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The photograph appears to show nightime on Earth with just a sliver of daytime. Beyond cities in Iberia and along the coast of Africa, most of what we can see would be reflected light from the Moon? We are just past full moon on April 1.

1/4 exposure time so 250 ms of light. the light is coming from all the light sources in the universe, plus the moon, plus the sun's rays refracting through the atmosphere which happens even at night.

The natural blue light is coming from the oxygen in the atmosphere but it's so overwhelming in that spot that it turns the light pure white. The red/orangish is coming from particulates and the green/red from aurora. My favorite part I think is the very bottom where you can see the blue light taper off and not overwhelm the camera sensor and you can see the aurora with it. I love this photo so much.

Probably my favorite photo ever now.


> the light is coming from all the light sources in the universe, plus the moon

And all the others are negligible by many orders of magnitude compared to the moon. So it's really just the moon as far as this photo is concerned (except for the small sliver that's still illuminated by sunlight, including refracted sunlight).


> the light is coming from all the light sources in the universe, plus the moon

This is true for every photo ever taken


so the atmosphere acts as giant lamp lit from behind by Moon? never thought of it that way

> the light is coming from all the light sources in the universe,

That's highly incorrect. I have many lightsources that aren't contributing to any photons in that picture. For example my refrigerator light.


I turn off my refrigerator light after I close the door by reaching in and pushing the button. Don’t you?

> Beyond cities in Iberia and along the coast of Africa, most of what we can see would be reflected light from the Moon?

Yes, exactly.


That's what the caption the article above says

“Who wants a stylus? You have to get ’em and put ’em away, and you lose ’em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus. We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with—born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers.”

— Steve Jobs, 2007

(8 years before the introduction of the Apple Pencil)


When Steve Jobs said that, he was talking about a stylus as a main or even only input device. And he is still right about it. The Apple Pencil for the iPad never was a main input device but an alternative.

That wasn't the only time Jobs trashed a category Apple didn't currently have annon-sale model for, but was actively developing; he also slurred 6-inch Android phones as "Hummers", and mocked the 7-inch Android tablets as "too small" a little while before Apple launched its iPad Mini.

To be fair, 7.9 inches is quite a bit bigger than 7 inches. That's ~30% more screen area.

Exactly, but watch people leap into to defend how brilliant he supposedly was.

There’s no contradiction here. Jobs’ point was about the MAIN input method. A touchscreen that requires a stylus as main input method still is a terrible idea. The Apple Pencil is meant for alternative and creative input, something you can’t do well with your fingers.

Please, leave that reddit-esque “iSheep”-type of comment out of here.


I see no contradiction.

Touch input needn't be the main input to a laptop with a keyboard and a trackpad...

> (8 years before the introduction of the Apple Pencil)

I have briefly used one of the old PDAs with Windows Mobile and a stylus, and i have an ipad with an apple pencil.

They are two completely different experiences.

A stylus is clunky, particularly if you consider styluses as they were back in the day: pieces of dumb plastic with a specific shape to fit in the PDA itself, to be used on dumb resistive touch screens.

the apple pencil (as well as other modern styluses) are completely different, and work on capacitive touch screens.


The Pencil isn’t a stylus. At least not primarily. It’s designed for freehand. This is probably why they insisted on it charging via Lightning by removing its end cap. They didn’t want people getting ideas.

For a device that fits in your hand I understand his argument, for something that takes more than one hand to hold, I can see the usefulness of a different "pointer" device, but also, artists use things like the Apple Pencil, it makes way more sense.

And here we are, and the Pencil STILL doesn't work on the defectively oversized trackpads on Apple laptops.

So... we're talking about more than one blunder here.


> And here we are, and the Pencil STILL doesn't work on the defectively oversized trackpads on Apple laptops.

Many (including me) argue that Apple sells the best trackpads ever made, the size being a key attribute.


That and the excellent palm rejection. Probably why other manufactures didn't make track pads as large

It's just like Apple to create a problem and then have to implement an overly-complicated and flawed "solution."

Then they're not paying attention to how little of the pad they actually use, and the irritating-as-hell spurious presses that can cost you several minutes (or more) of work.

There's nothing like filling out a form (or comment) on a Web page to have it suddenly reload or back-page, deleting everything you entered.


I've literally never had a "spurious press" on a modern Apple trackpad.

I absolutely loathed non-Apple ones when I had to use them, the palm detection was completely useless and the cursor just swooshed around. I usually disabled the touchpad in the BIOS and just used the red nipple-mouse on Lenovos instead.


