WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

cubicle's comments

cubicle | 13 years ago | on: Discussion of HN at 4chan's /g/

Additionally, there's a soft limit to how negative you can be in the comments, where you can be downvoted. Submissions can only be flagged, not downvoted, and if you flag more than two submissions a day, your flag button is disabled. (It looks like it still works, but your flags no longer affect the ranking of a submission)

cubicle | 13 years ago | on: 1987 Time Capsule Predictions by Sci-Fi Writers About 2012 

  Isaac Asimov       Died 1992
  Gregory Benford    Alive
  Algis Budrys       Died 2008
  Gerald Feinberg    Died 1992
  Sheldon Glashow    Alive
  Frederik Pohl      Alive
  Jerry Pournelle    Alive
  Tim Powers         Alive
  Orson Scott Card   Alive
  Robert Silverberg  Alive
  Jack Williamson    Died 2006
  Gene Wolfe         Alive
  Dave Wolverton     Alive
  Roger Zelazny      Died 1997
A lot more of them have survived to be embarrassed by their predictions than I had thought.

cubicle | 13 years ago | on: Gunsmith Uses 3D Printer To Make A Rifle 

  Aluminum could maybe be made to handle .22lr type 
  pressures, but certainly not .223rem or bigger.
?

The Alexander Arms .50 Beowolf lower is made out of aluminum. http://www.gunblast.com/50Beowulf.htm

You can also buy single-shot .50 BMG uppers that bolt right onto regular aluminum AR-15 lowers, though of course you can't feed .50 BMG through a 5.56 magazine well.

cubicle | 13 years ago | on: Gunsmith Uses 3D Printer To Make A Rifle

1.) Blogspam. OP is http://www.webpronews.com/gunsmith-uses-3d-printer-to-make-a...

Does HN have any mods?

2.) Have blue has a blog, he's written two posts about this: http://haveblue.org/?p=1041 http://haveblue.org/?p=1321 It appears to be down right now, though. Cache links: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DlBe32... https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Z_5bOF...

3.) He printed a AR-15 lower receiver, which is the part, under US law, considered a "firearm". The high pressure components (barrel, bolt) are all made from conventional manufacturing processes, using steel.

Lowers are typically made out of aluminum, but they don't really experience any great stresses, so it's perfectly possible to make them out of plastic. (There's a number of commercial lowers made out of fiberglass: http://www.mdshooters.com/showthread.php?t=65134 (I'd link directly to the manufacturer's site, but it seems they're better at making guns than they are at securing web servers)) As he notes, people have even carved them from wood.

cubicle | 13 years ago | on: All of the available CSS color names

Cute.

Kinda annoying that it loads all its page content from www.colors.commutercreative.com, which RequestPolicy blocks by default, being an external domain.

cubicle | 13 years ago | on: Microsoft Expected To Post First Ever Quarterly Loss In Its History

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/microsoft-performance-expec...

  Analysts surveyed by FactSet Research estimate Microsoft MSFT +0.91%  will 
  earn 62 cents a share on $18.2 billion in revenue, compared with a profit of 
  69 cents a share, on sales of $17.37 billion, in the same period a year ago. 
  
  [...]
  
  At Citigroup, analyst Walter Pritchard said that even with the huge 
  writedown, he expects Microsoft to report results in line with expectations. 
  Still, Pritchard said, in a research note, that there are “many moving pieces 
  in the numbers” from Microsoft, and that the prospects for Windows 8 will be 
  a big driver of how investors treat Microsoft over the next year.
  
  Microsoft shares rose 64 cents, or more than 2%, to $30.32 Wednesday, and the 
  stock is up by almost 17% since the start of the year.
I can't comment myself, due to lack of information. We'll all see in four hours.

cubicle | 13 years ago | on: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

The prompt X-rays from the physics package heat up a lot of air very quickly. This expands, producing the supersonic shockwave front.

Then the fireball, being very hot and much less dense than the air around it, rises. Air is sucked towards ground zero, producing the backwash, and the characteristic mushroom cloud of any very large explosion.

cubicle | 13 years ago | on: The long and sordid history of the user-agent HTTP header field

The point is that you can use -U to specify arbitrary user-agent strings, and -E robots=off to ignore robots.txt.

User-agent blocking is completely braindead. It does nothing at all. The fact that somebody in 2012 can possibly think it works is astounding to me.

page 1
more