Hacker News: Two9A

New comment by Two9A in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

Two9A — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:26:33 +0000

Arabic is on the Semitic branch of the hypothesised proto-Indo-European language, which has dual number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)

So you'd expect to see languages from western Europe to south Asia that either have the dual concept, or have an attested ancestor that did.

Why was the Commodore 64 disk drive so slow?

Two9A — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:28:51 +0000

Article URL: https://imrannazar.com/articles/commodore-1541

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47215262

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by Two9A in "C64 Copy Protection"

Two9A — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:04:07 +0000

It's worse than that even: there are delays after every _bit_ transferred, due to various design decisions that were made along the way, which is why the C64's disk drive is slower than the previous computer (the VIC-20), which is slower than the one before that (the PET).

I wrote about the decisions and the resulting delays for one of those 100-post Threadapalooza projects in 2024, compiled here for easier reading: https://imrannazar.com/articles/commodore-1541

New comment by Two9A in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

Two9A — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:00:05 +0000

https://imrannazar.com - Sporadic blog posts on web development and retrocomputing

New comment by Two9A in "I sell onions on the Internet (2019)"

Two9A — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 11:44:17 +0000

If nothing else, you can put up a static page on the basics of Boglehead-ish finances; a copy of The Flowchart from /r/personalfinance would be a great low-effort stop-gap.

New comment by Two9A in "How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?"

Two9A — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:36:12 +0000

Mm, I still recall the time my Windows 98 installation corrupted its registry somehow. The only fix was to reinstall, and the machine had no floppy or CD drive... getting Windows back on there was a task.

New comment by Two9A in "Sodium-ion batteries have started to appear in cars and home storage"

Two9A — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:30:29 +0000

> They're larger and heavier for the same capacity, but the lower price makes up for it

So yes, the battery will be heavier because sodium's heavier, but it's so much cheaper that you can afford the extra footprint.

New comment by Two9A in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Adventure Prototype Recovered for the C64"

Two9A — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 18:46:49 +0000

Reminds me of a ROM-hack for Zelda: Ocarina of Time from a few years ago, that was presented in the release video as using unused assets and storyline from the game itself, when it was actually almost entirely new material. A great technical achievement, to be sure, but somewhat dishonest in its presentation.

New comment by Two9A in "The “impossibly small” Microdot web framework"

Two9A — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 11:05:47 +0000

I'm reminded of an MVC microframework I put together many years back in PHP: https://github.com/Two9A/BirSaat

Having pulled down a copy just now, the framework itself is 526 lines of PHP, and the sample site (a newsfeed that pulls from the BBC) is perhaps 300 lines in models and controllers. I use the framework to this day to serve out my blog and other small sites, seems to work well without getting in the way.

De-Googling TOTP Authenticator Codes

Two9A — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 09:52:03 +0000

Article URL: https://imrannazar.com/articles/degoogle-otp

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45091202

Points: 105

# Comments: 135

New comment by Two9A in "VIM Master"

Two9A — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 13:02:49 +0000

I also see a Login Via GitHub, but there could certainly be scope to allow local accounts here.

New comment by Two9A in "Potatoqualitee/EOL-dr: End-of-life Disaster Response"

Two9A — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 10:42:44 +0000

Quoting from the README:

Our VDI guy, Andy, was one of my favorites. He was grumpy, always tucked his shirt in, kept his desk Type A clean and was just so principled. ...I always thought he'd be there and was devastated when I found out he died unexpectedly.

"What about his homelab?" I thought. "Will his wife's wifi devices even be able to get an IP address if his DHCP server goes down?". I reached out to her to see how she was doing and she told me that, six months on, she avoids his office at all costs. She worries what will happen when her TV no longer works, when her wifi no longer works.

Potatoqualitee/EOL-dr: End-of-life Disaster Response

Two9A — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 10:42:44 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/potatoqualitee/eol-dr

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42364857

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by Two9A in "I turned an old phone into a NAS"

Two9A — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 11:23:16 +0000

I believe it's a reference to the look of a failed LiPo battery: it puffs up and looks like a pillow, but if you puncture it fire spews forth.

Reddit first came up with the phrase "spicy pillow" to describe that combination.

New comment by Two9A in "23words.com"

Two9A — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 18:06:53 +0000

Many of these types of games are daily, so I'd expect it's a different angle tomorrow.

(Thanks for the hint.)

New comment by Two9A in "Simplicity is an advantage but sadly complexity sells better (2022)"

Two9A — Mon, 06 May 2024 09:54:17 +0000

Sounds somewhat familiar. I worked at a place that replaced a basic LAMP stack with microservices written in Perl and MongoDB as a backing store, for the sole purpose of raising complexity.

And left Mongo on the default settings for the time (speed of return over reliability of saving data), so they ended up with a reporting replica which was MySQL.

Don't think I've seen anything before or since which was architected so exactly backwards.

New comment by Two9A in "Why are we templating YAML? (2019)"

Two9A — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 14:24:36 +0000

And I've been using vim exclusively for north of fifteen years with Tab replacement, never had a problem with the editor getting confused about what happens with spaces when I hit Tab.

Some detail about the corner cases you've run into would be great, if they're happening constantly I can see how it would be a bugbear.

New comment by Two9A in "Post Office lied and threatened BBC over Fujitsu dev whistleblower"

Two9A — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 14:03:08 +0000

"CBE" refers to Commander of the most excellent order of the British Empire [0] which is a title conferred by the monarch on those deemed to have performed especially well in the service of the nation.

So you can see how its value might be diluted by this instance.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_British_Empire

New comment by Two9A in "Research paper is also an executable x86 program [pdf]"

Two9A — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 09:24:35 +0000

Many years ago, I wrote up a post on doing this kind of thing in plain DOS .com files: https://imrannazar.com/articles/x86-printable-opcodes

It's good to see the principle can be expanded to EXEs, I'll have to dig into this some more.

New comment by Two9A in "Why use strace in 2023? [video]"

Two9A — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 09:56:09 +0000

I should write that down; -Z would've been really useful when my SSH server was falling over in a heap and I was left scrolling through strace to work out what happened.

I wrote that experience up last week, for what it's worth: https://imrannazar.com/articles/linux-upgrade-fail