??? On some devices it turns white after a few seconds and the 'info' button is invisible.
Readit Newsahazred8ta commented on Show HN: 15% of Forbes 30 under 30 winners did fraud 30u30.rip... · Posted by u/yevbar
ahazred8ta commented on Wood Gas Vehicles: Firewood in the Fuel Tank (2010) solar.lowtechmagazine.com... · Posted by u/Rygian
With germanys lack of petrol, they relied heavily on alternative fuel sources.
trivia: The US had plenty of gasoline during the war, but they had to ration gasoline because they were short of rubber for tires. So it goes.
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The average American drinks about 2.3 gallons of pure alcohol per year (in 2014), compared to 7.1 gallons per year in 1830, just as the temperance movement started to gain momentum.
America drank so much back then that the Federal Government was fully funded on liquor taxes, the first Federal income tax was not collected until prohibition took effect.
Not saying things are perfect now, but they used to be much, much worse. Highly recommend the Ken Burns Prohibition documentary for a deep dive.
[0]: https://www.archives.gov/files/publications/prologue/2014/wi...
US Prohibition was from 1920 to 1933.
The Revenue Act of 1913 already put income tax into effect before that. And early 1900s import tariffs added up to more than the alcohol tax. But yes, we collected a lot from whiskey in the 1800s.
It has always been the case that large companies who can afford to throw a 50-person team at a project, can out-develop a guy sitting at home in his bunny slippers.
ahazred8ta commented on RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001) datatracker.ietf.org/doc/... · Posted by u/ipnon
There is an entire paper looking at the history, meaning and cultural significance of the foo, bar, baz words: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-019-00387-2
Smokey Stover, the 1935 "Where there's foo, there's fire" guy, was a TV cartoon in the 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_Stover#Animation Influenced by german furchtbar/foobar/fubar, MIT used fu() and bar() in the late '30s.
ahazred8ta commented on SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes (2023) xorvoid.com/sectorc.html... · Posted by u/valyala
An interesting use case - for the compiler as-is or for the essentiall idea of barely-C - might be in bootstrapping chains, i.e. starting from tiny platform-specific binaries one could verify the disassembly of, and gradually building more complex tools, interpreters, and compiler, so that eventually you get to something like a version of GCC and can then build an entire OS distribution.
Examples:
Related: the stage0/stage1 series of hex-to-c compiler bootstrapping tools https://github.com/oriansj/stage0?tab=readme-ov-file and OTCC https://bellard.org/otcc/
ahazred8ta commented on "Slow Tuesday Night" by R. A. Lafferty (2015) apbsal.blogspot.com/2015/... · Posted by u/walterbell
The link to the story in the linked article is wrong; here's the current one: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...
An sf classic, with a bit in the middle involving AI generation of scholarly tomes. (1965)
ahazred8ta commented on Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980) newworker.org/ncptrory/19... · Posted by u/doruk101
One of my most fascinating reads of all time was "Brave New World Revisited" (1950s I think), a follow-up of "Brave New World" (1920s I think) by Aldous Huxley. Similarly, the point then was how the mass media and TV would eventually be used to mislead and deflect populations' attentions.
Such innocent times when we thought the TV could be evil.