Hacker News: iefbr14

New comment by iefbr14 in "Ask HN: Favourite Assembly Instructions?"

iefbr14 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:18:09 +0000

BR 14 (IBM assembler)

Because it has a utility named after it. Hence my name.

New comment by iefbr14 in "Last love: a romance in a care home (2023)"

iefbr14 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:47:52 +0000

The title immediately made me think of the September Song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWc8g6-N7cE

New comment by iefbr14 in "Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?"

iefbr14 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 11:10:29 +0000

FWIW, when I used windows (up to 7), I always used Notetab.

New comment by iefbr14 in "Why I'll Never Drive a Modern Car Again [video]"

iefbr14 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 18:53:33 +0000

I wish it was only cars, but unfortunately this decay in-the-name-of-progress is in everything nowadays.

New comment by iefbr14 in "The Engineer who invented the Mars Rover Suspension in his garage [video]"

iefbr14 — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 22:35:34 +0000

Very good documentary about Donald Bickler made by his son.

New comment by iefbr14 in "The Olivetti Company"

iefbr14 — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:21:28 +0000

Also about olivetti: Olivetti & the Italian Computer: What Could Have Been. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfMxcrN90PE

New comment by iefbr14 in "The first new compass since 1936"

iefbr14 — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 22:47:08 +0000

In the demo there is a cut in the video where the needle abrubtly stops. The cut is visible because the lighting is slightly different.

New comment by iefbr14 in "Could an electric blanket save you £4k this winter?"

iefbr14 — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 10:26:05 +0000

The damage from a frozen water line in your house can be a lot more than $4000.

We had them when I was still a kid in the sixties and I did not like it at all. Jumping in a warm bed is nice but leaving it on during the night makes you wake up all sweaty in the middle of the night. Even on the lowest setting.

New comment by iefbr14 in "$5 whale listening hydrophone making workshop"

iefbr14 — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 10:59:09 +0000

Nice, however the mentioned github link ( https://github.com/loganwilliams/passive-acoustic-listening ) does not exist (anymore?).

New comment by iefbr14 in "Take a walking tour of the Gothenburg Radio Museum"

iefbr14 — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 23:40:16 +0000

Nice, but the left-right movement goes opposite to my intuition.

New comment by iefbr14 in "52 Year old data tape could contain Unix history"

iefbr14 — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 18:26:32 +0000

For nostalgia sake. It's from the computing period when there was a great influx of good idea's but still a huge shortage in memory and storage.

New comment by iefbr14 in "The Windows 7 Renaissance? StatCounter shows surge in usage"

iefbr14 — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 17:18:00 +0000

It is probably just a rise in the number of automated scrapers/bots that use a windows 7-like user agent.

New comment by iefbr14 in "Marine park threatens to euthanize 30 whales if Canada does not provide funding"

iefbr14 — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 23:01:29 +0000

Why don't they just release them into the ocean?

New comment by iefbr14 in "Bat: Cat with syntax highlighting"

iefbr14 — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:16:50 +0000

cat | highlight --force -O xterm256 | less -SRNI

works fine for me.

New comment by iefbr14 in "Just let me select text"

iefbr14 — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 17:40:39 +0000

On my system I use a little script coupled to a key that lets you select a graphical area with text in it and it converts it into real text that is placed in the clipboard:

#!/usr/bin/bash

maim -us | tesseract --dpi 145 -l eng - - | xsel -bi

[[ "$(xsel -ob)" ]] || (notify-send "No text found"; ohno)

You wil have to install maim, tesseract and xsel for it to work.

Edit: you can leave out the ohno which is just an audible alarm on my system

New comment by iefbr14 in "UK banks still run software code written more than 60 years ago"

iefbr14 — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:08:59 +0000

I've been a consultant for a long time and in that role you were hired only to fix old systems that the resident staff refused to maintain, because not sexy. I didn't mind, it paid good money and I have seen a lot of companies from the inside which is also a plus. The dev were not below average, they just weren't interested.

New comment by iefbr14 in "UK banks still run software code written more than 60 years ago"

iefbr14 — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 10:48:37 +0000

> It found that 50% of banks admitted to relying on software that only one or two staff members, who are at or near retirement age, understand.

This is an organizational problem or just plain neglect. I learned cobol back in the seventies in one day. I used it for 40 years and I never had any problems understanding programs written by others.

New comment by iefbr14 in "I've Reviewed 100T-Shirts. Here Are the Best Ones [video]"

iefbr14 — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 16:46:09 +0000

If you like to pay $100 for a t-shirt that looks the same as a $10 one from the Aldi, this is a video for you :)

New comment by iefbr14 in "A big Asteroid will Fly Close To the Earth Sep 18th [video][16 mins]"

iefbr14 — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 08:48:40 +0000

It will pass at 2.2 times the lunar distance, no worries. Source: https://www.spaceweather.com/

New comment by iefbr14 in "Ask HN: You are given a PETAFLOP of compute, what do you do with it?"

iefbr14 — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 11:54:19 +0000

Without any exploitation costs, mining bitcoins would be my first choice.