don-code

8 ms·

151.
by don-code 4y ago
This feels similar to backdooring encrypted systems. The upsides are similar: some trusted entity has the ability to act in a supposed best interest - national security in the case of encryption, reducing e-waste in the latter. Unfortunatel
152.
by don-code 4y ago
It feels easy to think that it's the case that your employer and coworkers are a family. In my case, I stayed six years in my first job out of college - as did most of my coworkers (the company was pretty stable up until the very end,
153.
by don-code 4y ago
Back in high school, I fulfilled my community service requirement at a local nursing home. Several of the residents there had no local friends or family, and as a result, no visitors. I was tasked just with giving them someone to talk to. W
154.
by don-code 4y ago
In the past seven years, the only consumable I've bought for my moka pot is a new seal - $5 on eBay. The pot was made in 1947. It was my father's. Before that, it was my great aunt's. These are not statements you could make o
155.
by don-code 4y ago
I've "tried" cassette tapes three times now. The first, which at this point is insignificant, is when they were period-accurate, and I didn't have a frame of reference. They were pretty good then. The second time was aro
156.
by don-code 4y ago
It took awhile before PCs really caught up with the demands that a full-fledged Active Desktop would put on them. I remember trying it on my 83MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM, and later a 233MHz Pentium II with 32MB of RAM, both without much s
157.
by don-code 4y ago
I've noticed this as a cultural difference between "self-improvement" type engineers, and "dark matter" type engineers. Self improvers are the ones reading Hacker News, going to conferences, and generally trying to
158.
by don-code 4y ago
The North American owner's manual for the BMW E30, which being an 80s car would have been contemporary with the Franklin Ace, has a similar humorous admonition: > Caution: Although the ABS is very effective, always remember that bra
159.
by don-code 4y ago
While I don't agree it's a Spendesk problem, it's definitely a hard position to take that Spendesk shouldn't fix it themselves. When a large (I'd guess, at minimum, double digit) percentage of your virtual card traf
160.
by don-code 4y ago
Is that, by chance, a T500 with the T60 keyboard swap? I ran with one of those for some time, before the lack of graphics horsepower (I think it had a Radeon 3650?) ultimately did me in. If you're looking for another cool upgrade, I al
161.
by don-code 4y ago
I'd be very interested if you chronicle this somewhere. A part of me long wanted to do the same with an O2 workstation, but in more recent years it became much less tenable due to the modern Web (half the web is already broken in minor
162.
by don-code 4y ago
I bought it used, and with the expectation that I'm going to be on the hook for my own long-term maintenance and support, as is true with more or less everything I buy. (Full-time Linux user here.) The sad reality is that the experienc
163.
by don-code 4y ago
Interestingly, the Pentium Overdrive mentioned in your linked article will actually run relatively recent OSes - the latest release of Slackware, for instance, should still run on it. I have the 83MHz version in my old 486 (though it's
164.
by don-code 4y ago
This may work for common phones (aka: Apple and Samsung phones). I had to retire a perfectly workable, but five years old, HTC phone after three such shops refused to fix it, citing unfamiliarity and cost. I now have an ASUS phone, and full
165.
by don-code 4y ago
Is this something that's documented publicly? I'd love to read more.
166.
by don-code 4y ago
I self-host on a 3-node Kubernetes cluster in my basement. It runs on three off-lease HP DL360 1U servers that I bought for about $120 each. I work heavily with Kubernetes in my day job, so this also gives me a playground for things that I
167.
by don-code 4y ago
I personally use a black desktop background - and a black shell background as well - as a way of establishing negative space. It feels much cleaner and less distracting than some of the other common backdrops I've seen: colorful wallpa
168.
by don-code 4y ago
In a former role, I used EC2 in us-east-1 to host the front door e-commerce site for a consumer electronics company. AWS suggested that we go through the Infrastructure Event Mangaement process ( https://aws.amazon.com/premiu
169.
by don-code 4y ago
I'm deeply reminded of MindMaze, which shipped with old versions of Microsoft Encarta in the 90s. While I'm sure the questions were canned and not programmatically generated, it behooved you to go read up on the subjects that it w
170.
by don-code 4y ago
With regard to: > in principle you could create a “mirror human” with everything flipped, which is good because it’s insane and they would be immune to infectious disease but also to food so to keep them alive you’d need an entire mirror
171.
by don-code 4y ago
About 14 years ago - before I'd taken as much as an intro to CS class - I wrote some software that helped a bar keep track of who'd drank what. They were the type of bar where, if you drank every beer they had available, you'
172.
by don-code 4y ago
I have the same FM transmitter that the author mentions. If you're worried about an extra digital-to-analog step somewhere in your audio pipeline: it's a moot point. The transmitter's acoustics leave _a lot_ to be desired: th
173.
by don-code 4y ago
Yes! This was actually my first shot at home servers as well - same rationale and all. Old Pentium laptops seemed to get thrown out every few weeks, easily ran Windows Server 2003 (I hadn't seen the light yet), were reasonably easy to
174.
by don-code 4y ago
I run my home site off a 3-node Kubernetes cluster with 16-core CPUs and some tens of GBs of RAM each, off a business-class Internet connection with a static IP, and I'm still under no pretense that some arbitrary new restriction on
175.
by don-code 4y ago
> I hacked the program to NOP out the loop and just immediately capture. This is a level of freedom that I wish we still had today. I'm not talking so much about the open source, "free as in speech" freedom, but more so ab
176.
by don-code 4y ago
I'm somewhat surprised, disk being so many orders of magnitudes slower than compute (and to a lesser extent, memory), that there's such a wide gulf. My expectation would have been that the difference would be negligible, as `tar`
177.
by don-code 4y ago
There's a machine described in here which is compatible with both the Apple ][ and CP/M systems, at a comparable price point to either one. As a naive buyer, why would I have _not_ purchased this system?
178.
by don-code 4y ago
I was somewhat disappointed that there was only one "need" for holistic systems presented: the fact that correctable DIMM errors were getting eaten by underlying firmware. While I don't necessarily disagree with the speaker&#
179.
by don-code 4y ago
I was writing a response to this, the point of which was going to be that there's a gradient with regard to the amount of respect shown (or not shown) to people as they climb the social ladder, but at the same time, there are some form
180.
by don-code 4y ago
Mine was one of the later 6800-series - an 8-bit CISC CPU with enough 16-bit extensions to not feel too constrained. It's interesting that everything which made it a great learning platform (orthogonal instruction set, instructions for

More ›