Hacker News: dlinder

New comment by dlinder in "The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million"

dlinder — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 17:34:54 +0000

Audit the Fed (cube)!

New comment by dlinder in "The UCSD p-System, Apple Pascal, and a dream of cross-platform compatibility"

dlinder — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 22:10:10 +0000

Around 1995, our high school "Pascal I" and "Pascal II" classes were taught in a forgotten Apple //e lab in the Math wing of the school. The PC and Mac labs were occupied by typing, word processing, and desktop publishing classes. I think every other kid in class groaned, but to a hamfest scrounger of PDPs, Vaxen, and weird UNIX workstations, UCSD p-System Pascal on Apple hardware was weirdly intriguing, the cherry on top being that the whole lab was served by a Corvus hard disk shared over, I think, an "Omninet" network. We'd all come in, turn on the lights, turn on the computers, and then have the lecture portion of class while this poor early NAS would serve Pascal to 20-odd machines simultaneously. I think we saved our work on floppy disks, though maybe that was a backup, as I think I recall turning in our work by saving to the Corvus? Even at the time, it all had a very "you are living the early experimental days" feeling to it.

New comment by dlinder in "Be careful with that thing, it's a confidential coffee maker"

dlinder — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 23:24:38 +0000

This brings to mind the legendary "property passes" from Commodore / Amiga. These were passes to remove property from the office, so if you brought in personal property, you'd need to get a property pass issued to remove it at the end of the day. Of course the security guy handing out the passes was clueless, so the engineers would get property passes for Boeing 747s, Cray X-MPs (just in case Commodore ever bought a cray, the lucky holder of the property pass would presumably be able to wheel it out the door), and so on. Dave Haynie records these stories in his "Deathbed Vigil", though the property pass story seems virtually unmentioned on the textual web, aside from an everything2 source.

The cypherpunk revolution (2016)

dlinder — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 17:44:15 +0000

Article URL: http://projects.csmonitor.com/cypherpunk

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16690952

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dlinder in "Buffett wins $1M decade-old bet that the S&P500 would outperform hedgefunds"

dlinder — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 17:25:59 +0000

You can also write to longbets@longnow.org - but we will have the registration open again shortly (within weeks).

Dan @ Long Now

X and NeWS history (long)

dlinder — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 22:30:21 +0000

Article URL: http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-September/010471.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15280268

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by dlinder in "Tell HN: WarGames (1983) is mind-blowing"

dlinder — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 19:23:17 +0000

WarGames and Real Genius were the regular weekly watch (on VHS!) between my brother and I growing up. What WarGames is to computer hacking, Real Genius is to hacking, pranks, and working hard / playing hard.

"It's yet another in a long series of diversions in an attempt to avoid responsibility."

Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell's Visionary 80s Tech Incubator

dlinder — Sun, 19 Feb 2017 00:35:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.fastcompany.com/3068135/retrology/the-untold-story-of-atari-founder-nolan-bushnells-visionary-1980s-tech-incubator

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13677519

Points: 70

# Comments: 1

New comment by dlinder in "Ask HN: Strange bug workarounds?"

dlinder — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 03:35:34 +0000

You sound like a kindred spirit. I have put hard drives in freezers to release stiction; I have baked motherboards in the oven to re-flow questionable solder. I wonder if anything in our kitchen is sacred! Sometimes I wish I had "MacGyvering goofy tech junk" as a full time job!

New comment by dlinder in "Ask HN: Strange bug workarounds?"

dlinder — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 22:54:02 +0000

I worked on a social news product and part of our look was to have an icon for every story - either an image pulled from the page, a user-uploaded image, or, in the case of Flash content (say, a video player), a screen capture.

We had it all up and running - loading the content, waiting for the player to initialize, taking the snapshot, generated sizes - on a windows machine when, one day, the request came in to migrate that machine to a VM. After the migration, things were fine - until we disconnected RDP. Snapshots were coming back at the right size, but totally white.

The eventual "solution" was a laptop in the engineering area RDP'ed into this VM to keep the snapshots from going white. It got unplugged one holiday weekend, earning it a red hand-sharpied sign - "PRODUCTION LAPTOP: DO NOT UNPLUG". It was unplugged again one fateful weekend, this time prompting a healthcheck to be written that looked for all-white images in its output.

That rig ran that way, I believe, until someone had the insight to make a second VM, this one RDP'ed into the first.

Turtles, all the way down!

Has BART's cutting-edge 1972 technology design come back to haunt it?

dlinder — Mon, 28 Mar 2016 17:36:24 +0000

Article URL: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_29687067/has-barts-cutting-edge-1972-technology-design-come.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11375783

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by dlinder in "Is Spoonrocket (YC S13) Dead?"

dlinder — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:39:06 +0000

http://www.berkeleyside.com/2016/03/14/exclusive-spoonrocket...

Is Spoonrocket (YC S13) Dead?

dlinder — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 20:37:00 +0000

Customer support offline, no menu yet for SF or East Bay, apparently closed all weekend... any news?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11285389

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

StyleSeat Buys Online Booking Site for Salons BeautyBooked

dlinder — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:42:32 +0000

Article URL: http://fortune.com/2016/01/19/styleseat-beautybooked/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10935250

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

SLS Qualification Booster Test at Orbital ATK

dlinder — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 22:11:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn6OvHofcoo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9187762

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dlinder in "Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]"

dlinder — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:39:44 +0000

132-51 CONS CONUS FSR Support hourly rate. CONUS rates will be billed for Services performed outside the continental U.S. unless in a warzone. Normal business hours are defined as an 8-hour work day (rate is 15% more outside of normal business hours). $ 146.60

132-51 OCONS OCONUS FSR Support hourly rate. OCONUS rates will be billed for Services performed in a warzone. Normal business hours are defined as a 12-hour work day (rate is 15% more outside of normal business hours). $ 195.47

New comment by dlinder in "Osmo"

dlinder — Thu, 22 May 2014 17:55:15 +0000

Hey Don!

I was about to post a link to your new gig when I spotted that you had beaten me to it!

New comment by dlinder in "Urine in Portland reservoir: How dangerous is pee in drinking water?"

dlinder — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 16:59:10 +0000

It too would be diluted down to 4 parts per billion and not matter.

New comment by dlinder in "US tech giants knew of NSA data collection, agency's top lawyer insists"

dlinder — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 20:43:07 +0000

iirc "upstream" refers to collection out on the Internet - the "fuck those guys" program is MUSCULAR, which is the tapping of private interdatacenter links.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstream_collection vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR

Pelosi: You don't fight [the intel community] witho a price… they come after you.

dlinder — Thu, 13 Mar 2014 16:38:04 +0000

Article URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-more-involved-in-cia-senate-dispute-reports-say/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7392904

Points: 1

# Comments: 0