justanother

As someone comin up on 50 myself, I have to say age has yet to be an issue with my career. Maybe I don't go out of my way to advertise it (cut the resume down to the past 10 or so years, don't have a face full of white hair), but I'm still landing plenty of the same ole gigs with Typescript, Ruby on Rails, Python, whatever the flavor of the month is. So I guess my advice is to just ignore it?

Of course, trying not to giggle at the 28 year old who thinks they need 4 meetings a day for their precious startup is a different matter. But as long as they pay on time...

I have one of these in the garage. I think they're 6502-based with the OS on EPROM, or at least that's what I vaguely recall from last time I had mine opened-up about 20 years ago. I can dump the ROM if it'd help.

Yeah, I try to bleed it with a long-handle screwdriver for 30 seconds. In fact, the couple times I've managed to zap myself was with residual current even after that, so I can't imagine what the full potential is. It's just a no-fun job.

I understand he got permission and everything was checked out by actual RF eggheads, but damn. I won't even change a HV run capacitor unless i'm wearing crocs, standing on cement, and wearing the rubber oven mitts. And even then, I keep one hand behind my back. Because there have been accidents, and they hurt (the pool pump run cap fails approximately annually in this climate and if I paid someone to change it every time, I'd be a lot poorer).

That said, the food demodulating the signal into audible noise is badass.

That rabbit hole goes pretty deep.

In the early 1990s, the IIgs community went through this sort of "faux workstation" phase where we had 16MHz hotrodded accelerator cards, high(er) resolution graphics cards like SecondSight, and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system (GNO/ME) along with the beginnings of TCP/IP support (gstcp). If you squinted one eye, we could almost hold our own against something like SPARCStation 1 as long as you didn't want to run Mosaic. You could fire up a desktop with a few shell windows and compile C programs and telnet out while playing SoundSmith (not-quite-.MOD) songs. That is to say, we were pushing the whole mess beyond anything a sane person would even fever-dream of attempting.

The community today is putting out more releases more steadily than any other era I can recall since then, but we seem to have mostly backed off of the whole "workstation" application that was in a few dorm rooms at the time.

Edit: FWIW I just noticed the date today. Happy 8/16!

As a longhaired teenager, I rarely got the chance to physically touch these things (although it did happen a couple times). Mostly I remember telnetting into a machine, noticing that it was Irix, and being able to login as "4Dgifts" without a password for a root shell. The joy was short-lived though, because as soon as you tried to build software (regardless of how "portable" the package was), you ran into interesting problems, if the compilers were even installed. I eventually got to spend several days with a Webforce Indy and its fancy (what we would now call a) webcam, where I took my first-ever selfie in 1995 and made my peace with the dev environment. These lil things were definitely ahead of their time, even if their price tags weren't.

Nice to see you here on HN, Roger. Some of us still use Merlin 16+ every weekend when we get a little free time.

Not sure if this was intended, but in Belizean creole, "Fi Wi" (pronounced "fee wee", not like WiFi) means "ours" or "for us." Good name for an MIT-licensed kernel project.

If you want to make money, there's no place like eBay to move vintage hardware. If you're more concerned about it going to a good home, show up to any sort of vintage hardware meetup (KansasFest, VCF, etc) and someone will take it off your hands. Generally speaking, most vintage hardware is something that someone else wants, with the notable exception of generic Intel/AMD clone hardware, and even that stuff is gaining traction in the community.

It's a way of using Windows that is very tolerable to POSIX commandline diehards. The similarities are numerous and include enhanced scriptability and even small details like up-arrow command history. You could get all of that with Cygwin, but Powershell adds tight OS integration, access to COM objects (or whatever we're calling them this year) as well as the remoting of objects. It's a useful and powerful shell that reminds me of VMS DCL and csh.

I have never, and I mean never, been a Windows user, even though I've been using computers since 1982. During the rise of Wintel in the early 1990s, I followed the rise of Linux and 386BSD. When Win95 and NT ruled the business desktop in the late 1990s, I sought refuge in SPARCStations, Linux, and discontinued NeXT hardware. After the turn of the century, I adopted the newly-POSIX-compliant Mac OS. All this to say, avoidance of Microsoft products has been a cornerstone of my computing policy for nearly half a century (with the notable exception of Applesoft BASIC).

But PowerShell? PowerShell's nice.

I get one of these every week or two. If someone says they're "impressed with the work you're doing" at my family S-corporation that magically W2-ifies my contract gigs, it's kind of a giveaway.

