simmons

6 ms·

1.
by simmons 3mo ago
Yes, I remember feeling pride in the stability of my systems when I saw a large uptime. I had a server that had 1000 days of uptime, once. Now when I see a large uptime, I'm terrified of what security patches the kernel may be missing!
2.
by simmons 4mo ago
Ah, that took a second to get. If anyone is stumped, it's a reference to Turner Time [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TBS_(American_TV_channel)#Turn...
3.
by simmons 5mo ago
A Sam's Club in my area has started selling fresh squeezed orange juice. It's quite delicious. (And yes, it's pricey.) I've looked around at many other stores (including places like Whole Foods) and nobody else seems to
4.
by simmons 5mo ago
Yes, the latest chips were very expensive back then, and out of reach for most people who would continue buying new computers with older chips. (As opposed to how most people today buy an iPhone or a Mac or whatever with the latest semicond
5.
by simmons 8mo ago
Wow, that takes me back. It reminds me of the pre-web days when people would set up telnet services for providing information about the weather, ham radio callsigns, lyrics, FTP search engine (archie), and of course BBSs. An acquaintance of
6.
by simmons 10mo ago
I was excited earlier this year to discover that Micron (Crucial) was manufacturing 64GB DDR5 "laptop memory" modules, allowing me to pick up a couple in early September to build an ASUS NUC VM server with 128GB of RAM. It was a l
7.
by simmons 11mo ago
I don't think it was ever common, since earphones weren't that popular until people started calling them "earbuds", but the term was historically used in at least some circles in the U.S. The 1988 Radio Shack catalog [1]
8.
by simmons 11mo ago
When you become good at using Palm graffiti, it's not too bad. I remember playing through all of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ game on a Palm IIIx while commuting on the bus between Boulder and Denver back in 1999 or so,
9.
by simmons 11mo ago
It's just a matter of buying from the right web page at Microsoft's web site. At least as of June, I was able to buy a license with a traditional license key here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/window
10.
by simmons 11mo ago
I was in this same situation earlier this year with one machine that was using a license attached to my Microsoft account. From what I read online, I thought I was freeing up the license by running "slmgr /upk" and "slmg
11.
by simmons 1y ago
I would love to hear your other theories! I don't think it would exactly be "create a fork of this repo", but if a developer invests significant time and effort solving hard problems where the solutions are implemented in the
12.
by simmons 1y ago
Very cool! I had an MC-10 when I was a little kid. It was my first computer, and I didn't know anyone else who had one. I didn't have the book with this Arctic Adventure program, but I had another book with an adventure game you c
13.
by simmons 1y ago
2002 Honda Accord. An immensely reliable car that is built to last, and is inexpensive to maintain.
14.
by simmons 1y ago
Neat! I sometimes play around with the idea of reverse engineering and transcompiling a tiny game that I think was probably written in Turbo Pascal 4.0. Maybe 4.0 supported optimizations, but this program seems to have been compiled in a de
15.
by simmons 1y ago
> In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the
16.
by simmons 2y ago
Wow, the mention of SLS takes me back. SLS was the first Linux distribution I ever used. (Not counting the very early days of manually extracting tar archives of userspace binaries to make a system...) I remember passing around the precious
17.
by simmons 2y ago
I thought I was the only one who preferred David Lynch's Dune. I'm glad to find out I'm not alone. I explain to people that it depends on if you're a bigger David Lynch fan or a Frank Herbert fan. I have nothing against
18.
by simmons 2y ago
Even outside of gaming, people's needs are going to vary a great deal. Some people are sensitive to refresh rates, some people really need great color reproduction, etc. But since you asked what I optimize for... I'm cheap, and
19.
by simmons 2y ago
It's not completely clear to be that the original poster did anything nefarious. (Although the Stack Overflow post has been deleted, so I don't know what was mentioned there.) It seems to me that section 10.3 could cover terminati
20.
by simmons 2y ago
I've been doing this for years, as well. I've also found that the majority of companies I give an email address to are actually surprisingly good stewards of that information. However, I have found a number of email leaks. It look
21.
by simmons 2y ago
The idea of cars being driven remotely by someone on the other side of the world was mentioned in Charles Stross's 2007 science fiction novel Halting State. I think about it sometimes, but I always come to the conclusion that the laten
22.
by simmons 2y ago
I'm a long-time user of apt-cacher-ng, but reading this reminds me of some of the pain points I regularly experience. Maybe others have some thoughts. It would be nice if my Docker image builds, which may include apt-get steps, could b
23.
by simmons 2y ago
I've been in a lot of different work situations over my career, including occasionally working part-time. Most of my part-time situations have tended to be very small, well-defined projects, or situations where I may be able to provide
24.
by simmons 2y ago
I'm not the poster who mentioned this, but I assume they're thinking about tax brackets. If you make a year's worth of income in a year, then take a year off starting in January, some of that income may be taxed in a higher b
25.
by simmons 2y ago
I think it mostly depends on the particular engineer and the engineering culture of the team/company. I was hanging out in a coffee shop a while back, and some software engineers who looked extremely young happened to sit at a nearby t
26.
by simmons 2y ago
I love job control! And as usual, Julia Evans explains it in a clear and straightforward fashion. I would add that as a shortcut, you can just type % (without fg) to foreground the current job, or % and a number to foreground a particular j
27.
by simmons 2y ago
> if someone who didn't hear you says, "what", or "can you say that again?", don't just repeat the last three words you said. My pet peeve about asking people to repeat isn't that they won't repeat
28.
by simmons 2y ago
Thank you for the name of this disorder and link! I've also had this my whole life, and I knew it was a thing that wasn't terribly rare (based on reading comments from others in the past, here on HN and elsewhere), but I think thi
29.
by simmons 2y ago
Thanks to the OP for writing this up. I'd love to see mail be rebooted. A few thoughts: 1. I don't know if HTTPS is the best analogy, since it took 20 years for it to really become widely used (vs. non-secure HTTP). I think a bett
30.
by simmons 2y ago
I personally think that I only get worse at programming when I drink even a little, and quickly stop caring. On an unrelated note, some folks started a distillery in Lakewood, Colorado, and they named it Ballmer Peak after the XKCD. :)

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