> 3. The FDAI's signals are more complicated than I described above. Among
> other things, the IMU's gimbal angles use a different coordinate system from
> the FDAI, so an electromechanical unit called GASTA (Gimbal Angle Sequence
> Transformation Assembly) used resolvers and motors to convert the
> coordinates.
Readit Newsjsrcout commented on Inside the Apollo “8-Ball” FDAI (Flight Director / Attitude Indicator) righto.com/2025/06/inside... · Posted by u/zdw
jsrcout commented on Middle-aged man trading cards go viral in rural Japan town tokyoweekender.com/entert... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
I love this so much.
jsrcout commented on Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using? · Posted by u/fuzztester
It's more readable than C++, C or Rust though
Depends on who wrote it. My own Perl code, and plenty I've seen, is extremely clean and readable; sadly, a lot isn't. I'm sure clean and readable C++ exists, but the stuff I have to work with - big codebases with tons of history - is not. "Terrifying" would be more apt in most cases.
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jsrcout commented on NASA has a list of 10 rules for software development cs.otago.ac.nz/cosc345/re... · Posted by u/vyrotek
I work with a lot of embedded and embedded-adjacent software, and even I think several of these rules are too much. Having said that, Holzmann's rules are from 2006, and embedded / space qualified hardware has improved quite a bit since then. These days planetary probes run C++, and JWST even uses JavaScript to run command scripts. Things are changing.
jsrcout commented on The practical (Unix) problems with .cache and its friends utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/ingve
I aliased ls to ls -A ages ago. While of course this doesn't solve any specific problems, it keeps one much more aware of what all's floating around in your home directory dotfiles.
The scale of the Carnegie library program is pretty incredible. My dad’s library as a kid was a Carnegie library in central Iowa. The libraries near where I live in Dublin, Ireland are Carnegie libraries.
Same thing in my small WV hometown. Gorgeous building, too.
Wozniak's original BASIC for the Apple II only supported integers; when Apple decided they needed floating point and Woz refused to spend time on it, they decided to license it from Microsoft, producing Applesoft BASIC. Applesoft was slower than Woz's BASIC, because it performed all arithmetic in floating point.
"In the Apple II ROMs, I even stuck in my own floating point routine. It wasn't incorporated into the BASIC, but I just didn't want the world thinking I couldn't write floating point routines." -- Steve Wozniak [0]
[0] https://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/07/03/steve-wozniak-v-step...
I'm not clear on which Apple II ROMs (INTEGER BASIC or Applesoft ROM, or both) he's referring to.
Rule #10 - it’s probably DNS
I worked at place in the late 90s where that was true, at least for anything Internet related. We were doing (oh so primitive by today's standards...) Web development and it happened so many times. I'd call downstairs and they'd swear DNS was fine, and then 20 minutes to half an hour later, it would all be mysteriously working again. But only if we called down heh heh.
On an unrelated note, one of the folks down there explained the DNS setup once and it was like something out of a Stephen King novel. They'd even been told by a recognized industry expert (whose name I sadly can't remember any more) that what they needed to do was impossible, but they still did it. Somehow.
They really were great folks, they just had that one quirk but after a while I could just chuckle about it.
If the abstraction doesn't fit a new problem, it should be easy to reassemble the components in a different way, or use an existing abstraction and replace some components with something that fits this one problem.
The developers shouldn't be forced to use the abstractions, they should voluntarily use them because it makes it easier for them.
An underappreciated value. I call this composability and it is one of my primary software development goals.