Kinda related old guy story time: My high school had a small room full of 286es running Novell, which was dated even for its time. I was a self-taught nerd who took intro-to-programming classes to goose my GPA easily (it didn't help, I dropped out anyway, but that's a whole other story). Anyway, I had been exposed to early IRC and BITNet Relay and decided I could clone it easily by just appending a chat log to an ever-growing file on the Novell network, and the 'clients' would just periodically check this file for growth and print the new bytes. Once one important bug was fixed (you couldn't check the file too often or you'd melt the Novell server), the chat program was permanently installed as a plague upon the high-school programming classes. Novell had its own popup messaging in text mode, but they'd already locked it down due to student shenanigans, but this was a group chat that could be made to work wherever there was a world-readable Novell share, and iirc the network wouldn't function properly without at least one (the 'mail' directories? idk it's been awhile).

Gosh I was so proud. I never directly caused any computer problems in high school, but damn if they didn't try to find a way to blame me for every foul wind that blew. They deserved my little group-chat annoyance.

To your point, I've watched with interest the redevelopment of the West Bottoms. I don't live anywhere near Kansas City anymore, but in the 1980s and 1990s, we teenagers used a large portion of the Bottoms around the 12th Street Bridge to play hide-and-seek at night, and we never encountered another soul (people were just too scared to be in the Bottoms at night, but we were young and crazy). Just a desolate area with tall neglected brick buildings from 1900, with some alleys that were still dirt. But I'm blown away now at how small businesses are taking it over block-by-block and turning it into a kinda pleasant place.

Surely this could not have been possible without some civic backing (the soil contamination in the Bottoms was simply awful and required extensive EPA cleanup and then some), but as you note, policy plus cheap prices appears to be turning it around.

Around that time, maybe a little bit earlier, I was a Sun nerd surrounded by other Sun nerds, but this worked for Linux too: We'd FTP into each other's machines and upload things like .au files of lonely whale cries into /dev/audio for an endless supply of WTF Moments.

mpg123 (command line) worked fine on my turbo dimension cube. Apparently others as well: https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2691.0

Exactly correct. Nonetheless, a prosecution was indeed brought, and the opinion you're citing is an appeal. Without the EFF's financial support, weev would not be a free man.

I knew an ex-employee back in the day (not me I swear) who created a dialup/ISDN provisioning profile called 'Ringing' in the modem rack controller module (not the Radius server, that would be too obvious), such that a glance at the modem rack status page showed everyone who was connected, and one that was 'Ringing', just like any other incoming call that hadn't been picked up yet. It went completely undetected, yielding 128Kbit ISDN service for well over a year.

Obviously I do not advise this, especially now that the CFAA has been interpreted to include things like changing URL parameters and flicking boogers on the carpet.

I don't often use the term 'self-employed' because I don't directly receive 1099 income, and I receive a W2 paycheck and benefits, although my employer's headquarters happens to be in my office. But in practical terms, yep I'm self-employed.

We (my wife and I) do business-development for our crazy schemes, sometimes alone, sometimes with the help of up to six contract developers that we love to work with. I fund those crazy schemes by doing contract software development myself. Benefits include 100% paid health and dental insurance, as much 401(k) matching as we can possibly have, and afternoon siestas.

We have no plans to hire anyone else, simply because it would be very important to me to give them a square deal: Equal ownership in the company, equal benefits, nice equipment, and so forth. But I don't mind enlisting other contractors who are already comfortable, and if one of our schemes really takes off, we incorporate a Delaware C-corp around it and make sure everyone owns a piece. That's only happened once, but I managed to quickly step down from the C-suite and become a SW dev contractor at that company.

He hasn't said a word to me for years, from the moment I rejected his first offer when, after over 15 years together, he finally thought he'd found his Big Exit. I'm fine with how our lawyers finally worked things out, though. Is that bad? Kinda.

But also, that relationship had to go, because in that context, I was always 'less than.' I wasn't the boss, so in every situation I was just someone who 'worked for' him, and was treated accordingly, by customers and staff alike. When strategy was discussed at the big boys' table, I was quietly seated with the other children.

My new venture is mine alone, I'm not 'less than' anyone else, I've taken my place at the head of the table, and it's perfectly clear that I'd been underestimating my potential for a very long time. It's been wildly successful, doing interesting work with high-profile customers. A++ would split again.

