1. Ceefax Simulator
Total comment counts : 30
Summary
The article is about an interactive teletext viewer called Interactive Viewer. It assigns a three digit number to each page and allows users to navigate through pages using number keys or channel buttons. It also features live pages from Ceefax and provides information about the creator and how to get in touch.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the author’s experience with VCR programming in the past, where a VCR could access TV listings and allow the user to select programs for recording. The author considers this a significant technological advancement. The article then mentions that later VCR+ or Video+ systems required users to look up numbers, which was seen as a step backward, until guide systems were introduced.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author discusses the challenges of explaining old technology to their 6-year-old daughter. They mention trying to explain TV shows that start at specific times and the concept of going to a shop to get a song. The author concludes by mentioning that they haven’t had to explain ceefax yet, but that this article will help.
2. MuPDF WASM Viewer Demo
Total comment counts : 13
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The article praises the excellent performance and speed of a tool called Mutools. It is recommended as a backup converter for PDF files when another tool, Imagemagick, fails. The article provides a link to the Github page where the tool can be found.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses issues encountered when using Firefox for Android. The table of contents takes up half the screen width and it is unclear how to remove it. Additionally, the browser freezes when attempting to go back from a page. The loading of WASM, which processes the PDF, is slow and takes about five seconds to start. The problems were experienced on a mid-range Samsung phone (Galaxy A52s 5G). A solution to remove the contents pane is provided, but there is no “fit to page” option available, making it difficult to view the entire page even with a 50% zoom out.
3. 50 Years Later, This Apollo-Era Antenna Still Talks to Voyager 2
Total comment counts : 13
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a documentary titled “It’s Quieter in the Twilight,” which explores the history of the Voyagers. It includes recent interviews with the few remaining individuals involved with the Voyager project. The article provides a link to the IMDb page for the documentary.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the author’s childhood nostalgia for a reference to tracking station 43 in Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of the Worlds. It goes on to mention the Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s and how it was cool to have a NASA Mars landing included in the music.
4. Cosmic rays streamed through Earth’s atmosphere 41k years ago
Total comment counts : 7
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
This article discusses the fact that Earth’s magnetic field has previously had more than two magnetic poles before the Earth’s core solidified. The article mentions the concept of geomagnetic excursions, the Laschamp event, and geomagnetic reversals as relevant topics. It provides a link to a Popular Mechanics article for more information.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses a theory from the 60s suggesting that the long lifespans mentioned in the Old Testament could be explained by a sudden increase in cosmic rays. It further suggests that this influx of cosmic rays could also have contributed to the dispersion of a persistent global cloud cover, the rain and flooding event experienced by Noah, and a subsequent reduction in human lifespans.
5. The Basics of Legibility: A Short Guide for Non-Typographers
Total comment counts : 10
Summary
The article is about legibility in typography, specifically focusing on the shapes of letters and how they affect legibility. The author discusses the concept of familiarity and how people read best what they are familiar with. They provide an example comparing two different typefaces, illustrating that readers had an easier time reading the familiar typeface.
The author then addresses a reader’s comment about Apple’s “San Francisco” typeface and why it is not the best choice for a user interface. They compare it to the “Japanese Sword Fallacy,” explaining that while technically well-designed, San Francisco lacks personality and purpose. The author believes that typefaces like “Helvetica” and “Univers” are more suitable as UI typefaces due to their minimalistic nature and unique characteristics.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the importance of functionality over aesthetics in user experience (UX) design. The author mentions an experience with a promotional code that had a visually appealing design but was difficult to enter due to the similarity between certain letters and numbers. The article emphasizes that while it is desirable to have both functionality and beauty in a user interface (UI), without functionality, a visually pleasing UI becomes pointless.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article questions the importance of font choice and argues that it is mainly subjective. While certain fonts, such as DIN, are more legible and less ambiguous in specific contexts like airport navigation, the difference between fonts like Fraktur and SF Pro is much larger. The author mentions the difference between font types in Chinese as well. They inquire about research on the legibility of fonts and where the point of diminishing returns might be for different activities. The author concludes that, while they appreciate a good programming font, most differences in font choice are based on personal preference and have little impact on functionality. They also mention a cultural difference in how digits are written, noting that handwritten notes often differ from computer fonts in the representation of certain numbers.
6. U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
Total comment counts : 53
Summary
A study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan found that students with last names starting with letters towards the beginning of the alphabet receive lower grades compared to students with last names towards the end of the alphabet. The researchers analyzed over 30 million grading records from the university’s online learning management system and discovered that the default ordering of students’ submissions based on alphabetical rank contributes to this bias. Additionally, students with earlier alphabetically ranked last names received more negative and less polite comments from graders and had lower grading quality overall. The researchers suggest implementing random order grading as the default setting to address this issue and recommend hiring more graders or distributing the grading workload to mitigate bias. The study highlights the potential social impact of this unconscious bias on students’ academic and career opportunities.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author discusses the order in which exams are graded in academia. They explain that the exams are shuffled randomly, with individuals picking up stacks and grading a specific exercise. However, when it comes to grading weekly exercise sheets, the order is shuffled for fairness. The author notes several effects that come into play, such as being less tired at the beginning and having a better mood towards the end. They also mention an alphabetic effect where being the first name on a list in elementary school resulted in being assigned special tasks, which annoyed them as a shy child.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author recalls their experience in K-12 school in the 80s and 90s, where students were seated in class based on their last names. Those with last names starting with A-D were seated in the front, while those with last names starting with U-Z were seated in the back. The author vaguely remembers that in high school, there were more high-achieving students with A-D last names and more troublemakers with U-Z last names. However, there is no way to determine if this seating arrangement directly caused these differences as there was no control group or experiment conducted.
