Hacker News: dn3500

New comment by dn3500 in "The first packet sent via RFC1149 avian carrier is up for auction at Christie's"

dn3500 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:37:46 +0000

The internet was 19 years old in 2001, and it's 44 now. To me, turning off the NSF backbone in 1995 marks the end of the early internet, because that's when commercial traffic was allowed everywhere with no restrictions. So I'm with you, but others will have different opinions.

New comment by dn3500 in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

dn3500 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:19:19 +0000

US news outlets are often blocked where I live too, but not this one. Here's what the articles says:

There are a variety of forces driving the decline in wine sales. Baby boomers are aging out of the market while young people are drinking less alcohol due to health and financial concerns. Wine faces competition from craft beer, liquor and canned cocktails as well as cannabis.

“The kids just aren’t drinking as much,” Berryhill said. “And it’s not just wine, it’s whiskey and beer and everything. And then you’ve also got the competition with all the seltzers.”

Tariffs have reduced exports, particularly to Canada, which was the largest foreign buyer of American wine.

New comment by dn3500 in "Previously unheard recordings of John Coltrane, captured by Frank Tiberi"

dn3500 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 11:55:43 +0000

I am not familiar with this machine but I owned several other Japanese miniature tape recorders in the 1960s. These germanium transistors are very temperature sensitive, and the thermistor was almost certainly there to compensate for this and keep the bias point steady in normal operation as the temperature varied. And yes a single amplifier was used in all these machines.

New comment by dn3500 in "Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown"

dn3500 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:44:48 +0000

OP put in 60 amp service. I can't imagine why you would need that much, even with the minisplit. My flat is three times the size of his office and has an electric water heater and washing machine and it has 32 amp service.

New comment by dn3500 in "How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story"

dn3500 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:58:50 +0000

In 2000 you could go to the library and look up the number in the Polk directory. There was one for each borough. There was an alphabetical section, a section by street address, and a section by phone number. You can still go down to the library and use them, for example if you want to know what was at 867 Madison Ave in 1926, or who had the phone number PENnsylvania 5000.

New comment by dn3500 in "Germany Records Historic 12B KWh Solar Feed-In in July 2026"

dn3500 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:28:08 +0000

Also about 16 GW. They don't say what the installed capacity is but average midday generation is 40 GW for usage of 40% which is not bad.

New comment by dn3500 in "The tiny holdout building in the middle of Macy’s is back in view"

dn3500 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 08:57:40 +0000

They have an odd definition of "middle".

New comment by dn3500 in "Turning a dumb AC unit smart (without losing my security deposit)"

dn3500 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 08:40:10 +0000

It uses R-22 so it's pretty old, but probably not 1950s. Maybe 1970s. R-22 was phased out starting in the 1980s, and banned in 2010 (that's in Europe, maybe later in US).

When I lived in the US I tried to get a minisplit and they wanted $4000 for a medium size unit! The same one where I live now is $400 installed.

New comment by dn3500 in "Why malloc always does more than I asked for?"

dn3500 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 08:32:22 +0000

Your test is backwards. I would write it like this:

  if (size > a->limit - a->cursor) return NULL;

New comment by dn3500 in "Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s"

dn3500 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 20:04:57 +0000

Serious and maybe stupid question, also note I don't live in the US. Is this really needed? If you put a scoring pad and a couple pencils in each lane would your customers say "what is this shit", turn around and walk out?

New comment by dn3500 in "Late Bronze Age Collapse"

dn3500 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:49:30 +0000

After the one where humans first harnessed water power, the Dam Age, and when we started wearing clothes, the Garb Age.

New comment by dn3500 in "Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool"

dn3500 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:48:35 +0000

What a useless article! I found some actual information here:

https://www.techspot.com/news/97995-data-center-uses-waste-h...

The "data center" produces about 28 kW of heat and the swimming pool has cut its gas bill by 62%. They are saving US$24,000 per year.

New comment by dn3500 in "Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland"

dn3500 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:50:50 +0000

It's obviously not 180 kWp/m. If it was I could put 1 meter of panels on my roof and power my house and 200 of my neighbors.

I didn't try to calculate the amount of energy it produces in a year, just the length of panels required to power a high speed train when the sun is shining. 18,000 watts / 100 meters is 180 watts per meter. At 180 watts per meter, 50 km gives you 9 MW, which is about what a high speed train consumes at cruise.

New comment by dn3500 in "Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland"

dn3500 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:00:17 +0000

They're getting 180 watts per meter, so it would take 50 km of panels to power one high speed train. And that's when the sun is shining. Double this at least if you want to store the energy and run trains in the evening.

New comment by dn3500 in "Gun Mistakes in Fiction Writing: Handgun Edition"

dn3500 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:00:49 +0000

In the US Navy at least, you don't "fire" a torpedo, you "shoot" it. The lore is that "fire" has a very specific, very urgent meaning on a warship and you don't use that word unless there actually is a fire.

New comment by dn3500 in "Gun Mistakes in Fiction Writing: Handgun Edition"

dn3500 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:49:09 +0000

I'm not a handgun expert at all but I've caught a few of these, like the guy who racked the slide on his revolver. The author who really impressed me, although not with his handgun knowledge, was Tom Clancy. I was in the anti-submarine warfare business in the 1970s and some of what he wrote in Red October I only knew from classified sources.

New comment by dn3500 in "A retrospective of my time on the internet"

dn3500 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:45:19 +0000

You could be right. I haven't had one since 2018. ChatGPT says 70% of residential customers worldwide do still have routable addresses so I may have spoken too much from my own experience. I'm sure it depends on where you are, and I don't live in the US, which has a large number of IPv4 addresses per capita. Also IPv6 changes things.

New comment by dn3500 in "A retrospective of my time on the internet"

dn3500 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:17:30 +0000

I was there when we turned on the Internet in 1981. At the time I would have defined the Internet as the set of all endpoints reachable using IPv4. By that definition, none of us today are even on the Internet. You can't send a SYN packet and have it arrive at my house, and I can't send a SYN packet to your house. That means we are entirely dependent on the big guys like Facebook if we want to communicate with each other. Yes, there are some protocols like bittorrent that get around this, but that's the default situation today.

New comment by dn3500 in "The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment"

dn3500 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:31:12 +0000

I don't understand the kernel problem. Why did he feel he had to rebuild the kernel weekly? When the amdgpu stopped working why couldn't he just go back to the last working kernel?

New comment by dn3500 in "A few interesting modern pixel fonts"

dn3500 — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:01:29 +0000

Square pixels were certainly not an innovation of the Macintosh. The earliest raster scan workstation I'm aware of is the Alto, released in 1973. It and the ones that came after it like the Star and Dorado all had square pixels. So did the early 1980s engineering workstations like Apollo and Sun, which also came out before Macintosh.