Hacker News: bigjimmyk3

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "Top lawmaker asks White House to address open-source software risks"

bigjimmyk3 — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 14:25:38 +0000

I think the citizens of Oklahoma would be surprised to hear that Sen. Cotton represents them (hint: he does not).

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack"

bigjimmyk3 — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 03:35:25 +0000

Someone tried running that in one of the campus computer labs when I was a student, and the (probably misconfigured) IPX routers amplified it into... a campus-wide outage. Seems weird to me, but that's what the big sign on the door said the next day.

The perpetrator was never caught.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "How Higher education failed America's poor"

bigjimmyk3 — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 04:13:09 +0000

I believe my situation was similar to GP's: family on the lower end of middle class, and enough younger siblings to make it a stretch.

I was accepted to a reasonably prestigious university, but ran out of money after the first semester, so I wound up coming home and finishing my degree at a state school.

It's also important to note that the student loan system back then was very different: different guarantors, and non-infinite money.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "Asking about firearm safety during ER admissions: positive results"

bigjimmyk3 — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 21:07:23 +0000

The post title says "Asking about firearm safety" but the article says that they are _telling_ about safety, after asking about access:

> In the study, researchers introduced standardized firearm safety questions into the electronic medical record (EMR) system, ensuring that healthcare providers consistently inquired about firearm access during behavioral health assessments.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "Sleep apnea pill shows striking success in large clinical trial"

bigjimmyk3 — Tue, 27 May 2025 14:15:32 +0000

The only maxillomandibular advancement with which I'm familiar is a surgical procedure, rather than an exercise therapy. It involves repositioning both the mandible and your upper jaw (as the name implies) by cutting and repositioning both.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "How to live on $432 a month in America"

bigjimmyk3 — Sat, 24 May 2025 13:02:49 +0000

I grew up in a 1300sf wood heated house, so I have relevant experience here. It does take time to buck, split, load, unload, and stack the wood. It goes faster if you have a small child (me) to help!

We cut wood for our own use and also sold it, so it didn't require 100% of our time to keep the heat on.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "WikiTree: The Free Family Tree"

bigjimmyk3 — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 23:56:10 +0000

WT's process for living persons attempts to head this off. It's not perfect, but I think it's a pretty good method.

When you enter data about a living person, you are required to include an email which "invites" that person to WikiTree. If they don't respond within 30 days, their record (which was already private) is anonymized to last name and decade of birth.

Each record's privacy is configurable by its maintainer, or by those to whom the maintainer has granted access.

Obviously there are ways to goof this up or act maliciously, but I don't think the site makes intentional doxxing any easier than it already was.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "WikiTree: The Free Family Tree"

bigjimmyk3 — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 23:52:36 +0000

I agree that familysearch.org is a goldmine for primary sources, I'm very grateful for their digitization initiatives. I'm also glad that there are multiple non-dark-patterned options for people who want to preserve their family history.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "WikiTree: The Free Family Tree"

bigjimmyk3 — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 16:45:46 +0000

I recently started doing some genealogy work for my family, and I was not excited at the prospect of using most of the paid family tree sites -- dark patterns, etc. I recently ran across this site and it seems much more agreeable. I like the wiki-style collaboration, and the emphasis on primary sources is also a big plus vs "this is what I was told."

WikiTree: The Free Family Tree

bigjimmyk3 — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 15:57:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wikitree.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43753407

Points: 19

# Comments: 8

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "The Peppermills of Jens Quistgaard"

bigjimmyk3 — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 22:27:57 +0000

I have owned a Unicorn mill for nearly 20 years, and it is still going strong.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "Can hunters' donations help deliver high-quality meat to Colorado food pantries?"

bigjimmyk3 — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 16:04:13 +0000

I have recent experience with this -- I picked up my son's processed deer yesterday morning. There was a chest freezer at the checkout area advertising Hunters Feeding The Hungry (a similar org that moves donated game meat to local food pantries) and I donated a package of ground venison almost without thinking. I don't think anyone has grand notions of meeting 100% of families' protein needs via wild game.

I grew up eating a substantial amount of venison, along with fish and squirrel.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "The Death of the Minivan"

bigjimmyk3 — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 14:44:05 +0000

I don't know -- we rented a car for 5 adults + luggage in FR a few years ago, and we wound up with a Citroen C3 Aircross[1].

"This is the biggest one we have" was the only answer we got, so we made it work.

[edit: corrected a typo]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_C3_Aircross

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "Taking a Radio Camping"

bigjimmyk3 — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 23:01:08 +0000

I did something similar last month; I took my FT-817 with me to scout camp. I wanted to work some FT8 but didn't bring the required doodads with me to hook the radio's audio interface to my Surface Pro X. No problem, I'll just use the mic and speaker on the laptop. To my surprise (and much to the annoyance of my fellow leaders) it worked! wsjt-x is an amazing piece of software.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "Dear Roku, you ruined my TV"

bigjimmyk3 — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 19:56:03 +0000

Earlier this year my roku-enabled TV started showing some new Terms Of Service, and it wouldn't let me watch anything unless I agreed to them.

...or unplugged it from the network.

Now, it sounds like they may have done me a favor.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "Goodwatch – A Ham Radio Wristwatch (2020)"

bigjimmyk3 — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 16:45:35 +0000

POTA seems to be pretty active -- I managed to make a couple of voice contacts a few weeks ago on a 5W rig, so voice work isn't out of the question.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "The Microsoft Excel superstars throw down in Vegas"

bigjimmyk3 — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 13:10:44 +0000

For the n-dimensional part there's xcubes:

https://www.xcubes.net/

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "The Last Days of Zork"

bigjimmyk3 — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 22:14:30 +0000

This seems like something that would fit well into a tablet-sized display with a voice interface -- sort of like a conversational adventure.

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "Boeing Starliner launches first crewed mission"

bigjimmyk3 — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 21:33:42 +0000

Honeywell is also an aerospace company:

https://aerospace.honeywell.com/

New comment by bigjimmyk3 in "The man who killed Google Search?"

bigjimmyk3 — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 22:04:44 +0000

> stepped up from working 100 hours a week to working 120 hours

That's 17 hours a day, which seems unlikely (for an extended period of time) without some kind of performance enhancing substance. Also, I'm not sure I'd want to use the end product of that kind of death march for anything important.