Hacker News: brightsize

New comment by brightsize in "Peter Thiel says he told Elon Musk not to give wealth to charity"

brightsize — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 20:38:03 +0000

The Straight White American Jesus podcast did a deep-dive on Thiel's thinking recently. It wasn't what I was expecting but then I hadn't previously been paying attention to him. Apparently he's all about tech-utopinism with himself as the King and no regard for the fate of his fellow non-tech-utopian human, as in his mind such people are just holding back human progress.

I haven't watched any of his Antichrist talks but I take it that he's not thinking of this entity in the Christian sense. Instead the Antichrist is a person with some amount of power who is trying to find solutions to mankind's problems using the tools of the old order, rather than through technology and its kings.

https://www.straightwhiteamericanjesus.com/episodes/brad-unf...

New comment by brightsize in "Cyberthreats to railroads loom as industry and TSA grow an uneasy partnership"

brightsize — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:56:16 +0000

If the U.S. ever goes to war with a major adversary, one of the first waves of cyberattacks will likely target infrastructure that rarely comes up in discussions about digital threats: railroads.

Cyberthreats to railroads loom as industry and TSA grow an uneasy partnership

brightsize — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:56:16 +0000

Article URL: https://therecord.media/railroad-cyberthreats-tsa-regulations

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41672889

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by brightsize in "Open Sourcing DOS 4"

brightsize — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 03:34:13 +0000

> I wrote TSR's that snatched cycles off the timer interrupt

We've all been there. How else could you get anything interesting done back in the day?

New comment by brightsize in "Silent Running: 1970s Environmental Fable Remains Depressingly All Too Relevant"

brightsize — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:16:05 +0000

Having grown up in New England in the era, I remember "acid rain" being a big concern too. The polluters fought to keep anything from being done about the problem, but decades later some steps were actually taken by the US government (and others) and apparently there's been a fair amount of success.

I agree, now that "corporations are people" in the US it's hard to imagine being able to successfully battle them and force large-scale, cross-industry environmental-health measures to be taken. That is, unless it so happens that such measures maximize short-term profits in some way.

New comment by brightsize in "The Eagle Obsession – Space: 1999 documentary"

brightsize — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 01:28:42 +0000

And more tape drives. But Space:1999's moon base still had a huge number of Blinkenlights and related gear that I have to believe was under an expensive IBM support contract. I wonder if the company found a way to get out of the contract? Some clause requiring the moon remain in its historic orbit maybe?

New comment by brightsize in "Useful Uses of cat"

brightsize — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 19:38:16 +0000

Here you go. This is the second time in the past few years that cat was used to process bikers in the NW WA wilderness. The first time was fatal. I used to live about 15min from where this incident occurred. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/cougar-attacks-cyc...

New comment by brightsize in "Genetic autopsies to unravel the mystery of sudden deaths"

brightsize — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 00:36:46 +0000

Not to suggest that the phenomena are necessarily related (though it wouldn't surprise me), there's also this:

>Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) is a fatal complication of epilepsy. It is defined as the sudden and unexpected, non-traumatic and non-drowning death of a person with epilepsy, without a toxicological or anatomical cause of death detected during the post-mortem examination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUDEP .

New comment by brightsize in "Full PGP Support in Skiff"

brightsize — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 23:11:00 +0000

>We’ve heard our users loud and clear - interoperable end to end encryption (E2EE) across email providers is critical for privacy and security online. We have taken this feedback to heart. We are proud to announce support for PGP encryption inside Skiff mail starting today for all users across all tiers, including Free.

Full PGP Support in Skiff

brightsize — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 23:11:00 +0000

Article URL: https://skiff.com/blog/full-pgp-support-in-skiff

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38689700

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

New comment by brightsize in "Possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record? (2018)"

brightsize — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 00:37:30 +0000

PBS Space Time just did an episode on this topic: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=vyEWLhOfLgQ

New comment by brightsize in "Google Groups ending support for Usenet"

brightsize — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 05:19:50 +0000

Use it again! Thunderbird has a built-in Usenet client and you can configure it to connect to any number of NNTP servers.

New comment by brightsize in "Google Groups ending support for Usenet"

brightsize — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 05:04:27 +0000

comp.lang.python is one of the busier (programming) groups as well.

New comment by brightsize in "Sellafield: Europe’s most toxic nuclear site"

brightsize — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 20:25:45 +0000

*Hanford.

New comment by brightsize in "Ask HN: What are you reading these days?"

brightsize — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 06:50:16 +0000

"Stop Time" - a 1967 memoir by Frank Conroy. [1]

Next up, "Inequality In An Age of Decline" by Paul Blumberg (1980) [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-Time

[2] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/paul-blumberg/i...

New comment by brightsize in "The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)"

brightsize — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 19:10:38 +0000

Spamgourmet (https://www.spamgourmet.com, https://github.com/spamgourmet/spamgourmet), free, has always worked well for me though these days I tend to just use the disposable addresses built in to Fastmail. Addy.io, (https://addy.io/), free/paid, is a newer offering with some nifty features like automatic PGP encryption.

New comment by brightsize in "People who can't give up paper"

brightsize — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 19:37:04 +0000

Re: hiking, your comment reminded me of this recent write-up in the Seattle Times. It's hard to imagine serious hikers hitting the trail in the PNW without at least one person in the party carrying the relevant Green Trails paper maps, but I suppose they exist.

https://www.seattletimes.com/life/outdoors/seattle-mapmaker-...

“Your devices aren’t big enough to show you the context at any level of detail that from our point of view would be useful,” he said, citing the possibility of needing to find an escape route in a wildfire. “If you unfold a map, you can see where you are and get a better handle on where you can go.”

Coburn’s stewardship also resulted in the durable quality of today’s Green Trails maps. Made of Polyart tearproof synthetic paper, with special ink to shade topographic relief, and printed at Capitol City Press in Olympia, these maps have a clear selling point: waterproof, solar-powered, no batteries required."

New comment by brightsize in "The male loneliness epidemic and how it affects fathers"

brightsize — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 02:16:31 +0000

> Masons. Where these do exist, they've been gender integrated.

Not true of the Regular Freemasons at any rate - "The attitude of most regular Anglo-American grand lodges remains that women Freemasons are not legitimate Masons" (Wikipedia).

edit:spelling

New comment by brightsize in "Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)"

brightsize — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 03:03:08 +0000

Similar: I was a kid in S. VT in the 60s/70s and everyone using the phone system used five-digit dialing. You were assigned a 254-xxxx or 257-xxxx number, but when dialing you only had to use the last five #s, as the "25" prefix was implicit. I think there was a bias on the part of the phone company for assigning 254- prefixes to residences and 257- ones to businesses, but I'm not sure how strict they were about it. I can't recall if using the full seven digits worked when calling within those two prefixes, but I think that it did. I don't remember anyone ever using alphabetic prefixes, which makes me wonder if they were perhaps used there before I was born or if it was a convention only in big cities (my town was ~10K, a bit under).

New comment by brightsize in "USENET rises again?"

brightsize — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 17:29:09 +0000

Eternal September, mentioned in the article, is good. Another that I know of is https://solani.org/ .