Hacker News: jtotheh

New comment by jtotheh in "Dilbert creator Scott Adams doesn't expect to live much longer"

jtotheh — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:53:35 +0000

One of many creative people whose work I love and who have some questionable aspects. I'm sorry he's suffering and dying young (IMO). The Dilbert strip was genius.

New comment by jtotheh in "Birth of 86-DOS"

jtotheh — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 21:07:42 +0000

https://web.archive.org/web/20160503170006/http://www.paters... this may be a later-in-life snapshot of Tim Paterson's work as of 2016 which is very impressive. He has/had a blog you can see here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180711012545/http://dosmandriv... (entry is from 2011). I would put a lot of credence into his account of the days of 86-DOS, the IBM PC and so on.

New comment by jtotheh in "Birth of 86-DOS"

jtotheh — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 20:38:07 +0000

It's interesting...M$ is very sleazy in this, especially the way it turned out. Tim Paterson was clearly a great programmer. The really interesting person to me is Gary Kildall though, who I think invented a lot of the underpinnings of doing things with "microcomputers" and seems to have been a really great guy. Unfortunately, "business" is not about being nice (or having the best product). Gates has been a minor obsession of mine over the years.....I'd like to see him make good on all the promises he's made to give away his wealth. There's a book on him I think is interesting called "The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire". I mean he's smart, smarter than me, but I don't think he's as smart as he thinks he is, or necessarily even doing that much good in the world. Some good, but a lot of trying to micromanage things he doesn't know much about.

New comment by jtotheh in "Starlink "Support"?"

jtotheh — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 10:52:31 +0000

There is a clear view of the sky, no obstructions. The phone app showed that the satellite receiver had a good connection, ping percentages, etc. It was just "restricted" because the software had decided this was not a valid location for this account. Even though we changed the account to a "ROAM" account. A day later, they still haven't even responded on the chat, except an automatic "we're sorry we haven't called yet" text.

Starlink "Support"?

jtotheh — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 17:39:20 +0000

I just spent a day trying to get a starlink installation to work. I could verify that it was talking to the satellite from the "statistics", but it found the present location unacceptable and was in "restricted" mode = useless. So I tried to resolve it through the app, the website, etc. I changed the account to "ROAM" type so it shouldn't have mattered where I was. Their "support" consisted of an autoreply to a ticket, no way to get a human, even a chatbot. We just replaced it with a T-Mobile 5G device. T-Mobile was a pleasure to deal with. I'm just wondering if others have also had bad experiences with Starlink "support". I assume they just figure the money they save by not providiing it is more than the business they lose????

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44848461

Points: 1

# Comments: 4

New comment by jtotheh in "Unix Workstations – The Computer Collection"

jtotheh — Sun, 25 May 2025 22:49:21 +0000

I do this (use a mini for hosting time machine backups). I have them on external drives, I have two and switch between them weekly, keeping the other one at a friend's house.

New comment by jtotheh in "I'm manually transcribing the AltairBASIC source, ten lines a day starting today"

jtotheh — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 23:12:03 +0000

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-bill-gates-problem-reckonin...

New comment by jtotheh in "[dead]"

jtotheh — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 17:50:52 +0000

14 years of age seems like a pretty low cutoff, also......

New comment by jtotheh in "Trump admin deports migrants even as judge orders removals stopped"

jtotheh — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 17:49:30 +0000

IANAL. I am very concerned about this matter. from the document you so helpfully provided: "the President proclaimed that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA, are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”

So I think on its face they are claiming they are apprehending NON-"lawful permanent residents" - i.e. NON green card holders. I think the reality, though, is that even if you ARE a green card holder, the way this is being carried out - based on the video of Mahmoud Khalil's "arrest" - you may find yourself having your head shaved in a prison in El Salvador, with no way to make your case.

Re Mahmoud Khalil- he IS a "lawful permanent resident" and I thought "habeas corpus" was thought to be an issue within 24 hours, much more time has now elapsed. ????

New comment by jtotheh in "It's not a crime if we do it with an app"

jtotheh — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 17:16:00 +0000

re uber and taxis: I don't use uber, but I just had occasion to price a ride to the airport (Dulles) from home (Bethesda MD) for Lyft and a taxi, and the taxi was a lot cheaper. We got there just fine.

New comment by jtotheh in "Creators Admit Unix, C Hoax"

jtotheh — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 19:18:43 +0000

use the reader mode of your browser.

