Hacker News: cobbaut

New comment by cobbaut in "US FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control by 2028"

cobbaut — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 11:20:03 +0000

My Commodore Amiga 500 floppies from the late 1980ies still work. I went nostalgic a couple months ago, booted about eight of those floppies and all worked. They were probably kept dry the hole time, but I did move several times, they were in boxes in cellars and in garages.

New comment by cobbaut in "I wish tech companies knew more about me"

cobbaut — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 08:57:18 +0000

Similar here: I occasionally listen to music on Youtube late in the evening, and always watch a math or physics video in the morning. Simple, but it appears impossible for Youtube.

New comment by cobbaut in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

cobbaut — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:38:06 +0000

>> falsify election results

> This is something that is extremely hard to accomplish in the US.

Yet I seem to remember Al Gore winning an election, still Bush became president. Right? EDIT: link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

New comment by cobbaut in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

cobbaut — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:32:19 +0000

Plus they are building coal plants as backups for when other sources fail.

New comment by cobbaut in "Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)"

cobbaut — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:00:52 +0000

My doctor said "you have to earn your sleep". I had the same problem until:

- two pieces of fruit per day

- two portions of vegetables per day

- half an hour of outside sunshine per day

- twice per week exercise until you sweat

- no sleep during the day

- get out of bed every morning around the same time

- no processed food!

New comment by cobbaut in "What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix? (2014)"

cobbaut — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:20:38 +0000

I have recovered files several times after fsck on a failed partition. I may have a 75 percent success rate with this... did not keep statistics obviously.

Though it could be less, cause I also remember recovering files with foremost on a dd copy of a disk.

New comment by cobbaut in "What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix? (2014)"

cobbaut — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:14:52 +0000

It's at the root level, no user came near that back then so it was kinda hidden.

New comment by cobbaut in "What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix? (2014)"

cobbaut — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:11:08 +0000

> In a couple of decades running Linux installations of all flavours, I have never seen anything in lost+found!

I saw it often. Running fsck on a crashed/failed partition usually does put some files in there. Maybe I kept using old hardware too long...

New comment by cobbaut in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

cobbaut — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:04:57 +0000

NT 4.0 did not crash that often if you rebooted it weekly (not uncommon at the time). And it had a simpler menu.

But I agree about W2000 being peak Windows.

New comment by cobbaut in "A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking"

cobbaut — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:32:02 +0000

> I'm not in that city.

Same, it claims Brussels, but I'm in Antwerp. It also got my screen resolution wrong.

New comment by cobbaut in "Programming Still Sucks"

cobbaut — Thu, 07 May 2026 06:13:13 +0000

What I remember mostly from working in that era, was that managers let engineers make the technical decisions.

New comment by cobbaut in "New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming"

cobbaut — Sat, 02 May 2026 08:57:18 +0000

Thinking of problems before falling asleep does sometimes help me in finding solutions in a dream. Though I may still be half awake when doing this.

New comment by cobbaut in "Warp is now open-source"

cobbaut — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 07:56:18 +0000

>Oh, not OS/2 Warp.

That would be awesome!

New comment by cobbaut in "Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it"

cobbaut — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:43:49 +0000

>The assembly seats in Brussels, so the decision comes from Brussels (geographically).

Except that half the time the assembly seats in Strasbourg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_of_the_European_Parliamen...

New comment by cobbaut in "EFF is leaving X"

cobbaut — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:23:11 +0000

My first thought was "so they go commandline now?". Because X for me is still "the graphical interface".

New comment by cobbaut in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

cobbaut — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 08:56:29 +0000

> You may be thinking of Hong Kong

No, I was thinking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_Between_Great_Brita...

The way I understood this treaty was that the global powers in 1906 (Russia and Great Britain) accepted Tibet as part of China without the need for a war.

In the context of your comment, you say the US and Russia attack sovereign countries and you mention Tibet and Taiwan in the same sentence. Sorry but Taiwan has not been invaded by China, and Tibet was at the time internationally agreed as being part of China (not that I agree with that). Not the same ballpark sorry.

New comment by cobbaut in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

cobbaut — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 13:57:57 +0000

> China with Tibet and Taiwan

What do you mean? China has bought Tibet from the British. And what have they done with Taiwan?

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

cobbaut — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:31:07 +0000

https://cobbaut.be personal homepage since 1997

New comment by cobbaut in "Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?"

cobbaut — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 07:20:06 +0000

European from Antwerp here. I only use two of those, and see more and more of my friends migrate away from some, albeit slowly.

New comment by cobbaut in "Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support"

cobbaut — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 07:42:31 +0000

MS Outlook was a heaven for viruses.

Lotus (even before Notes) had cloud-like features for mail and worked on Windows and OS/2.