HN user
formerly at Umass, EMCON, IBM, Northeastern, jarg, Raytheon and Powerhouse Dynamics, (Perrimon lab) Harvard medical school, now programmer at Boston University.
Curmudgeon is the perfect term to describe.
He was a great part of TWIT. I liked his obscure software references (lotus Jazz was one I think).
He also found this new thing is like that old thing.
His non positive takes were a great addition to the show.
The non-profit I help with moved to Wordpress so people can edit the site without having to use git. (We have a lot more editors now)..
I find college radio to be a good curator of music. MIT radio is a mix of students and long time music lovers who DJ.
They archive shows for a couple weeks (though it’s automatic so the shown typically starts a couple minutes in). Some shows actually list the songs they play at trackblaster.
Radio Ninja I like for electronic music. They put shows up on mixcloud as well.
We did whole genome crispr designs at my last university job. Can confirm that off target effects are an issue with cas9. Pattern matching across the genome to see if a design is unique takes some time. These were interesting pipelines to work on.
It’s only a matter of time before the next better thing shows up.
V5?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR5_engine
We owned an vw inline 5 Passat (quantum in North America). Good engine and synchro awd.
Steam set up a sales queue for the deck, so scalping wasn’t an huge issue with them. You can only get them through steam.
The price is another issue…
I love the bottom pop up which says “It’s better with the App”
The options are “yes” or “Not now”
No option for the “No thanks, please don’t bother me about this again for at least 30 days” that I want
The times will repeat this about ever 3 articles, which is really fn annoying.
We’d get the same every time. It wasn’t great but it did work.
Intel this year seems to have something competitive with the core ultra cpus. The “wildcat” cpus are being released now in budget friendly machines. We’ll see how they do.
I’m not going back from Linux but I’m glad there is competition again.
We had Fortran converted to ADA semi automatically at a place I worked.
We called it Adatran.
That code was weird and very hard to maintain. That goodness it was just small functions.
I think it’s just your browser. They got me.. just enough off the main text to give a little jump..
If you watch the documentary it’s an interview with the people who were there. There might be some discrepancy but I think the IBM guys were being honest about how it went down. The doc is on the Internet archive and worth a watch.
You get the idea that it wasn’t some brilliant business strategy by Microsoft, the deal for the operating system wasn’t that good for them initially.
From the transcript: https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
Jack Sams (IBM):
Gary had some other plans and so he said well, Dorothy will see you. So we went down the three of us...
Gordon Eubanks Former Head of Language Division, Digital Research: IBM showed up with an IBM non-disclosure and Dorothy made what I...a decision which I think it's easy in retrospect to say was dumb.
Jack Sams: We popped out our letter that said please don't tell anybody we're here, and we don't want to hear anything confidential. And she read it and said and I can't sign this.
Gordon Eubanks: She did what her job was, she got the lawyer to look at the nondisclosure. The lawyer, Gerry Davis who's still in Monterey threw up on this non-disclosure. It was uncomfortable for IBM, they weren't used to waiting. And it was unfortunate situation - here you are in a tiny Victorian House, its overrun with people, chaotic.
Jack Sams: So we spent the whole day in Pacific Grove debating with them and with our attorneys and her attorneys and everybody else about whether or not she could even talk to us about talking to us, and we left.
………. Bill Gates: Digital research didn't seize that, and we knew it was essential, if somebody didn't do it, the project was going to fall apart.
Steve Ballmer: We just got carried away and said look, we can't afford to lose the language business. That was the initial thought - we can't afford to have IBM not go forward. This is the most exciting thing that's going to happen in PCs.
Bill Gates: And we were already out on a limb, because we had licensed them not only Basic, but Fortran, Cobol Assembler er, typing tutor and Venture. And basically every - every product the company had we had committed to do for IBM in a very short time frame.
Interesting story of how MS got into the operating system business. IBM wanted the CPM operating system, but Digital Research wouldn’t sign ibms NDA… really a pivot point in computing history.
From “Triumph of the Nerds” tv transcript:
https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
Jack Sams (IBM) was looking for a package from Microsoft containing both the BASIC computer language and an Operating System. But IBM hadn't done their homework.
Steve Ballmer: They thought we had an operating system. Because we had this Soft Card product that had CPM on it, they thought we could licence them CPM for this new personal computer they told us they wanted to do, and we said well, no, we're not in that business.
Jack Sams (IBM); When we discovered we didn't have - he didn't have the rights to do that and that it was not...he said but I think it's ready, I think that Gary's got it ready to go. So I said well, there's no time like the present, call up Gary.