I love the Mac trackpad but would love it more if the pencil worked with it

A larger and, more importantly, taller trackpad that also functions like a Wacom with Apple Pencil, which would compel Apple to adopt a more square display, 3:2 or 4:3, capable of showing more lines of code. Too bad that would cannibalize the iPad line, so Apple would never do it.

Calling Apple’s trackpad defective and/oversized has got to be one of the most tone-deaf and uninformed things I’ve seen this year.

Please.


Then you obviously don't do much work with it.

8 hours a day every work day for the last 15+ years, plus whatever I do at home with just a laptop (I have an external touchpad for most use).

You must have some weirdly conductive palms or something.


Any website that uses more memory than Voyager 1 should be considered bloated.

There's almost certainly less than 69KB of useful human-readable information on any given page.

I was actually a bit curious how much HN uses, since it's probably the lightest site that I frequent.

According to Brave's dev tools, looks like just shy of about 90kb on this comment page as of the time of this writing.

Obviously some of that is going to be CSS rules, a small amount of JS (I think for the upvotes and the comment-collapse), but I don't think anyone here called HN "bloated". Even that one page wouldn't fit on Voyager.


  curl https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47564421#47564679 | wc -c
143927

  curl https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47564421#47564679 | pup -p --charset utf8 'text{}' | wc -c
30954

Huh, fair enough. I was looking at the network console in the browser and it said 89KB.

Almost certainly my fault...sorry!


Our comments don't really contradict each other. The page size without any linked documents like an external style sheet grew to 140KB after your comment. But just the text is 30KB.

That's only HTML but when it is loaded in chromr it is more than 40 MiB.

I was actually a bit curious how much HN uses, since it's probably the lightest site that I frequent.

I use an iPhone 5 as an iPod. HN is one of the few web sites that still works with iOS 10.


HN used to work fine on an Nokia classic phone until last year. Sadly it doesn't any more, since they switched the CA to something that is not in the OS root trust. If HN wouldn't enforce HTTPS, it would still work fine.

Nice. Do you just use your 5 as a stationary iPod, or do you dual-carry with a modern device as well? Curious on if you also use it to wi-fi the web on your local LAN periodically too, of it that was just a periodic test to check if HN worked.

I use it around the house to Airplay music to various devices.

A number of things don't work, or work in unexpected ways, mostly because Apple doesn't allow me to log in to iCloud with such an old phone.

I can't control lights with the Home app. But Airplay works fine. The phone doesn't know what a HomePod is, but it shows up with a regular generic speaker icon, like the AirMac I have hooked up to my stereo.

Sometimes I have a few minutes to kill, and I pick it up to look at HN. The New York Times web site starts to work, but the login page doesn't load at all. WSJ blocks me at a "verifying the device" screen. WaPo half works. eBay works some, but no pictures. Ditto for Wikipedia.

There's a lot of things you take for granted on a new phone that you only realize when you're using an old phone. Like you didn't used to be able to quickly scroll an entire web page it's only a screen at a time in iOS 10. You can't grab the scroll bar on the side and move it, either.

And 99.9999% of people don't realize the genius of the camera island. It makes it so much easier to pick up the phone if one end is elevated a bit. With a completely flat phone, you end up dragging/scraping it along the table in order to grip it, which scuffs the surface. And if the table is really smooth, it's surprisingly difficult to lift the phone straight up.


Why can't you log into iCloud? unless somethings changed in the past year or something broke between ios 6 and 10, it should work. I'm still signed into my iPad 2 running iOS 6 (granted, iirc the root cert expired a bit ago so you need to update that). the 2fa is also a bit weird, you have to input the code after your password (eg: if your password is password123 and the code is 789 you'd submit password123789)

Why can't you log into iCloud?

Ask Apple.

I just tried it again.

"Can't Use Your Apple ID on This Device

Your Apple ID can only be used on devices running iOS 15.0 or later, or macOS 12.0 or later. This iPhone can't be updated to the latest software."


I think that might be a thing with apples Advanced Data Protection if you have it enabled, which is understandable since the software needs to know how to un-encrypt the data. If you don't have that enabled, then ignore this and assume apple decided to kill a whole lot of devices (particularly their macs, I know a surprising amount of people still on 10.15)

The SSL certs are probably going to be a problem before HN changes its rendering.

There is more information in a typical, single page of comments here than there is on the average webpage. And I'd say a far higher signal to noise ratio (though depending on the topic discussed some will disagree).

This page is only ~30kb. I wonder where the extra ~60kb you're seeing is coming from?

Downloaded data != memory usage

You're comparing apples to apple trees


640K is all anybody actually needs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120477


Any development team larger than Apollo programming team of 350 is overstaffed.

