What happens if you take motion blur past its logical extreme? Here are some fun observations and ideas I encountered while trying to answer this question, with an attempt to apply the results in a procedural animation.

source: L

In 1969, Harry amazed everybody with a little electronic gadget he’d built which, using the primitive digital integrated circuits of the time, generated random music, played it through a speaker, and flashed lights on its front panel. It was precisely what people expected computers to do, based upon portrayals in the movies and on television, and yet it could be held in your hand and was, internally, very simple. He explained how it worked, and I immediately knew I had to have one. Digital electronics was in a great state of flux at the time, with each manufacturer launching their own line of integrated circuits, most incompatible with one another, so there was no point in slavishly reproducing Harry’s design. Starting from the concept, I designed my own gadget from scratch, using Signetics Utilogic diode-transistor small scale integration integrated circuits which were popular at the time but shortly thereafter made obsolete by 7400 series transistor-transistor logic (TTL). The architecture was identical to Harry’s device, but I opted for more with-it and less power-hungry light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for the display instead of the incandescent bulbs he used. I built the electronics assembly on a sheet of perforated board using wire-wrap fabrication (some people look down their noses at wire-wrap today, but it was good enough for the Apollo Guidance Computer and almost every mainframe backplane of the 1960s, and my wire-wrapped electronics works perfectly fifty years later.)

Little did I imagine, when designing and building the Mind Grenade hardware in 1969, that fifty years later I’d be emulating it on a computer which ran more than a thousand times faster than the one I used in my day job at the time and, furthermore, was sitting on my own desk. But here we are. Thanks to HTML5 and JavaScript, it is now possible to emulate the hardware Mind Grenade entirely in software that runs within any modern Web browser. Below is an abstracted version of the Mind Grenade front panel. Press the power button at the bottom to get things going. The slider at the left controls the pitch and the slider at the right sets the rate at which the notes play. The check boxes below the lights select any of the 16 possible tunes that can be played.

source: HN

This page performs a live, annotated https: request for its own source. It’s inspired by The Illustrated TLS 1.3 Connection and Julia Evans’ toy TLS 1.3.

source: L

In the world of modern portable devices, it may be hard to believe that merely a few decades ago the most convenient way to keep track of time was a mechanical watch. Unlike their quartz and smart siblings, mechanical watches can run without using any batteries or other electronic components.

Over the course of this article I’ll explain the workings of the mechanism seen in the demonstration below. You can drag the device around to change your viewing angle, and you can use the slider to peek at what’s going on inside:

An interactive experience!

source: DF

If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.

source: HN

Can you beat 1024 of javascript at chess?

source: HN

This article is a comprehensive guide to the Roland Juno’s digitally-controlled analog oscillators (DCOs). I fell in love with the Juno early in my synthesizer journey and I’ve spent the last year or so doing research on its design so that I could create my own Juno-inspired DCO, Winterbloom’s Castor & Pollux.

source: trivium

Cameras and the lenses inside them may seem a little mystifying. In this blog post I’d like to explain not only how they work, but also how adjusting a few tunable parameters can produce fairly different results:

This is amazing work.

source: HN

I used this code to help me make a video to explain how SHA-256 works.

Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9EbD6iY9zI

source: HN

Let’s get in the ring and show what AVX/AVX2 intrinsics can really do for a non-trivial problem, and even discuss potential improvements that future CoreCLR versions could bring to the table.

Everyone needs to sort arrays, once in a while, and many algorithms we take for granted rely on doing so. We think of it as a solved problem and that nothing can be further done about it in 2020, except for waiting for newer, marginally faster machines to pop-up. However, that is not the case, and while I’m not the first to have thoughts about it; or the best at implementing it, if you join me in this rather long journey, we’ll end up with a replacement function for Array.Sort, written in pure C# that outperforms CoreCLR’s C++2 code by a factor north of 10x on most modern Intel CPUs, and north of 11x on my laptop. Sounds interesting? If so, down the rabbit hole we go…

Very well done.

In this blog post I’d like to look at these simple machines up close. I’ll explain how gears affect the properties of rotational motion and how the shape of their teeth is way more sophisticated than it may initially seem.

Movement is important in this article so most of the visualizations are animated – you can play and pause them by tapping on the button in their bottom left corner. By default the animations are enabled, but if you find them distracting, or you want to save power, you can globally pause all animations, just make sure to unpause them as needed.

This is very neat.

source: HN

The Pond and Plaza Hotel in 1933: https://www.oldnyc.org/#718363f-a

The Hidden Number Problem (HNP) is a problem that poses the question: Are the most signficant bits of a Diffie-Hellman shared key as hard to compute as the entire secret? The original problem was defined in the paper “Hardness of computing the most significant bits of secret keys in Diffie-Hellman and related schemes” by Dan Boneh and Ramarathnam Venkatesan.

In this paper Boneh and Venkatesan demonstrate that a bounded number of most signifcant bits of a shared secret are as hard to compute as the entire secret itself. They also demonstrate an efficient algorithm for recovering secrets given a significant enough bit leakage. This notebook walks through some of the paper and demonstrates some of the results.

The goal of Explanations is to try to allow people to play with fun parts of computers. Graphics, compression, audio. The tagline is my biggest inspiration: “Play, don’t show”, riffing off the typical “Show, don’t tell” rule of writers and authors everywhere. Why bother giving a diagram when I give you an inspector and let you poke at things yourself!

Previously, this series was known as “Xplain” and was more focused on the X11 window system and protocol, but I’ve been slowly moving towards anything that interests me, and I’m hijacking this project for it since I really like the format and style I’ve developed. The code for every single one of these demos is available in the GitHub repo, and I do try to comment heavily and go into even more depth there! Play with the code! Use it for one of your own projects! It’s all MIT/X11 licensed. I very much appreciate followup questions and any sort of feedback through the links mentioned above.

You might have noticed that when you ran your mouse over the stipple, your cursor changed. That’s because this isn’t just any old stipple image, that stipple is actually the background of a full X server session running in your browser using HTML5 canvas. All of the interactive demos will use this framework to explain what’s going on under the hood.

Author comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041340

source: L

The Enigma Machine was one of the centerpoints of World War II, and its cryptanalysis was one of the stepping stones from breaking codes as an art to cryptography as a science. The machine encrypted messages sent between parts of the German army – operators would type a key on its keyboard, the machine would scramble that, and a letter would light up on the top.

This notebook simulates an Enigma Machine and visualizes how it works. The Enigma Machine is an especially neat thing to visualize because it was electromechanical. As you used it, it moved. Instead of circuit traces, it had beautiful real wires connecting its pieces.

source: grugq

A whole mangrove forest, lighting up all at once, plunging into darkness, then lighting up all again – in near-perfect synchrony. How do thousands of fireflies coordinate with each other? Who is the conductor of this silent symphony?

source: L

Transparency may not seem particularly exciting. The GIF image format which allowed some pixels to show through the background was published over 30 years ago. Almost every graphic design application released in the last two decades has supported the creation of semi-transparent content. The novelty of these concepts is long gone.

With this article I’m hoping to show you that transparency in digital imaging is actually much more interesting than it seems – there is a lot of invisible depth and beauty in something that we often take for granted.

source: L

Execute Program is for people who already know a programming language. We’ll help you to fill in gaps in your existing knowledge.

At least in the beginning, seems introductory. Not sure how advanced it goes.

Our solar system collectively hosts nearly 200 known moons, some of which are vibrant worlds in their own right. Take a tour of the major moons in our celestial menagerie, including those that are among the most mystifying—or scientifically intriguing—places in our local neighborhood.

Pretty heavy web page.

source: K