Steve Ballmer: And so Bill right there with them in the room called Gary Kildall at Digital Research and said Gary, I'm sending some guys down…. Treat them right, they're important guys.
They tried to neutralize but couldn’t apparently.
“But when members of GKN Aerospace’s response team arrived to inject a neutralizing agent into the tank to reduce the liquid’s volatility, they learned that the tank’s valves were gummed up, making the interior inaccessible, said Mr. Covey.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/us/garden-grove-chemical-...
They’re “triumph of the nerds”really good. Really gets to the pivotal points in business.
The story of how MS got the operating system contract told by Gates/Balmer and the IBM executives. (MS at the time didn’t have an operating system, just software)
Also includes the Apple tour of Xerox research told by Steve Jobs and some of the xerox folks.
Worth a watch. Transcripts if you want to read: (part 2 is the IBM entering the business)
Modern PHP is pretty good. I’ve been using it for a while so it’s comfortable.
I’ve been doing so Perl maintenance lately and I miss PHP. Perl is a lot weirder than PHP. If I didn’t know C or had dabbled in Perl before I would be completely confused. There is More Than One Way to do it (the Perl rallying cry) causes a lot of confusion. The one nice thing about Perl is that it doesn’t really change anymore, and you can see where it positively influenced others.
I know areosmith, phish and the Dave Mathews band gave fan club members dibs on good tickets, though this was year ago. My friend was a huge phish fan and he’d always get a bunch of new years tickets in the 90s.
“Data recovery”?
Well Flea just released a jazz record where he plays trumpet. I admire him for it, but might need some financing now.
I used canvas for some Harvard extension classes 10 to 5ish years ago. It worked Ok. Work distributed, grades posted. I didn't realized so many schools used it, or that it was all schools on one instance, which seems kind of nuts.
I lost access when I left as it was tied to my work email. I downloaded a lot, but there was still some useful stuff on the boards.
I wonder what the havkers found out about me. Perhaps the class notes will be lifted to train AI, higher quality than a lot thats on the internet anyway.
Wmbr is great. I always assumed it was “Walker Memorial Building Radio” based on the building it transmits from.
We used to be amazed when I ran cross country in high school that these pro marathoners would best all of us in our approx 5K(3ish mile) races and then go on to repeat that distance multiple times.
It’s totally remarkable.
I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (sometimes they do deserve it) spends a lot on R&D.
On the Apple 2 at least the paddles registered a number between 0-255. The joysticks were just “2 paddles” with an x and y between 0-255.
I remember a little adjustment slider to help the joystick center near 0,0
It’s hard. But do what you can, it’s all you can do.
We got a solar array 10 years ago now. It’s small, but between 1000 to 3500 watts depending on the weather. It brings me some joy.
“Ones and zeros” by Jack Johnson is brutal lyrically. “A lot of traffic on the streets, so who's really doing all the drilling?”
It’s an unknown future and I’m glad that there are a lot thoughtful comments in this thread by people who care.
There are a few of these floating around for older games, but the world needs more:
Ara technica has a war stories feature on game development.
https://arstechnica.com/video/series/war-stories
For apple 2 games John Romero did a podcast. It’s decent but he seems to have stopped doing them.
https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/ Or YouTube
Ted dabney experience has a lot of interesting interviews with older arcade game designers:
A huge factor. I used ada for years and the fact everyone I worked with did hobby projects in other languages didn’t help it. And most of us liked Ada.
It had other warts the string handling wasn’t great, which was a huge problem. It was slow too in a time where that mattered more (we had c and ada in our code base.). I remember the concurrency not using the OSs so the one place we used it was a pain. HPUX had an amazing quasi real time extensions, so we just ran a bunch of processes.
As a student in the 90s I worked security for the student concert group on campus. We had to frisk people for Jello Briafa (Dead Kennedys) spoken word performance. I found a couple of tape decks, but those were allowed.
They still put a lot of effort sometimes. I saw Dave Chapelle in NYC and they made us put our phones in these pouches which were unsealed on exiting the show.
FNM’s cover of the Commodore’s Easy is both ridiculous and sublime. Man they can play.
There was a good bbc show of theirs floating around on YouTube. The music is so intense that I feel these quieter pieces give one a chance to catch one’s breath.
The home page isn’t great. I think what he ment was use the subscription feature, which you seem to do.
I sometime forget that feature exists, but I have channels I like that seem to only show up when I pull up subscriptions and never make it to the “home page suggestions” (I guess my own personal algorithm?).