Near-Clearwater here. There's absolutely no reason to go there at night unless you're Sea Org (easily identifiable by the vests they wear that make them look like hotel staff). There's no nightlife aside from one restaurant at the south end. If you make too much noise (ie screaming "You're in a cult! You can leave and get help!"), a white van will be dispatched and follow you for several miles. Some of the buildings are vacant, some contain Narconon-style substance counseling groups that 'help' you by introducing you to Dianetics. All in all, kind of otherworldly, but mostly boring.

Also, one hundred percent chance they're reading this.

In Nice, I learned that nobody ever calls a toilet a "WC", but rather a "toilette", and that "ne" is generally optional in "ne .. pas" negation. But rappers like Dadju taught me Congolese slang like "kitoko." It took years to transform my American high school French into something less alien to people in France. Music was a huge part of that, though.

Fun little story, at Kansasfest 1992 (the Apple II conference that persists today) I was incredibly young but was roaming the dorms at night between various groups hacking on stuff and begging for underage-beers, when I heard some chatter about some people who had developed an interesting 3D game and promptly received over $800KUSD in shareware fees in just a month, enabling the purchase of fast cars. I ran into those people and saw a brief demonstration of Wolf3D on a plasma-screen laptop, it looked mighty fancy.

The next day, I saw Carmack stick his head into a computer lab where and friend and I were hacking on something, and I said "Hey John! I really liked Wraith! I just beat it!" (Wraith was an 8-bit tiled 2D adventure game that he had released). He smiled and said "Oh, I've gotten a bit better since Wraith..."

Of course by that time, he was about to release Doom. Not to belittle the ray-casting problem of determining which 2D tiles to hide and show in those adventure games, but he had indeed gotten a bit better.

Not sure if it qualifies as 'groundbreaking', but Ben Eater's youtube and websites are an amazing way to stay sharp on first principles. You can watch him build and program a 6502 or similar computer on a breadboard, and there's an entire subreddit of people following along with him.

Starts off with an interesting premise and makes me think, hey, maybe I should re-examine my priors, let's see the evidence. And then the evidence turns out to be something about people who "make more than $100K," and goes on to assert that they "live in gated communities" and "can afford private security." In 2023, "making over 100K" just means that you're usually on-time with your monthly housing payment.

Author may indeed be going somewhere with this, but I'd like to see stronger support for the thesis.

Ever-growing Google Docs text files tell you everything about my life, going back to about 2007. Bank balances, payment schedules, work tasks, personal tasks, items ordered, deliveries expected, and even a couple sentences about how I felt and what happened. As you might expect, there's a simple format that is followed for each day, so that someday I could parse these files into a database of some sort. During meetings, I type non-stop taking notes into this file. If I promise someone something, it goes into the file. Because of this, I can tell you that I did 'x' on Tuesday, March 12th, around 2pm, and for that it is invaluable because if I were to rely on my grey matter for all of this, I would fall flat on my face. If I promised someone something or began a task, it keeps getting rolled over into the next day's notes until it's complete. It is extremely uncommon for things to 'slip through the cracks' as a result.

It doesn't really matter which tool you use, as long as it's predictably formatted and easily searchable. There is simply no way I could deal with the insane demands of life without relying on an external memory. Google Docs is nice because it's highly available and replicates between desktop, macbook, and iphone almost instantly, such that I can leave one device and pick up the next without losing my 'memory'. This is one feature that I find extremely valuable.

Pretty much the only way to download the cool warez that you FTPd down (from some Scandinavian anonymous FTP site that displayed the warning "our transatlantic link is only 128Kbit, so Yankees please only leech at night") to your VM/CMS account. Can even be used to transfer stuff over 2400bps AX.25 hamradio channels. The 1980s equivalent of zip ties and bailing wire.

There seems to be a pattern emerging here, and I've seen something similar in my contracting experience: Once the cheap money dries up, the social network figureheads show you who they really are. Believe them when they tell you.

One of my first ("borrowed") internet accounts was on VM/XA SP around 1991. Yeah you had to hit CTRL-Z to clear your screen, but I was actually amazed at how friendly this machine was (and it would happily spit out pages and pages of helpful documentation), given that it was an "IBM mainframe." It was quite the experience learning to navigate the nascent internet and BITNet of the time on that thing.

I met up with Hans on X.25 just a couple years after the book came out, when he was at Artcom. I found him to be incredibly nice, and he even ran a small BBS and was helping me get a VAX account to explore VMS a bit. I don't recall why, but we eventually lost touch. This year I noticed him on Github doing some hardware-related stuff though.