were tasked with trying to reverse engineer. Ostensibly, it was thought to be a heat seeking missile, but there seemed to be no control or guidance circuitry at all. There was a single LDR (light dependent resistor) attached to a coil which moved a fin. That was it. Total cost for the guidance system maybe a couple of dollars, compared to hundreds of thousands for the cheapest guidance systems we had at the time.

The key insight was that if you shined a light at it, the fin moved one way and if there was no light the fin moved the opposite way. That still didn't explain how this was able to guide a missile, but the next realisation was that the other fins were angled so when this was flying (propelled by burning rocket fuel), the missile was inherently unstable - rotating around the axis of thrust and wobbling slightly. With the moveable fin in place, it was enough to straighten it up when it was facing a bright light, and wobble more when there was no bright light. Because it was constantly rotating, you could think of it as defaulting to exploring a cone around its current direction, and when it could see a light it aimed towards the centre of that cone. It was then able to "explore the sky" and latch on to the brightest thing it could see, which would hopefully be the exhaust from a plane, and so it would be able to lock on, and adjust course on a moving target with no "brain" at all.

comrade1234 on Runners who churn butter on their runs

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:34:23 +0000

This is really funny. My wife and I watched all of New Scandinavian Cooking over a few months and there was an episode where he made butter. It blew our minds at how simple it was. We had no idea!

So we bought a couple of liters of cream (35% fat), put it in the stand mixer and made butter. There's a Serious Eats page about it.

The butter we made was better than what we normally buy. We live in Switzerland so the normal grocery store butter is very good. Our butter had less water in it (you can tell in a frying pan) and more flavor. Plus we take the resulting buttermilk and make ricotta cheese and then we take the leftover whey and make Norwegian cheese (more like fudge). So we get three products from one batch of cream. The butter comes out to be about 20 cents cheaper per 250g than store bought and then the ricotta and "fudge" are free, so financially you come out ahead. The cleanup is a bit of a pain though.

We've also made cultured butter from crème fraiche. It's tasty but even when the crème fraiche is on sale it's still like 2x the cost of using cream so probably not worth it other than gifts and special occasions. We made mandarin sorbet with the sour buttermilk after the crème fraiche butter and that was excellent.

When I tell old Swiss people (people in their 70s/80s) that we make butter they think it's hilarious. They tell me about how when they were kids their parents made their own butter and also at parties/gatherings the parents would give the kids a jar of cream and it was their job to shake it and pass it around until it was butter.

If you have an hour on the weekend and if you have a stand mixer I suggest just trying it. Start with the balloon whisk and when the peaks start forming switch to the paddle watch it because when the butter forms it happens quick and you get a big clump of butter rattling around in the mixer knocking it off balance. It takes maybe 25 minutes and then you have to wash it in ice water, mold it, then clean up. About an hour.

Animats on Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 06:37:54 +0000

Oh, that incident.

That was back when Altavista, the first search engine, was in downtown Palo Alto. Brian Reid was behind that. It was intended as a demo for the DEC Alpha CPU. They wanted to show that a large number of little machines could do a big job, which was a radical idea at the time. They were leasing an old telco building, on Bryant St. behind the Walgreens on University Avenue. The telco had moved to a larger building nearby when they went from crossbar to 5ESS, leaving behind the very tall racks typical of electromagnetic central offices.

That's where the modern data center began. Before this, data centers were raised floor operations. This one was racks and racks of identical servers, with cable trays overhead. This was the first one to look like a telephone central office. Because that's what it was before.

The building is still some kind of data center. For a while, it was PAIX, the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, the peer meeting point for west coast ISPs. Equinix has it now; it's their SV8 location, offering colocation services. Small by modern standards, but close to the early HQs of many famous startups, including Facebook.

The grease problem was written up in the local newspaper, back when Palo Alto had one. Palo Alto Utilities (the city owns its power company) got the report, and quickly realized someone was dumping grease into their transformer vault. So they put someone on stakeout, watching all night. The offending restaurant employee was caught. The restaurant was fined and billed for the cleanup.

In 2006, there was another grease dumping incident in a transformer vault a block further north. This one did result in a grease fire.[1] Palo Alto Fire Department has a CO2 truck, and dumped enough CO2 in to put out the fire. Power was out for most of the night.

I used to live within walking distance of there.

[1] https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2006/03/12/grease-dumpin...

paul on Tony Hoare has died

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:14:00 +0000

One of my favorite quotes: “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”

I think about this a lot because it’s true of any complex system or argument, not just software.

pradn on Tony Hoare has died

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:11:40 +0000

He came to give a lecture at UT Austin, where I did my undergrad. I had a chance to ask him a question: "what's the story behind inventing QuickSort?". He said something simple, like "first I thought of MergeSort, and then I thought of QuickSort" - as if it were just natural thought. He came across as a kind and humble person. Glad to have met one of the greats of the field!

Plasmoid on Tony Hoare has died

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:18:00 +0000

Fun story - at Oxford they like to name buildings after important people. Dr Hoare was nominated to have a house named after him. This presented the university with a dilemma of having a literal `Hoare house` (pronounced whore).

I can't remember what Oxford did to resolve this, but I think they settled on `C.A.R. Hoare Residence`.

stevepike on Caxlsx: Ruby gem for xlsx generation with charts, images, schema validation

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:21:37 +0000

It looks like this is a community continuation of the axlsx gem which was maintained back in the day by Randy Morgan (randym) over at https://github.com/randym/axlsx. One of my earliest open source contributions was adding support so that you could output spreadsheets with "conditional" formatting (color something red if it is below some value, for instance). I remember Randy being extremely supportive of new contributors and it made me want to be a part of the ruby community.