7. 6th generation x86 CPU Comparisons
Total comment counts : 10
Summary
This article is a comparative analysis of three 6th generation x86 CPUs: Intel P-II (Klamath, P6), AMD K6 (NX686), and Cyrix 6x86MX (M2). The author discusses the architectural differences and advantages of each CPU. The AMD K6, for example, combines elements from both the P-II and 6x86MX architectures, prioritizing short latencies and translating x86 instructions into queued RISC operations. The K6 has a short and efficient pipeline, with most stages performing complex tasks. However, it can only execute a maximum of two x86 instructions per clock, limiting its performance compared to the P-II, which can decode and execute three instructions simultaneously.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a video that compares the performance of Quake’s software renderer on the Pentium MMX and the AMD K6 processors. It highlights how the Pentium MMX manages to outperform the AMD K6 due to a pipeline quirk in the FDIV instruction, despite being a previous generation, in-order design compared to the AMD K6’s next generation, out-of-order design. The video provides in-depth analysis at the micro-architecture level.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article mentioned is titled “RISC vs CISC: the Post-RISC Era” and was written by Ars. It provides a non-technical introduction to the generation of architectures and can be found on the Ars Technica website.
8. My 25-year engineering career retrospective
Total comment counts : 32
Summary
The author reflects on their career and offers advice for those considering a career in engineering. They discuss topics such as mindset and productivity, learning, career planning, public exposure, work-life balance, mentorship, and networking. The author mentions their obsession with time and how they used to sleep only 4-6 hours per day. They also reflect on the problem of procrastination and offer tips for combating it. The author shares their experience with competition and emphasizes the importance of collaboration. They discuss the value of journaling and note-taking, regretting not starting these habits earlier. Lastly, the author reflects on their relationship with school and suggests focusing their curiosity into a more focused trajectory.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article emphasizes the importance of finding balance and true happiness in life, rather than focusing solely on productivity and career success. The author disagrees with the notion that grinding for long hours and having a clear career path are the only paths to success. They argue for prioritizing sleep, mental and physical health, and enjoying daily habits. Additionally, the author emphasizes the importance of caring for family and friends and warns against using people as a network for personal gain. They suggest pursuing activities like blogging and public speaking for personal enjoyment rather than for clickbait purposes. Overall, the article highlights the need for a well-rounded and fulfilling life.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author expresses regret for focusing too much on technical skills and not enough on self-promotion and communication skills. They compare themselves to peers who prioritized charisma and are now in high-level positions or have switched careers and are financially secure. The author advises graduating engineers to learn how to dress well, engage in small talk, exaggerate in a defensible way, and present their contributions in a way that makes them appear more significant. They believe these skills are crucial in today’s workforce.
9. Dehydrated: Letsencrypt/acme client implemented as a shell-script
Total comment counts : 15
Summary
The article discusses Dehydrated, a shell-script client for signing certificates with an ACME-server such as Let’s Encrypt. The client supports both ACME v1 and ACME v2, including wildcard certificates. It relies on the openssl utility for handling keys and certificates, and has dependencies such as cURL, sed, grep, awk, and mktemp. The software, ACME-protocol, and CA servers are relatively young, so there may be some issues. The article provides resources for getting started and troubleshooting, and mentions the availability of a configuration file and an IRC channel for discussion and suggestions.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author used a tool called Certbot to implement SSL for multiple customer vanity domains. Certbot is a declarative tool where domains are specified in a text file and it automatically manages the certificates. However, it requires discrete commands to add, remove, or modify certificates, so the author had to keep track of the state. They used a management UI and wrote the domain file based on database configuration changes. If no changes or renewals were needed, nothing happened. The article also mentions that Certbot has great hooks, including a pre-check for http-01 validation to avoid failures. The author used S3 to store the validation files, making it work across a pool of load balancers. The author concludes that Certbot’s focus on simplicity, configuration, hooks, and storage makes it an easy-to-use and powerful system.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author of the project Dehydrated has recently sold it to a company called apilayer. Despite the acquisition, the project will remain open source, and the author, Lukas, will continue to maintain it.
10. Senate passes reauthorization of key US surveillance program after midnight
Total comment counts : 14
Summary
President Joe Biden has signed legislation reauthorizing a key U.S. surveillance law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Senate approved the bill with bipartisan support, extending the program for two years. The law allows the U.S. government to collect without a warrant the communications of non-Americans located outside the country for foreign intelligence purposes. The reauthorization faced opposition from lawmakers concerned about civil liberties, but their proposed amendments failed to gain sufficient support. The Biden administration argued that the surveillance tool is crucial for national security.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a vote in the Senate that was not divided along party lines. The outcome of the vote was a mix of yes and no votes from members of different parties.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The provided text is not an article, but rather a statement mentioning that the user’s senators voted in favor of something. The user also mentioned that they tried contacting their senators’ offices but did not receive a response.