Hacker News: bpoyner

New comment by bpoyner in "Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero"

bpoyner — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:34:52 +0000

That's _bananas_.

New comment by bpoyner in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

bpoyner — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:27:37 +0000

I taught myself to juggle in a weird way. I had 3 lightweight plastic cubes, laid down on the bed, and began tossing them directly over my head (my hands on either side of my head). I think it gave me a good sense of where each cube was at all times.Once I got good at juggling supine, I just transitioned to sitting up straight.

New comment by bpoyner in "Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80"

bpoyner — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:47:43 +0000

Reminds me of stumbling across the Harvard Mark I, which is about 1-2 years older, while wandering through the Harvard Science Center (as one does). By far the oldest computer I've seen in person. Seems they moved it since then to the Science and Engineering Complex.

New comment by bpoyner in "SETI@home: Data Acquisition and Front-End Processing (2025)"

bpoyner — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:55:04 +0000

This paper describes the front end of SETI@home and provides parameters for the primary data source, the Arecibo Observatory

Most of this data was recorded commensally at the Arecibo observatory over a 22 yr period

Interesting as Arecibo collapsed in December of 2020. It sounds like they have a lot of data to still churn through.

New comment by bpoyner in "What your Bluetooth devices reveal"

bpoyner — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:35:42 +0000

"We agreed on a 150-day disclosure window". Isn't that longer than Google Project Zero gives to release fixes?

New comment by bpoyner in "Booting from a vinyl record (2020)"

bpoyner — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:51:21 +0000

I remember getting floppy disks in magazines, I've used cassette tapes with a Commodore 64, I also remember flexidiscs for music, but I've never heard of the flexidisc as a software medium. Where was this?

I found a reference to a Thompson Twins game distributed by flexidisc in the UK.

New comment by bpoyner in "Handling secrets (somewhat) securely in shells"

bpoyner — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:27:00 +0000

Not directly related to this, but you can use systemd-creds to store secrets at rest. It can even work with a tpm2 chip or a key file to encrypt the secrets.

And then use these tips for when you want to interactively reference those stored secrets.

New comment by bpoyner in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

bpoyner — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:20:59 +0000

No half life 3 released?

New comment by bpoyner in "Installing and using HP-UX 9"

bpoyner — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 13:12:58 +0000

I agree that LVM in HP-UX was far ahead of Linux back in the day. To be fair some of those advanced features in HP-UX LVM required an additional license (eg: mirroring required Enterprise Operating Environment). I haven't touched HP-UX in like 10 years however.

New comment by bpoyner in "XSLT RIP"

bpoyner — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 12:49:50 +0000

Chuckling at the disclaimer 'No AI made by a human.' I doubt many web devs could tell you that because so many use AI now. I was speaking with a web dev this summer and he told me AI made him at least twice as productive. It's an arms race to the bottom imo.

New comment by bpoyner in "Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy"

bpoyner — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:08:34 +0000

Sad you have to come to the bottom of the comment section to find any criticism of DHH. I wouldn't do business with the guy, nor use his OS.

New comment by bpoyner in "1981 Sony Trinitron KV-3000R: The Most Luxurious Trinitron [video]"

bpoyner — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 11:51:00 +0000

To drive home how luxurious this was, 1981 was the start of a recession that lead to 10% unemployment, the highest since the end of World War II, and here are people buying a TV that would be $35,000 in today's money.

New comment by bpoyner in "US embassy wants 'every social media username of past five years' for new visas"

bpoyner — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:35:35 +0000

I hope everyone is reading through and noticing this is for F, M and J visas, which are all education related visas. Not that I love that either, but it doesn't apply to every visitor.

New comment by bpoyner in "US embassy wants 'every social media username of past five years' for new visas"

bpoyner — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:20:27 +0000

Bolivia also has a reciprocity visa charge of $160 for US citizens. Many years ago we were very close to the Bolivian border but the visa cost for a day trip just didn't make it worth it.

New comment by bpoyner in "In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio"

bpoyner — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 11:33:06 +0000

This is great and I believe it. But saying your game would be loaded "after a few minutes" might be true for a small game. I had the Commodore 1541 floppy drive while my friend had the Commodore Datasette. The speed difference between these were huge. The floppy drive was around 300 bytes per second while the tape drive was around 50 bytes per second (3KB/minute). We would literally go outside to play while waiting on the tape drive.

New comment by bpoyner in "Why fastDOOM is fast"

bpoyner — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 12:29:14 +0000

That definitely brought back memories. Around '92, being a poor college student I took out a loan from my credit union for about $2,000 to buy a 486 DX2-50. For you younger people, that's about $4,000+ in today's money for a pretty basic computer. I dual booted DOS and Linux on that bad boy.

New comment by bpoyner in "The XB-70 (2019)"

bpoyner — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 12:43:35 +0000

The have a XB-70 at the Wright-Patterson USAF Museum in Dayton. I was blown away looking at the engines. Highly recommended museum if you're into aviation, it's huge so give yourself plenty of time.

New comment by bpoyner in "Gold Is Worth More in New York"

bpoyner — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 13:46:36 +0000

Huh, interesting. They claim to have $11B of gold but at market rates it's closer to $450B.

New comment by bpoyner in "Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more"

bpoyner — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 16:35:41 +0000

Along these lines, 'Mc' and 'Mac' mean 'son of' in Scottish and Irish surnames.

New comment by bpoyner in "Bluesky now has 30 million users"

bpoyner — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 12:45:11 +0000

You mean the social network that keeps showing my wife dick pics even though she turned off adult content? That social network? Pass.