Hacker News: dcminter

New comment by dcminter in "ASCII by Jason Scott"

dcminter — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:54:50 +0000

Ha! This is so delightful. I vaguely remember chipping in some paltry sum on some early plea for donations for this, and getting a random manual duplicate in the post as a perk. Since then I've occasionally wondered how it's going, but never quite got around to looking it up properly. Somehow ten years passed.

Amazing work.

New comment by dcminter in "The Power of a Free Popsicle (2018)"

dcminter — Thu, 14 May 2026 23:07:59 +0000

Yes, we stayed at one near ORF a few weeks ago. We thought the staff were weirdly enthusiastic about a not very good mass produced cookie actually. Might stay there again, but not because of the gimmick.

New comment by dcminter in "No "yes." Either "HELL YEAH " or "no.""

dcminter — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:47:32 +0000

I don't think this is a good principle to apply comprehensively. The "if you’re often over-committed or too scattered" qualifier is very important. Sometimes you need to get out of your comfort zone, which absolutely means saying a timid "yes" to something when you would much rather say "no."

New comment by dcminter in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

dcminter — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:08:49 +0000

Kafkaesque, a wire-protocol compatible Kafka mocking service.

https://github.com/dcminter/kafkaesque

Worth kicking the wheels if you're currently using embedded or dockerised Kafka in your tests.

New comment by dcminter in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"

dcminter — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:24:16 +0000

I look forward to today's Money Stuff!

New comment by dcminter in "Noctua releases official 3D CAD models for its cooling fans"

dcminter — Sat, 02 May 2026 15:37:59 +0000

I hoped as much! Delightful.

New comment by dcminter in "Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)"

dcminter — Sat, 02 May 2026 15:35:40 +0000

He's likely a good bit older than me then - I was about 9 when we got ours. I think "fancy calculator" was probably one of the best ways to use them given their limitations.

Their success was largely down to their very low price point (clever cost-shaving engineering) at a time when there was a huge untapped public interest in computers.

New comment by dcminter in "Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)"

dcminter — Sat, 02 May 2026 13:08:56 +0000

The ZX81 didn't have so much software around for it - what there was mostly came on tape, or was typed in¹ on the ghastly membrane keyboard, and what there was was very limited in capability (the default RAM size was one kilobyte (yes, just 1024 bytes, though typically you'd buy a "ram pack" upgrade to 16k). Then it was very rapidly superseded by the more capable ZX Spectrum machine. So odds are your Dad didn't patch software on the ZX81 because it was usually already highly optimised to squeeze it into the tiny space available.

What was very common on those devices was using the "poke" command in BASIC to change a handful of values, but while it was possible to change code in this way it was much more common to be changing the value of variables - things corresponding to "number of lives left" and the like. Not all that different.

Fairly quickly, though, the games were entirely in machine code and used fancy loaders (still from tape mostly) so you didn't get access to BASIC. This created a market for devices that let you get at a monitor program - the "Multiface" series of addons². They had at least three generations of that device, but the company slightly weirdly evolved into a music production company³ after that, which is kind of cool.

Er, ok, I'll stop now while I still can...

Edit: PS - you should ask him about it. Tell him another former ZX81 owner says "Hi" and that my fingers still ache from that keyboard. Although I sneer a bit at its capabilities, it kicked off an interest in computing that's still paying the bills 40 something years later...

----

¹ https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2000265/Book/Not_Only_...

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiface

³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_Robot

New comment by dcminter in "Ask.com has closed"

dcminter — Sat, 02 May 2026 11:51:47 +0000

Ask it for advice on learning to play the banjo...

Edit: ...or was it the ukulele?

New comment by dcminter in "Noctua releases official 3D CAD models for its cooling fans"

dcminter — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 05:37:40 +0000

> I'm a Noctua fan!

New comment by dcminter in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

dcminter — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 05:42:30 +0000

I'm a Linux guy who doesn't really like Macs but has intermittently been required to use them. On the whole I have a grudging respect for Apple (their hardware is peerless), but seeing one screen turn to "brushed steel" when the app on the other was put into full screen mode kind of blew my mind because "UI is worse than Windows" was not, at the time, a failure mode I believed the company was capable of.

New comment by dcminter in "It's cool to care (2025)"

dcminter — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 13:58:29 +0000

I like opera and classical music generally. Musicals too, although only ones written up to about 1950. I was unreasonably embarrassed about this as a kid because it wasn't "cool".

New comment by dcminter in "It's cool to care (2025)"

dcminter — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 13:55:39 +0000

The author says:

> I’d recommend you go to the show if you haven’t already, but that’s not really the point of this post.

So while I agree that it is good to contemplate why you like things, that wasn't the topic of the post at all.

The author quite explicitly say so.

New comment by dcminter in "It's cool to care (2025)"

dcminter — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 13:53:21 +0000

Yes. You should try liking things too instead of being dismissive of those who do. Kind of the author's point.

New comment by dcminter in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

dcminter — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:34:28 +0000

My terminal (terminator) does (2) and the "easy" scrollback on tmux messes up the ability to scroll with the mouse, at least with default settings. I just tried it in zellij and that doesn't. Since I'm only using a multiplexor for (3) and zellij does that too, I'm already inclined to switch.

I know I'd get used to them, but the key combos used by tmux seem very odd choices, even to someone who used to code on a real glass tty!

New comment by dcminter in "Show HN: Kafkaesque – a wire-compatible mock Kafka"

dcminter — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:35:12 +0000

If anyone's interested, there's a bit more about the intention behind this library here: https://paperstack.com/kafkaesque/

Show HN: Kafkaesque – a wire-compatible mock Kafka

dcminter — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:33:22 +0000

A Java library (and standalone tool) for mocking Apache Kafka dependencies in a realistic way.

By re-using the Apache Kafka client library datatypes, Kafkaesque is compatible with the Kafka TCP wire-protocol but without the startup overhead required to launch real Kafka brokers.

Those of you in Kafka integration test hell, we salute you! IYKYK

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739444

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by dcminter in "How to get better at guitar"

dcminter — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:01:55 +0000

Perhaps you're looking for this?

https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...

New comment by dcminter in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

dcminter — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:15:13 +0000

I think you're not appreciating how big space is. They're not going to be near any star for thousands of years - and near here is still very distant. If we're still around then, we'll probably be able to look after ourselves.

New comment by dcminter in "Desk for people who work at home with a cat"

dcminter — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:04:45 +0000

My wife, being a genius, has a decoy keyboard. Pretty effective, it usually has a cat sitting on it.