New comment by jtotheh in "Ask HN: Who is on your donations list this year?"

jtotheh — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 21:51:11 +0000

https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org https://www.unrwa.org https://wck.org https://www.wearebgc.org

New comment by jtotheh in "For the Love of God, Make Your Own Website"

jtotheh — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 21:59:30 +0000

I did, a little while ago. It's sort of an exercise in Luddism. Been posting things that are personal, political, etc. It's just very simple HMTL, not even any dynamic HTML, so no comments, etc. I just started doing it and have kept it up for a bit. It's at https://www.vin-dit.org/

New comment by jtotheh in "The decline of the working musician"

jtotheh — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 16:41:37 +0000

remember, before there was recorded music all music that could be heard was performed live. The technology has evolved over time. Once people were buying and using recorded music, there was a tendency for less creative participation. Some things have emerged in the face of this. For instance, karaoke, where people can participate live with the music. Also, things that DJs did. Scratching literally turns a record, the embodiment of mass media music, into a musical instrument being wielded by someone, often in a small group setting. When the raw material is traditional instruments, people can express themselves in certain ways. DJs remix, add breaks to, scratch over, rap over, and otherwise express themselves with the records and turntables as the raw material.

New comment by jtotheh in "LibLISA – Instruction Discovery and Analysis on x86-64"

jtotheh — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 21:55:47 +0000

This may be a really dumb question, but is that much of the behavior of an x86_64 CPU variable and undefined? Until recently I thought the chipmakers provided full information (recently I found an article about people investigating the undocumented innards of the 286, IIRC). This seems like a pretty shaky foundation for software.

New comment by jtotheh in "Asi HN: Best database you've ever used?"

jtotheh — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 22:02:50 +0000

I've used DB2, Sybase, Postgres, mysql, Oracle, and a little SQL Server. Long ago I worked in a Sybase shop and management said we must move to Oracle. Sybase had a nice programming language that made things easier and clearer than Oracle, all i remember is that it involved creating temp tables and then querying against them. I think Sybase is no longer very popular but SQL Server was based on it and may have similar stuff. Postgres is pretty ubiquitous and it is pretty good IMHO. The DBAs at a recent job all said SQL Server is better but there is the $/windows server stuff you have to do to use it.

New comment by jtotheh in "COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it"

jtotheh — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 16:26:32 +0000

I worked for a while as a contractor for the US Dept. of Education Student Loan system. It was z/OS with DB2 and most new business logic was done in this weird language "Gen" https://www.broadcom.com/products/mainframe/application-deve... . Gen can supposedly "generate" java and other stuff but they used it to generate COBOL for the mainframe. You could debug the Gen code on the 3270 emulator, rather than trying to deal with the generated COBOL. There were a small number of people (like 6) who were handling that code. The data and I guess some of the code went back to like 1980 at least. There was so much legacy code, I doubt they've changed platforms. I was supposed to be more a Java guy but I did a little Gen. Mainframe is very alien to me. The people that knew it well could really crank on it, though. I joined when they were converting an MS ASP front end to a Java one. So we wrote Java that users interacted with via the web and that made calls to Gen (really, to cobol). In retrospect there was a lot wrong with that operation... One interesting problem that came up once was that the mainframe didn't sort things the same as Java. It turned to be caused by EBCDIC vs UTF.

New comment by jtotheh in "Ask HN: What software written in assembly language really impresses you?"

jtotheh — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 21:40:14 +0000

I think APL on System/360 was implemented in assembly. That's pretty wild.

New comment by jtotheh in "Ask HN: Windows Backup Solution?"

jtotheh — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 21:59:20 +0000

Thanks for all the replies! I'm going to give Arq a try. EASEUS was unable to open a Bitlocker-encrypted external drive from its restore media(USB). I guess I shouldn't have expected it to be able to. I have not lost any data, I was just testing my restore capability. I will see if Arq works for me. (and I am reformatting the external drive, will hopefully have encryption of the backup on the unencrypted drive).

Ask HN: Windows Backup Solution?

jtotheh — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 12:27:49 +0000

I am struggling to find a working windows backup solution. I'd like to backup my entire Win11 install to a big USB drive, have the drive be encrypted (or the backup encrypted) and have it be a simple tool. I've had some issues with VEAM's free tool and now EASEUS backup. On Macs I use Time Machine and Linux/BSD I use borg, and I'd really like something viable for windows.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41686853

Points: 10

# Comments: 15