I have been following this series since it began, and it's just magical for the sort of nerds who have consumed all of the surface-level documentaries and books about Apollo, especially if you have an interest in electronics engineering, computer science, or radio communications. It's a genre that's distinct to YouTube--something I fear going away every time YouTube tries to chase TikTok and Instagram trends.
Marc, Ken, and their team are national treasures. I'm absolutely blown away at the depth and breadth of what they have accomplished in this series.
- "Digital Apollo", a book about HCI, the tension between automation and human-in-the-loop, the history of systems engineering and minutae of each Apollo landing through those lenses. If you want a heavy dose of interesting, inspiring and thought-provoking HCI and embedded engineering lessons and anecdotes in context of the most thrilling examples possible you'll love this.
- "Sunburst and Luminary", the really quite charming and lively memoir by Apollo software engineer Don Eyles.
- "Apollo" by Cox and Murray, a go-to general history of the Apollo program that emphasizes program management and engineering far more than the astronauts.
This + the CuriousMarc videos and you'll feel spaceflight mini expert high, and be quite capable of maybe flying a landing in one of the emulators, actually understand the technical jargon in any of the Apollo landing videos or the Apollo 13 incident video, or appreciate some AGC source code.
I keep saying this and you can check my comment history to verify - HN is botted to an extreme degree. There’s absolutely no restrictions on spinning up additional accounts and any hacker worth their salt could easily spin up an LLM to set up apparent opposition to a linked idea. It’s clear HN has absolutely no problem with this.
What is inexcusable is the large fraction of the community that sees the logic behind the article but avoids getting involved for fear of irritating some future employer, or just because they want to avoid confrontation here. We’re watching tech billionaires usher in a dystopian society in real time. And we want to talk about what exactly? Apparently anything but the Peter Thiel shaped elephant in the room.
Seems like HN is doing something to combat this, considering how many [dead] comments I see in every post (which you can enable by setting `showdead` in your user profile).
I've only recently enabled it so I don't know how frequent dead comments were before the LLM era.
To be fair, I've been here for like 15 years and have had show dead on for most of it, and although the quality of them has certainly gotten lower, I'm not convinced that they are more frequent.
I think HN needs user karma and subdivisions/subforums in addition to the current system. Users will have a very limited amount of votes (like 1 or 2) per each user to up or down their karma. And subforums would have karma thresholds voted by participants, to prevent spam and low effort posting. There are even more complex approaches with better self-control too.
Sure, such systems have their own drawbacks, but as a complete system, they are usually better on average than no-karma forums.
PS: current karma should be better called a score or something similar, it is not very useful.
The Anti-Intellectualism of the Hacker News Elites.
AIs are useful tools in programming, whether you like it or not. Yes, there is a lot of hype. There is also a lot of ignorance. AI is not going to write an entire complex application for you, but can easily make its development 10x faster.
I never understood the tribalism. For nearly a decade now I have used Windows, Linux, and Macs essentially daily. I have an Ubuntu desktop in my shop, a variety of Debian servers in the cloud, a Windows desktop in my office, a Mac Mini in my bedroom, a MacBook in my bag, and a handful of iPhones/iPads everywhere else. They’re useful for different applications and workflows, and it’s not that difficult to adapt to where they all feel natural. I recognize I’m the weird one though, and I rather enjoy learning new interfaces (I switch my default web browser every few years for “fun” and as a maintenance strategy (kind of like an especially opinionated factory reset).
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