Hacker News: e808

New comment by e808 in "Making"

e808 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:20:52 +0000

This is definitely something I have been mulling as I 'made' several software projects that I have been tossing around in my head over my lifetime via vibe-coding recently that would have taken me 10x to 100x the time to a MVP, with AI, i can push it way beyond the MVP and enchance and enrich with features I may not have considered without the almost immediate MVP production.

What is the end-product value? I definitely have found value for myself since its things that I considered for a while for myself. Others may appreciate the end product. But is the value of the end product the 'original idea'? or the comprehensive prompt to produce it again? the number of tokens it burned to produce the end product? The number hours it took me to work on it to get the end product? (debugging, enchancing, user interface, design)?

Answers I dont have, but questions I have been mulling while immensely enjoying being able to produce random ideas I have had in me head for decades fairly quickly.

New comment by e808 in "StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game"

e808 — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 02:39:07 +0000

Fossil watches actually released a palm-based watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_Wrist_PDA nobody could out-nerd me with that watch that lasted only a few hours per charge.

New comment by e808 in "We Are Being Sludged"

e808 — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 02:59:41 +0000

I agree whole heartedly. My aging father went through a process of trying to call in a repair/replacement on a oven on a extended warranty, and the level of run around and hoops he had to take to get them to process and actually perform the service was incredible, things like having to pull out the oven and take a pic of the serial number and send it via email to several addresses, pictures of the receipt, contract, etc. Its a good thing he kept good records. Eventually after several weeks of back and forth and 3 failed repair attempts, they sent him a check for the full amount for replacement.

New comment by e808 in "Compute's Gazette Magazine Returns After 35 Yrs, Will Focus on Retro Computing"

e808 — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 23:51:25 +0000

Compute! had a fork? of a magazine specifically for Commodore Computers called 'Compute! Gazette' https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette I spent many of days in my youth typing in the pages of code they included at the end of every issue.

New comment by e808 in "PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights"

e808 — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 22:49:14 +0000

Oh that 'free' 3g was amazing! I was able to hobble through gmail through the browser, and even wrote a kindle-friendly Zork website so one could play text games on it allowing you to choose from a bunch of zmachine roms. Had some traction getting mentioned on a few news websites.

New comment by e808 in "Amazon Fire Tablets and other gear will reportedly switch away from Android"

e808 — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 23:21:22 +0000

This reeks of attempting to close the garden further. Whatever happened to that boot/hack that gave cli to ipad that was mentioned a few years ago.

New comment by e808 in "Internet in a Box"

e808 — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 00:32:07 +0000

The few instances I travelled in remote areas with little to no Internet, and moreover no over the air TV reception, I always mulled how a simple 1K-2k setup with a mini PC running plex and a 10-20TB of disk space could provide an plex TV media library (movies, tv, audio) for a small neighborhood. Throw in Ubooquity for books and audiobooks, you can provide a massive library of media entertainment and education to the area. (of course, copyrights be damned) also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

New comment by e808 in "Saying “sup” with `net send`"

e808 — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 20:16:47 +0000

I recall in the late 80s on vt100's accessing BITNET allowed you to 'net send'-like to other BITNET nodes around the country. I used to randomly try to contact other users at other random educational institutions after using the 'finger' equivalent to remote BITNET sites. I can only imagine how my messaging probably messed up their terminal session screens and just end-user confusion ensuing.

Another 'write' unix shenanigans was the ability to send control sequences, so one could send a 'terminal reset' sequence to any user online a terminal room using a dumb terminal (wyse, vt100 etc) and it would quickly reset the terminal and log them off. One could even send a long sequence of control strings to force a crude ascii animation, then reset terminal if you wish. (not me of course)

New comment by e808 in "My secret life as an 11-year-old BBS sysop"

e808 — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 20:53:53 +0000

Lora would be an interesting text-based communication method. Although closed sourced, its dirt china cheap.

New comment by e808 in "An AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj ŽIžek"

e808 — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 21:25:49 +0000

This seems like a step closer to the 'Her' movie AI entity (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) , or more closely, the scene where she converses with a Alan Watts, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exe7yup2Yu0 where in the movie did something that this inifiniteconversation has done in terms of feeding in a deceased philosophers works and voice to create an AI representation of the person.