Hacker News: cout

New comment by cout in "Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989"

cout — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:01:31 +0000

I think 5x86 had more to do with marketing than anything else, because the Pentium had already been on the market for a while when the Am5x86 came out.

New comment by cout in "What happened to GEM?"

cout — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:48:23 +0000

What was buggy about DOS 4? I ran it for years until I switched to DR DOS 5.

New comment by cout in "What happened to GEM?"

cout — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:47:28 +0000

I used dosshell on IBM PC DOS 4.0. I don't remember that feature. Was it added in 5?

New comment by cout in "What happened to GEM?"

cout — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:44:34 +0000

I knew viewmax had static windows, but I always wondered why. Now I know.

New comment by cout in "200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop"

cout — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:54:25 +0000

I have run x11 in 16-color and 256-color mode, but it was not fun. The palette would get swapped when changing windows, which was quite disorienting. Hardware that could do 16-bit color was common by the late 90s.

New comment by cout in "Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids"

cout — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 02:05:20 +0000

I recall it playing the same ad repeatedly during commercial breaks. I think i once watched the same ad 5 times in a row.

Later I subscribed to paramount+ via amazon, and said goodbye to the glitches.

New comment by cout in "Some Epstein file redactions are being undone"

cout — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 11:03:56 +0000

I remember noticing that a teacher in high school had used white-out to hide the marks for the correct multiple choice answer on final exam practice questions before copying them. Then she literally cut-and-pasted questions from the practice questions for the final. I did mediocre on the essay, but got the highest score in the class on the multiple choice questions, because I could see little black dots where the white out was used.

New comment by cout in "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges"

cout — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:35:49 +0000

Camping is a viable strategy in many Quake levels, and it is problematic to the point that many servers will kill you if you stay in one place for too long.

New comment by cout in "Writing a DOS Clone in 2019"

cout — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 11:14:15 +0000

Yes, Ralf Brown. I guess I'm getting old.

New comment by cout in "Writing a DOS Clone in 2019"

cout — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 14:38:18 +0000

If I were to write an OS for a system of that era, I think I would target a game console. Compatibility is a rabbit hole (as I discovered when writing a JIT for Ruby). If you don't have to worry about whether other software runs, there is a lot of room for creativity.

New comment by cout in "Writing a DOS Clone in 2019"

cout — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 14:33:02 +0000

Risk was minimized with the use of segmented memory. A bad pointer would generally only clobber something in the same (data) segment of memory. But there were no segfaults; a program crash means a reboot, which is why so many people optimized config.sys abs autoexec.bat for fast boot.

Come to think of it, maybe things aren't so different today -- if something goes wrong in your container/vm, many teams just wipe it and start from a clean snapshot

New comment by cout in "Writing a DOS Clone in 2019"

cout — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 14:28:26 +0000

I remember that book! I wanted to get a copy but made do with the DOS Programmer's Reference, 3rd ed., which was also very good since beej's interrupt list wasn't available yet or I didn't know about it.

New comment by cout in "GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code"

cout — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 11:05:26 +0000

KDE got better some ways, but I would really like to be able to write an applet without learning QML and everything that goes with it. The learning curve feels higher than when I wrote my first Android app.

New comment by cout in "GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code"

cout — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 11:02:04 +0000

There was a schism anyway (wayland vs mir). I was excited about both, though I never understood the difference between the two.

New comment by cout in "Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad"

cout — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 20:31:10 +0000

That's why I wrote this: https://github.com/cout/windowfocus

I bind Alt+Shift+H to run "windowfocus left", which figures out which window is "to the left" based on some heuristics such as the direction between the center of the active window and the other windows on the screen. Since it works uses the center of the window, it works with overlapping windows (but intentionally excludes windows that are occluded).

I've used it in both xfce and kde (though not recently).

New comment by cout in "Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1"

cout — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 20:21:31 +0000

Same here. Did yours have a fan or was it fanless?

New comment by cout in "EDE: Small and Fast Desktop Environment (2014)"

cout — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 20:17:24 +0000

How does it compare to using icewm or fvwm95?

New comment by cout in "Jim Weirich's Short License"

cout — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:17:29 +0000

"You are granted permission to read, copy, modify, redistribute this software or derivatives of this software."

While Jim's more popular projects were usually MIT-licensed, Jim was once on a quest to find the world's shortest open source license. As far as I can tell, this is the final form of that license, dating to 2009.

Jim Weirich's Short License

cout — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:17:29 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/jimweirich/sudoku

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887524

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by cout in "WriterdeckOS"

cout — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 01:55:02 +0000

This is the main reason I keep my PS/2 around with WordPerfect 5.1. Sure I can go browse the web with Minuet, or I used to before https everywhere, but that means saving and exiting WP. And 30+ years later I'm still waiting for a word processor with a decent Reveal Codes.