Hacker News: jakedata

New comment by jakedata in "DisplayMate"

jakedata — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 01:37:43 +0000

That site is old enough to be Slashdotted.

New comment by jakedata in "Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]"

jakedata — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:00:45 +0000

Minor nitpick - the Bernoulli 90 MB removable disk was released in 1991. The Bernoulli 44 MB was late 80s. I liked them a lot better than the SyQuest drives with their hard platters which seemed much more failure prone. I still have a stack of 90 and 150 MB disks and a couple 150 MB drives. They were considerably faster than the internal 20 MB ESDI drives in the IBM PS/2 systems I backed up. I saved a stack of the classic IBM keyboards when we decommissioned all that stuff. Still using them too.

New comment by jakedata in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"

jakedata — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:12:21 +0000

The most satisfying part of splitting wood is doing it in temperatures well below freezing. The wood is crystalline in hardness and really does tend to split as it does in this over-optimistic simulation. "Split your own wood and it will warm you twice".

CSB: I had no idea my uncle was unaffected by poison ivy. He invited me over to harvest some dead ash trees on his property. I was destroyed for a month by rashes and he didn't even know the wood was covered in urushiol.

New comment by jakedata in "JLink JTAG Access on the Pinecil"

jakedata — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:57:58 +0000

20v everywhere plus I made up a high power DC power cord with a barrel connector. My company’s marketing department has really nice USB-C power bricks emblazoned with our logo. I also invested in a biggish Anker battery with full USB-PD support.

New comment by jakedata in "JLink JTAG Access on the Pinecil"

jakedata — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:35:43 +0000

I bought a Pinecil so I could run it off a battery. I really came to appreciate the excellent temperature control and rapid heating, and use it instead of my soldering station for jobs away from the bench.

I have felt absolutely no need to touch the firmware. I try to forget that it is more powerful than my first three personal computers combined. Plug in, turn on, get hot. It meets my needs and exceeded my expectations. I suppose I could run a website from it if I wanted to make a point but as long as it doesn't require wifi and phone home to verify the license and leak my biometric data I expect to use it until I wear it out.

New comment by jakedata in "Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus"

jakedata — Sat, 16 May 2026 11:52:50 +0000

Causing a 15 minute outage campuswide is not clever at all. A DOS attack was not the goal and it drew unwanted attention. If I was responding to this outage there would have been consequences - not for doing it, but for getting caught. Perhaps a 200 KB/s rate limit on every device associated with the user for escalating timeout periods if the unclever behavior remained attributable.

New comment by jakedata in "Dell confirms its SupportAssist software causes Windows BSOD crashes"

jakedata — Fri, 15 May 2026 01:35:01 +0000

We pushed out a policy to ban it forever after the disruption it caused. Caused again I mean... Huge time waster.

New comment by jakedata in "Doctors Just Staged the Quietest Coup in American History"

jakedata — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:33:02 +0000

https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-172/iss...

It brings to mind the parable of the drowning man or "what do you want from me, I sent you two boats and a helicopter".

New comment by jakedata in "Ask HN: Who wants to be fired? (May 2026)"

jakedata — Sat, 02 May 2026 01:21:37 +0000

Paying an expensive senior (older) employee to quietly and happily go away without raising a fuss may have saved money in the long term. I am sure they did not offer the same deal to everyone.

New comment by jakedata in "Ask HN: Who wants to be fired? (May 2026)"

jakedata — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:18:27 +0000

I'm clever but too industrious. Clever and lazy seems to pay better.

New comment by jakedata in "Ask HN: Who wants to be fired? (May 2026)"

jakedata — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:23:25 +0000

My dad was offered a buyout when he was around my current age. It included 10 years seniority added to his pension and health insurance until Medicare kicked in. He never looked back.

Sadly, nobody is willing to pay me to go away.

New comment by jakedata in "Using the internet like it's 1999"

jakedata — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 22:52:04 +0000

m.fark.com looks pretty good on my phone.

New comment by jakedata in "Using the internet like it's 1999"

jakedata — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:55:55 +0000

Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions.

Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!

New comment by jakedata in "At long last, InfoWars is ours"

jakedata — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:49:32 +0000

"Tu Stultus Es"

"Drugs Win Drug War"

"History Sighs, Repeats Itself"

and of course...

"SICKOS"

New comment by jakedata in "Hospital Held Woman for Months Against Her Will. SCOTUS to decide if she can sue"

jakedata — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 01:42:28 +0000

Notes of the Justina Pelletier case here. I am still horrified by what happened to her and her family.

New comment by jakedata in "Flock Flocked up: How a license plate camera misread unraveled one man's life"

jakedata — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:31:32 +0000

^f settlement

$35,000 for being attacked by a police dog, hospitalized and jailed for hours. Nope. I'd ride that to the supreme court. He is lucky he wasn't shot for a 'misread'.

New comment by jakedata in "Giant barocaloric cooling effect offers a new route to refrigeration"

jakedata — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:31:17 +0000

To get a feel for this effect, activate an instant ice pack. Mixing ammonium nitrate with water is an endothermic reaction, instantly making the pack cool down. Being able to reverse a reaction like this simply by applying pressure is fascinating.

New comment by jakedata in "Downsides to US-Canadian dual citizenship for US resident?"

jakedata — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 10:17:15 +0000

My US-born child qualifies for US-Canadian dual citizenship under Citizenship Act Bill C-3. I can see several upsides to having a Canadian passport but what are the potential downsides for a US citizen and resident that does not intend to relocate?

Downsides to US-Canadian dual citizenship for US resident?

jakedata — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 10:17:15 +0000

Article URL: https://immigration.ca/claiming-canadian-citizenship-by-descent-under-canadas-new-citizenship-act-bill-c-3/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973210

Points: 3

# Comments: 3

New comment by jakedata in "Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down"

jakedata — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:15:22 +0000

There was a Windows 2000 bug that would allow the computer to be crashed via a malformed IrDA packet. Of course someone crafted a Palm Pilot app to zonk all the vulnerable PCs in the vicinity. It worked on servers as well. Endless fun for a little while.