zengargoyle

4 ms·

1.
by zengargoyle 2y ago
Sit right back and I'll tell you a tale. Fortune is a parasite glommed over the original intents of the Architecture of what is now known as Fortune. Originally as the high gods intended the whole mess was nothing but a Rolodex, a box
2.
by zengargoyle 2y ago
Reminds me of the old SmokePing.
3.
by zengargoyle 2y ago
Freshman year of high school I took a class called "Business Computer Applications". It was 1983 and I was 13. We were using Apple II+ computers or their clones. I had an Apple II+ since they came out and knew lots of things by th
4.
by zengargoyle 2y ago
Back in middle school, like 1981-ish I had this hardback book with a title of something like "A Shocking Story". The inside was hollowed out to hold about the same but it was rigged to go off when you opened the book. It got conf
5.
by zengargoyle 3y ago
Technically, yes for about seven years. We were introduced by a mutual friend because we were both staying on campus over the Christmas holiday. We hooked up on Christmas Eve and dropped some acid and had a fun few days. We were both the
6.
by zengargoyle 3y ago
I married my best friend of several years so she could get financial aid. Her financial aid counselor told her about the lengthy emancipation legal process or marriage. She came over one night with a "I have a huge favor to ask of yo
7.
by zengargoyle 3y ago
Back in the late 1980s when I was a teenager I found plans and built this little circuit with a LED that would light up if someone else in the house was trying to listen in on my phone calls. More than one phone off the hook... LED lights
8.
by zengargoyle 4y ago
The first program I ever keyed in was the one dimensional lunar lander simulation on my dad's HP calculator. Must have been 6 or 7 years old (by 9 years old I was doing BASIC on an Apple ][ with floating point card and programming int
9.
by zengargoyle 4y ago
This is why you fail. Thirty years ago I could make a wire wrapped 68000k board that did nothing but play music. CE/CS was different back then. I'd cut pins and solder in chips to twiddle the filters on audio output. You could
10.
by zengargoyle 4y ago
Tell them the object system was stolen from Python and they'll really freak out.
11.
by zengargoyle 4y ago
Something like `read` gives a better example. Like `man 1 read` is "read — read from standard input into shell variables", "read [-r] var...", a shell function. And `man 2 read` is " read - read from a file descrip
12.
by zengargoyle 4y ago
My pre-internet 16yr old ancient self (late bloomer) who had to read books in libraries and bookstores who lost first girlfriend by not kissing her and second girlfriend pinned me down and started sucking my face off while growing four extr
13.
by zengargoyle 4y ago
I used to mess around with Anki many years ago while studying Japanese. The approach I took was to figure out the database structure, then write a bit of code to expand the information on cards. Just alter the database directly. Mostly f
14.
by zengargoyle 4y ago
$ perl -E 'my $f=[[{X=>{Y=>["FOO"]}}]]; say $f->[0][0]{X}{Y}[0];my $g=$f->[0][0]{X}{Y}; say $g->[0]' FOO FOO Seems pretty trivial.
15.
by zengargoyle 4y ago
Same, I had my books from 1986 (when I was 16) bought from Caltech's bookstore while I was there at a summer program (YESS, Young Engineer Summer Scholars) that went on for months where I learned 2-3 semesters worth of undergrad physic
16.
by zengargoyle 4y ago
Yeah, my org had a Kerberos setup for some DB/middleware/CLI tools. I inherited a bunch of random script tools that took the whole typing in passwords for everything. Screw that, first thing I did was write a Kerberos module and
17.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
I think about half the comments I've ever made here on HN are about my Amiga 1000 that I got in 1985. By 1989 it had a 14MHz 68020/68881 with 4MB Fast RAM, an 80 MB SCSI drive, and a MIDI interface that I built myself from diagra
18.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
I'm talking about AmigaOS. Bits and pieces were based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS and the kernel itself had a lot of UNIXy sort of features. In the late 1980s if your work job is sitting in front of a
19.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
Forth is a really nice language for learning raw machine code then adding an assembler then moving up to a HLL in a few printed pages of code. The ultimate macro assembler. Back in 1986 teenage me found this library book that described For
20.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28081181 The OS was close enough and wonderful under the hood. So many UNIX people bought one for home just because it was so easy to port UNIX code. I wrote Amiga apps on a Sun3/50
21.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
Ah, the good old Crap and Crud (C&C) manual. Back in the day every EE/CE/CS/IT sort had a big 3-ring binder of everything that they learned once. Serial cable wiring CTE/DTE/Crossover, wire color orderings for
22.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
I flip table rage quit my 15 year job at a university over a new C-suite from who knows where throwing HPE equipment/software/consultants at me for a big sort of project and finding them all so utter crap that I would be a part o
23.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
I couldn't find a link anywhere to some sort of 'blank' PDF example, or to a fake filled out example. Double sided printing would be nice. So would formatting the output so you could cut/fold/staple it down into a
24.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigengrau
25.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
Lol, seems I have somehow actually been remembering the forerunner DKBTrace or something. Sometime around 1989 I had it on my Amiga from a Fred Fish PD software disk. Even on my buffed out A1000 (68020 14Mhz 4MB) it took a long time to make
26.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
USC would disable any residential port trying to host a real server like that (i.e. not a game server or something). It's a research and education network, not your free ISP. If you have legitimate reasons, get a teacher's note a
27.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
Ditto. But eh... My bagel place was large enough to be industrial park warehouse sized and served the state of New Mexico with outlet shops and probably the bagels you find in the bulk bins at the grocery stores. They hired anybody breathin
28.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
In like '89 when I was 19 and at university my work-study job was with the IT/ComputingResources department (old names). I worked as a graveyard shift NOC operator swapping tapes and handing out print-jobs, running system tests a
29.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
The thing with Javascript is that it sucks so bad that there are what a dozen or so languages built on top of it that get transpiled to JS to run in a browser or on V8. It sucked so bad that nobody really wanted to use it, they'd rath
30.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
Ditto. My $WORK had a 5ESS and a machine room and I've been in many a giga-POP. I wanted pictures from inside of the mix of just nice and rats-nest of cables.

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