Hacker News: drivers99

New comment by drivers99 in "How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet"

drivers99 — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 22:05:11 +0000

You gave me the idea to buy something I was thinking of ordering from Amazon (a Time Timer) and see how it compares. The timer I got is $24.95 on their site, 15% off welcome discount (-$3.74), +$10.00 shipping, and "orders ship within 3-5 business days." On Amazon they have the one I ordered for $19.95 list price minus 15% = $16.96 and I could have it within 1 hour for $9.99 (lol... I've never seen that option before) or tomorrow for free, although I do have Prime which is why that's an option. I do like to buy a lot of things directly from their original sellers or a specialized store (Loop earplugs, or speed cubes from TheCubicle, electronics from adafruit or jameco or digikey, etc...) but it shows you a big difference in service level.

New comment by drivers99 in "Apple Pass Designer"

drivers99 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 19:10:18 +0000

To add to that, since we're thinking the same thing: Do you have rotation lock turned on? If you turn it off, and turn an app like Safari sideways, does it turn the wrong way?

New comment by drivers99 in "Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines"

drivers99 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:40:33 +0000

I just recently saw that story in a book. What was it... Oh yes, it was in "Situated" by Angela Duckworth (of "Grit" fame). That's the gist of the book. Frog and Toad changed their situation rather than the downstream thoughts or behaviors (through willpower). Make it harder to do (friction up) what you don't want to do and make it easier (friction down) to do what you want to do.

New comment by drivers99 in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

drivers99 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:54:15 +0000

I recently ran across an edition of the Selfish Gene which adds two chapters from The Extended Phenotype that are supposed to fix/clarify some things. I haven't read any of the 3 books mentioned in this thread, but it makes me curious if there's any connection between the criticism and the updates.

New comment by drivers99 in "Alan Kay's answer to “Did the ENIAC have a BIOS”?"

drivers99 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:42:44 +0000

DonHopkins comment is marked dead but I’m glad I had show dead on because it’s right in the intersection of what I’m interested in, especially the forth on pdp-7 stuff. (The intersection is my interest in explanations of implementing forth from scratch and about the pdp-7 specifically.)

New comment by drivers99 in "HERMES radio enables voice and data communication over vast distances"

drivers99 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:10:14 +0000

Part 97 defines broadcasting as "Transmissions intended for reception by the general public, either direct or relayed."

Then there's a section that says:

> An amateur station shall not engage in any form of broadcasting, nor may an amateur station transmit one-way communications except as specifically provided in these rules

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-97#p-97.113(b)

Since "broadcasting" is prohibited (except for the exceptions), there is a distinction. There actually are a number of exceptions that allow different kinds of one-way transmissions though.

New comment by drivers99 in "Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]"

drivers99 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:18:30 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac-b6dRMSwY&t=34s

New comment by drivers99 in "Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)"

drivers99 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:52:12 +0000

Didn't realize you could zoom in until I saw this. It looks really cool when you zoom in and it replaces the boxes with actual building shapes.

New comment by drivers99 in "GPT-6 Astra"

drivers99 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:47:18 +0000

It looks like I misinterpreted the bottom of this page[0] where it says:

> A seaside scene: a white pelican in a blue helmet pedals a red bicycle along the beach, one wing gripping the handlebar, its big orange beak and pouch out front, webbed feet on the pedals, and a fish tucked in the front basket for later.

I thought that was the prompt from how it was worded. I guess it's part of the response.

[0] https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... scroll to the bottom

New comment by drivers99 in "GPT-6 Astra"

drivers99 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 23:19:50 +0000

It's a different prompt. It says his prompt was "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" but one I saw earlier this week specifically talked about the blue helmet and fish in a basket.

New comment by drivers99 in "GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter"

drivers99 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 23:16:32 +0000

That's over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49570643

New comment by drivers99 in "Making the Internet Boring"

drivers99 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 18:51:15 +0000

> Turn off your YouTube watch history

Just to add to that, it's a two step process: disable saving new history, and then clear all history

I estimate my watch time dropped by half per day the first time I did that. Then I started curating my subscriptions better, and watching from that.

New comment by drivers99 in "Everything I own, owned"

drivers99 — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 01:23:58 +0000

It's kind of funny, but AI can also use an oscilloscope. My friend vibe coded a software synth on a Raspberry Pi Pico. When he realized his oscilloscope had a network interface, he had Claude figure out how to connect to it over the network and analyze the actual audio output.

New comment by drivers99 in "Tumble Forth – from assembly to OS with C compiler (2023)"

drivers99 — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:36:06 +0000

Oh yeah, this is right up my alley. I've been thinking about making a Forth on bare metal for a while (made a Forth interpreter in C last summer, and a tiny amount of testing stack manipulation in hand-assembled machine language on a C64U), and the thought I (coincidentally) had moments before seeing this link was about making a boot sector on some floppies I just got for my 8088 IBM PC. I know that will only work for the Real Mode part but it might be fun to start there anyway. Edit: I knew about CollapseOS but didn’t realize this had been around too.

New comment by drivers99 in "Recycle – Floppydisks"

drivers99 — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:28:23 +0000

update for the record: I did get them within a few days

New comment by drivers99 in "I own 28,000 books – here's what I've learned"

drivers99 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 23:25:18 +0000

What makes you say that? I didn't get that feeling at all, and found it pretty interesting as well.

New comment by drivers99 in "Ask HN: What physical publication do you still buy?"

drivers99 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:24:11 +0000

2600 Magazine

New comment by drivers99 in "The Indo-European Family Tree"

drivers99 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:11:42 +0000

pretty interesting etymology connecting Dios, Jupiter, Zeus, etc. (Sky Father)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us

New comment by drivers99 in "Come for ENIAC, Stay for UNIVAC and Skeduflo"

drivers99 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:54:39 +0000

If it looked like the one on the left then it was probably an ENIAC decade ring counter. It could store 1 digit from 0 to 9 and could selectively count pulses to increment the value, with carry to the next one. The 10 tubes on the right (out of 36) were the actual flip flops of the counter.

New comment by drivers99 in "Come for ENIAC, Stay for UNIVAC and Skeduflo"

drivers99 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:27:00 +0000

I recently read a fascinating book I found in the library by an engineer who worked under Mauchly and Eckert and talks about working on ENIAC, BINAC, EDVAC, LARC, and UNIVAC. The book is "From Dits to Bits" by Herman Lukoff.