Any development team larger than Apollo programming team of 350 is overstaffed

We put a man on the moon mostly with pencils and slide rules.

Today we have massive data centers full of "AI" supercomputers, and we get… TikTok?


Surprising fact I just noticed about the next Moon landing attempt -- it'll take up to 22 launches to get everything into space needed for the attempt.

That's good, actually. We need to develop the capability to stage/assemble in-orbit, as this would relax a lot of hard constraints on size and complexity of the missions.

Vindication, finally.

Interesting, so this is why the phone line still worked when power was out across the whole town.

Yeah, it used to be that you could still make calls (particularly to emergency services) even in complete power outages, for as long as your local exchange has batteries for. (AFAIR that tended to be on the order of hours, but probably differs quite a bit across locations and regulatory domains/countries.)

Another thing we lost in the age of VoIP landlines, but then again mobile towers also have batteries. Just don't be unlucky and have a power outage with 3% battery on your phone...


Luckily, phone batteries and phone power consumption seem to have improved a lot in the last half-decade.

Yes, I noticed this too. Timeless wisdom in 2128 bytes of handcrafted HTML.


Twice a year is the current requirement in the UK and still provides a regular cadence.


> A decade ago, Apple began switching from trackpads with mechanical clicking mechanisms to Magic Trackpads, where clicks are simulated via haptic feedback (in Apple’s parlance, the Taptic Engine).... The Neo’s trackpad is mechanical. It actually clicks, even when the machine is powered off.

I wonder if the real clicks on mechanical trackpad will actually feel better than the simulated clicks on the Magic Trackpad.


Why do you need to wonder about this? We've had mechanical trackpads for ages to compare them to. They feel worse. Getting even click pressure across a large surface is nearly impossible.


I used to have a 2011 MBP and a M1 air at the same time. I actually preferred the mechanical trackpad of the MBP. Unfortunately that laptop died.


I’ve never seen anyone intentionally render em dash (—) as two hyphens (--). The code OP used to modify Roboto is surprisingly short, almost as concise as the Norvig spellchecker that OP references. https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html


This could be an age thing. I’m 62. I didn’t know there was such a thing as an em dash until I was nearly finishing grad school. My buddy had an Apple Mac and was up to date on typography, and told me about em dashes. I ignored him and have continued to use double hyphens — all the way up to this point where my iPad seems to convert them into em dashes.


Man, every time I see a Norvig blog post makes me regret that I'm not Norvig.


Yep, I've been writing it that way forever, it just tends to get autocorrected.

> In informal contexts, a hyphen-minus (-) is often used as a substitute for an en dash, as is a pair of hyphen-minuses (--) for an em dash, because the hyphen-minus symbol is readily available on most keyboards. The autocorrection facility of word-processing software often corrects these to the typographically correct form of dash. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash


Oh yes, typing two hyphens (--) to represent an em dash (—) is something I’ve definitely seen and used. I’ve just never seen anyone type an em dash (—) but display it as two hyphens (--).


> even though he specifically was looking for it

The historian was looking for conceptual connections between Ptolemy and Galileo, but the discovery of Galileo’s handwriting in Ptolemy’s book seemed to be a surprise.


I interpreted the fact that he was reviewing multiple copies of the same text as him searching for Galileo’s notes, but I suppose it’s possible that the motivation was the possibility of discrepancies between printings.


Owen Gingerich was a historian of astronomy who did a census of printed early editions of Copernicus' book De revolutionibus. He found a tradition of students copying annotations from teachers readings into their own copies of the book. I recollect that he was able to trace various traditions of commentary each stemming from a well known astronomy teacher.

I suppose that checking early printings of key works looking for annotations is a pretty standard thing to do now.


The Almagest was hand written about 1400 years before Galileo lived, so it's not so much looking at different printings as at different editions that are based on different set of copies of the copies of the copies etc, further many editors would try to "fix" the ancient work, removing material they didn't like and adding their own stuff or material from other works... it can get very messy.


There doesn’t seem to be an ulterior motive beyond “Muahaha, see the trouble I can cause!”


A classical virus, from the good old days. None of this botnet/bitcoin mining in the background nonsense.


I've always wanted to make a virus like those of the olden days. I wouldn't do anything malicious with it, but maybe I would deploy it to a friends computer if it wasn't very destructive. What resources are there to learn about viruses?


On the Atari ST we had a boot sector virus that inverted the mouse Y-axis after some random time.

So annoying.


No one actually knows what the payload from basemetrika.ru contains, though. So it's possible it was originally intended to be more damaging. But no matter what it would have caught attention super fast, so there's probably an upper limit to how sophisticated it could have been.


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