Hacker News: jll29

New comment by jll29 in "How to save the UK taxpayer £130M a year (by switching to Linux)"

jll29 — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:27:36 +0000

Linux has come a long way, both in terms of matured installation processes as well as friendlier Desktop and GUI applications.

In Germany, some cities have migrated to Linux successfully.

Linux TCO is pretty good if you take a long-term view, because it is simpler and more predictable than some of its alternatives, and the organization can develop what it needs when it wants instead of following one single external corporation's roadmap.

New comment by jll29 in "Is there a temp phone number like temp email?"

jll29 — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 14:41:47 +0000

https://tokly.app/?utm_campaign=international-calls-search-t...

New comment by jll29 in "Tiny Little Office"

jll29 — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 08:57:35 +0000

Definitely there is a need, as you say, but the Internet lacks a cross-site (DB-like) transaction capability. Hotel bookings and flight leg bookings are interdependent, and you will want to lock them in (transaction "COMMIT") once the complete path has been validated as available; if, in contrast, one flight leg or one hotel night are unavailable, the whole plan path may have to be cancelled.

Such a tool would be enormously helpful even for individuals traveling (e.g. business people or scientists visiting customers or trade fairs), which is important as this massively increases market size/potential user base scale.

New comment by jll29 in "Arena Allocators in C"

jll29 — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:36:02 +0000

See Sections 5+6 in https://drh.github.io/cii/toc.html

New comment by jll29 in "3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit"

jll29 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 21:16:56 +0000

This does not have to be an "either-or": you can be sovereign and still interoperate with others, while retaining your own infrastructre to fall back on or in parallel.

New comment by jll29 in "Knuth reward check"

jll29 — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 17:58:56 +0000

I also got one for catching DEK out for claiming "Alan Turing broke the Enigma".

That claim goes to the Polish cryptoanalyst Marian Rejewski instead, of course (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski); what Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers did was automate the breaking, which was important because it had to be done again every day (due to the many combinations of configurations of the Enigma).

New comment by jll29 in "I tried to move my notes out of Emacs. I failed. Again"

jll29 — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 08:46:33 +0000

plain text:

- longevity

- portability

- ease of processing

- cannot "break"

- viewable and editable with anything

Any other way is only acceptable if it can export to plain text.

New comment by jll29 in "Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years"

jll29 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:42:35 +0000

It's a great idea, and the OP and donors are making a big difference. While I was a doctorate student, I supported a Romanian orphanage (run by Americans I never met except via email) with parcels of medicine and stationary (basic stuff e.g. anti-fever pills, coloring pens etc.). Since I never sent any cash, I was not worried about being scammed.

I've also been financially supporting three grassroots projects to help children in three places, namely Lomé, Togo, Caruaru, Brazil and Bhopal, India (via https://www.fkb-bza.de, sorry, Website in German only, a charity that has the advantage of being free of any overhead - thanks to people I personally know and trust that travel there regularly, paying for their own tickets).

Thought experiment (putting back the geek hat on): I wonder if the OP's activity could be made viral and scaled up across the continent:

While there are more donors do:

- for each African country

- pick a seed city c

- pick a seed student s from c

- assign donor d to s to fund s' education

When paying for s.o. education, receiving students pledge to pay it forward by becoming a donor once they get a job that permits to do so or to return to become a teacher for a while.

On top of that, students form or join an online community to support each other and get to know each other (peace is as important as education!).

New comment by jll29 in "Penguin Mail – open-source Rust email client for Linux with AI"

jll29 — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 10:49:08 +0000

Looking for something as simple as PINE but with a fast full-text and fielded search.

Should be TUI-based and for Linux + Mac.

New comment by jll29 in "JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025"

jll29 — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 18:34:23 +0000

I hope they have something great up their sleeve... would be a shame if that gem of a company got killed by AI.

New comment by jll29 in "A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal"

jll29 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:09:19 +0000

For completeness' sake, here's also a history of competitor REUTERS' terminal:

• https://www.thebaron.info/archives/technology/reuter-monitor...

• https://www.thebaron.info/archives/technology/reuters-techni...

New comment by jll29 in "A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal"

jll29 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:07:11 +0000

In finance, people who consider the cost of a Bloomberg terminal "expensive" are often considered "not serious" (small fish)... it has often been seen as a status symbol as well as a professional work tool.

New comment by jll29 in "A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal"

jll29 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:05:03 +0000

Not really. If you ran a restaurant instead, you may also have to buy a few thousand dollars worth of ingredients and pay thousands of dollars in salaries per year and renting a venue to make the revenue that you are making. Even a pizza delivery service may need a few thousand dollars a year for a car and its driver plus petrol, taxes, insurance. Relevant is not the cost of doing business, but the annual revenue and margins.

E.g. $32k cost of business to make $2bn revenue statistically approximates zero.

New comment by jll29 in "A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal"

jll29 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:58:30 +0000

Especially if you're the BOSS - you may have a terminal, but you may transact by telling your underlings what to do on your behalf.

New comment by jll29 in "A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal"

jll29 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:53:09 +0000

Also on the input side: for instance here is a cheat sheet for a small part of the available keyboard commands: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/documents/bloomberg-cheatsheet.pdf

New comment by jll29 in "A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal"

jll29 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:50:47 +0000

For instance, Bloomberg provide you with:

- real-time data on financial instrument prices;

- real-time news (own and syndicated);

- an email address (firstname.lastname@bloomberg.net) used to email and chat with other professionals on the Bloomberg network. This is like LinkedIn and WhatsApp combined for people in finance, and people can keep the address for two years after e.g. losing a job, so they can use the network to find a new role.

- analytical software: tools to calculate various KPIs to assess and analyze business opportunities.

- capability to transact: The BB terminal is not just an information system, it also permits you to buy and sell directly.

(My university has one BB terminal that MBA students can access and get training on.)

New comment by jll29 in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

jll29 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:41:44 +0000

https://www.einfachbacken.de/rezepte/flammkuchen-rezept-einf...

https://www.amazon.de/Federwei%C3%9Fer-selber-machen-einfach...

New comment by jll29 in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

jll29 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:38:59 +0000

They can heat the grapes and sell the juice, it's fantastic - I just got a 3 l canister of fresh grape juice to drink on the weekend (since it's harvest time for vineyards, fresh from its producer, no additives, no preservatives, not even filtered). The taste is unlike anything from this world - I'd compare it to liquid honey, which only goes to show what industrally processed stuff the shops are feeding us with.

New comment by jll29 in "Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)"

jll29 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:34:42 +0000

"Stratus ztC Endurance®

Stratus ztC Endurance extends fault tolerance to modern enterprise and operational environments with intelligent, predictive technology that prevents failures before they impact operations. Delivering up to *99.99999%* [my emphasis] availability, the platform combines proactive health monitoring, automated failover, redundancy, and simplified serviceability to keep applications continuously available and ensures that data stays protected.

Stratus ztC Endurance is ideal for organizations running mission-critical workloads that cannot tolerate downtime or data loss."

Source: https://www.penguinsolutions.com/en-us/solutions/fault-toler...

New comment by jll29 in "Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)"

jll29 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:32:34 +0000

Great story, thanks. I wish it said more about the architecture and also VOS.

Speaking of reliable beasts, I own(ed) a HP PA-RISC workstation that never crashed in six years, and it was even purchased refurbished (second hand, and educational rebate, and still the cost of a car in 1996 - but worth every penny).

I'd add "R.I.P. HP 9000 715/75" but of course she is STILL working now, twenty years later, and she is sitting right next to me (also got a second 715/100XC for spare parts in case on day they are needed).