mad_ned

I'm still alive. But I've retired or at least taken an extended hiatus from my writing hobby, which in retrospect was probably a pandemic coping mechanism more than a lot of things lol.

I only came here because my in box is blowing up due to the traffic hacker news is driving to my site, and so then I see that this article is like #3 today. Not bad considering I don't really remember writing it!

More Marshmallows!

It's a rainy Saturday here, thought I'd give this one a second shot since the mood seemed right!

This is a great resource for aspiring FPGA tinkerers like me. Thanks for sharing!

Wish granted! @the.bessie.report on Instagram

haha yes, excellent suggestions! I did think about ternary logic actually but I don't know of an FPGA that supports it. I considered creating like a primitive that burns 2 register bits to approximate it even, and just throw away the 4th state and pretend I have 3-state logic on all the layers above. but i have enough on my hands just trying to get the stupid timing working on a simple CPU. Im not actually a CPU designer so I dont really know what I'm doing lol.

Thanks Scott - I'm really enjoying sitting back and reading all the great discussions you've been having here and interesting questions people have, nothing makes me happier as a writer than to be able to spark something like that.

I was really honored for a chance to talk with one of computer gaming's true pioneers, Scott Adams. His text adventure games launched an entire game genre and influenced and inspired a lot of other programmers and game developers.

If you read the interview and come away thinking, "why didn't he ask him about X?", today's your lucky day, because Scott has graciously agreed to stop by here and answer a few questions. He's new to HN, so be sure and give him a warm welcome!

Abandoned stuff is always so cool. My favorite continues to be this exploration of the abandoned power plant and tunnel under Niagara Falls:

https://freaktography.com/canadian-niagara-power-william-b-r...

only partially related, but I laughed the other day when I googled 'emacs' and it said 'did you mean vi?'

Doom next?

You may not have played the game Empire, but if you've played any computer wargame, you've played something influenced by it. I'm very honored to have had the chance to discuss the development of Empire with Walter!

As mentioned in the article, he is a sometimes-reader of Hacker News, so if people have any follow-up questions, we may just get lucky and have him drop by to answer a few.

this is genius.

I don't like them either, but I always want to. I wonder if e-paper or whatever will eventually get so cheap and so good, you could have a physical book full of e-pages, then after you read it, press a button, and it becomes a different book.

i spent a good long time writing code in emacs but our current project uses an IDE, and I found I could be pretty productive in it and learned to leverage its advantages. But I could not live without a solid text editor, and still use emacs for texty stuff, like config and log files and such (even though in theory i could do that in the IDE as well)

But as a result, a lot of the cool stuff I had set up in emacs never gets used anymore. not even sure how to run many of the .el's anymore i have in my .emacs tbh. I could probably get by just fine with nano but run full emacs just out of habit.

possible, maybe not likely. our school for instance had a modem line you could dial into, that let you access this one program that was for career counseling, it was like a buzzfeed quiz that asked you questions, and then recommended a career for you. I think I got plumber. we tried to hack past this to get at the general OS, but no luck. I suppose someone could set something like that up for the school record access, but would they? (like I claim in the article, it was the 80s so maybe)

Aka "Chip Butty". Jurassic park comes to mind...

"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

I would say, not letting go when I disagreed with some decision I knew was wrong. Younger me would tend to tenaciously fight those, to my detrement. You end up getting a reputation for being argumentative or hard to work with. Later I learned waiting things out and more subtle ways to affect change.

It also makes a huge difference if the startup is your primary source of income or not. My wife worked for several startups, all of which failed. But since I had a more stable paycheck, it wasn't so bad, and we just treated the extra startup income as a bonus, and had very low expectations on cashing in on the equity.

whups. i really need to hire an editor, with all that crazy substack money :-)

thanks for this! I've always wondered what the deal was, and teen me did not do any research on why the hack worked- once I got the files visible I just moved on. It was almost certainly this RDOS attribute stuff you show here I was playing with (also I took some artistic license in the post, not really sure it was 'F' vs. 'E'.)

If you mean "Thin Pipe, part II" - its there. hackernews moderators did something weird - this original post and early comments were just part 2 of the story, since i had posted part 1 separately last week. they relinked this part 2 post back to part 1, which was the earlier stuff leading up to the municipal broadband part. but the comments for part 2 remain. anyway sorry for any confusion - direct link for part 2 is here: https://madned.substack.com/p/thin-pipe-part-ii

the unevenness of the level of detail in the story, especially the part at the end, is my fault. I did indeed gloss over it. You have in some senses an unreliable narrator, because I was not privy to what went on with the Municipal Light Plant decisions once the Broadband committee was dissolved and so cant go into as much detail. But my best guess here is that we got renewed interest from the cable companies once the poles were done (the poles had to be done, no matter what approach we took), and then when unrelated issues with the chosen build contractor came up, the Municipal Light Plant decided to go the private route. The makeup of that body was different that the Broadband committee, and maybe prioritized the cost/benefit of going the municipal route differently than us.

That is a valid way to look at it. I and probably a lot of our former Broadband committee would tend to agree with you. However, the last time I spoke with any of them was spring of 2020, to thank them again for their efforts - because I was thinking about how supremely screwed we all would have been going into Covid without high speed internet in town. I think all things considered now, they were more or less equally happy with our (imperfect) outcome as I.

just for the record, yep I did think about moving, on more than one occasion. (I mentioned it in part 1, a little.) As for whether we were trying to force the town to do something only we wanted - it seemed like that to us at times for sure. But our belief was that having high speed internet service in town was something most people did want, not just us. and although we never built the system we thought we would, a very large majority did vote to create that muni system...