Thanks for continuing the work!

rozzie on Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:01:24 +0000

FidoNet was a simply wonderful innovation, and it was a reflection of the creativity of its author - Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity. https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings

Tom was working on FidoNet in 1984, the same time my Iris co-founders and I had begun work on what became Lotus Notes. Architecturally, those of us who were working on collaborative systems in that era were shaped by the decentralized architecture of USEnet - inspired and motivated by the observation that a community could be brought together by something technologically as simple as uucp.

Both dial-up focused, Tom took this in the direction of a decentralized BBS, while I took it in the direction of masterless replicated nosql databases we called 'notefiles'. Identity being at the core, Tom was focused more on public community while we focused on private collaboration.

It was such an exciting time for emergent decentralization, shaped by a strong dose of 60's idealism.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670035

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...

https://www.stevenlevy.com/crypto

01100011 on Darkrealms BBS

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 05:56:19 +0000

I have such strong nostalgia for that era, but man, every time I try to go back and experience a BBS like this is just feels so empty. There really isn't a way to experience the feelings back then. I admire them for keeping it alive, but the magic was long ago dispelled by ubiquitous internet connectivity.

I can go play a retro videogame and be taken back, but I've never felt that way with a BBS. Maybe it's just the intensity of what the BBS world was back then. It was a way into another world.. an exclusive world.. the first taste of digital life, long before it was taken over by the masses. An intimate community, but also a gateway to esoteric and faraway lands.

I was 12 when I got my first modem in '87. Suddenly I was no longer trapped in my town but connected to something secret yet global. Sure, long-distance charges kept things local for the most part, but it wasn't long before I found a way around that. Stolen calling cards, open PBXes, then Tymnet/Telenet and then in '90 an internet gateway of a local university. Wardialing, finding strange systems in the night... poking around until something gave way. Arrested. Reset. Probation. No computers. It all came to a halt. Then one day at Boeing Surplus I found an old green screen terminal and a 300 baud acoustic modem. Back online.. but the world began to change. MBBS, multi-line systems, and the world began to open. The world wide web began to take shape, Yahoo awoke, and the old steamship rolled into port for the last time.

joshvm on Notes on Baking at the South Pole

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:47:34 +0000

The few times I've baked there, it's been a pretty good experience. There's a full height proving cabinet, yeast works really well at altitude, the ovens have steam injectors, there are good mixers, a commercial fryer. In many ways much easier than baking at home, but probably not a patch on a good bakery.

We almost ran out of sugar in 2021 and Rothera sent us a bag of Tate and Lyle in break-glass-in-emerhency box on one of the early transit flights the following summer. That's still hanging in the galley. Cream also goes pretty quickly, and forget about eggs. But you only need "egg product" anyway.

The foods that tend to be avoided are pasta and beans, or really anything which has to be boiled. There's a massive pressure cooker but it's a pain to use and clean. It's also hard to brew coffee if you tend to use off-the-boil. The best you'll get is about 93 C. Espresso is fine as its pressurised anyway.

arcalinea on Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:01:29 +0000

Jay here: this is a transition I've been working towards for awhile, and I'm looking forward to advancing the vision and ecosystem as CIO (Chief Innovation Officer). Toni has been an advisor to us for years, and I personally recruited him to take over as CEO while I focus on new projects within the company. It's an honor to have him on board to lead us into this next stage of growth.

JKCalhoun on The new Apple begins to emerge

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:31:59 +0000

I think Steve Lemay is a good guy. I kind of fought with him when I was an engineer, he was a young, new designer (at Apple). But I always respected his point of view—even when we argued.

When Jobs came back to Apple in the latter 1990's "Design" slowly came to have an outsized role. I was one half of the engineering team that owned Preview (the application) when Steve Lemay became a seemingly regular presence in the hallway. As the new "Aqua" UI elements arrived in the OS like the "drawer" and toolbar, Steve and his boss (forgetting his name right now—Greg Somebody?) were often making calls about our UI implementation.

The bigger argument I remember with Steve revolved around the drawer UI element. With regard to PDF's, (the half of Preview that I worked on, another engineer handled images), the drawer was to display thumbnails for each page. If the PDF had a TOC (table of contents) the drawer is where we would display that as well.

So when you opened a PDF in Preview, the PDF content of course would appear in the large window—thumbnails, TOC (later search) would be relegated to a vertical strip of drawer real estate alongside the window—the user could open/close the drawer if they liked to focus perhaps on the content.

Steve Lemay insisted the drawer live on the right side of the window [1]. This was inexplicable to me. I saw the layout of Preview as hierarchical: the left side of the content driving the right side. You click a thumbnail on the left (in the drawer) the window content on the right changes to reflect the thumbnail clicked on.

Steve said, no, drawer on the right.

"Why? Why the hell would we do that?"

Steve was quick: "The Preview app is about the content. The content is king."

I admit that I still disagreed with him after the exchange, but I had a new respect for him as a designer because he was able to articulate a rationale for his decision. I suppose I was prejudiced to expect hand-waving from designers.

(Coda: some years later after I had left the Preview team, an engineer still on the app let me know that the thumbnails, etc, were at last moving to the left side of the app. The "drawer" as as a UI element had by this time gone away: resizable split-views were the replacement.)

(Addendum: Steve also invented the early Safari URL text field that also doubled as a progress bar. Instant hate from me when I saw it: it was as if the text of the URL you entered was being selected as the page loaded. So I'm old-school and Steve had some new ideas…)

[1] Localization was such that in countries where right-to-left was dominant, the drawer would of course follow suit.