Hacker News: kabdib

New comment by kabdib in "Should QA exist?"

kabdib — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:59:31 +0000

I miss my Q/A partner. He was a engineer who gave me feedback on designs and code, helped debug, and I could run the tests he wrote.

It's terrifying without that support. The beancounter level mgt does not Get It that it's cheaper to have this kind of support now than much later in the product cycle.

New comment by kabdib in "Desk for people who work at home with a cat"

kabdib — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:29:51 +0000

Lap-insistent cat made it impossible to use a keyboard. I finally bought a desk-height cat "tree" (maybe a shrub...) and put it beside my chair. He'll move to it after some scratching, and he's happier because he can actually nap.

New comment by kabdib in "DeployTarot.com – Tarot card reading for deployments"

kabdib — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:26:23 +0000

I intend to :-)

New comment by kabdib in "An update on Steam / GOG changes for OpenTTD"

kabdib — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:16:03 +0000

Thanks, I was honestly curious. I knew about Infogrames, did not know about the holding company.

New comment by kabdib in "“Collaboration” is bullshit"

kabdib — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:42:46 +0000

"The reward for winning is the opportunity to play again"

New comment by kabdib in "An update on Steam / GOG changes for OpenTTD"

kabdib — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:25:46 +0000

I really wonder who "Atari" is these days . . .

New comment by kabdib in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

kabdib — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:32:52 +0000

Computing hardware that isn't rad-hard is going to have a bad time without a handy atmosphere for shielding.

And hardware that is happy in high-radiation environments is not going to be fast.

New comment by kabdib in "Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction"

kabdib — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 01:20:17 +0000

> incompetency

"corruption"

New comment by kabdib in "Windows 11's Patch Tuesday nightmare gets worse"

kabdib — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 02:17:05 +0000

I had a QA engineer who gave me feedback on designs, great code reviews, and who wrote tests that I could also run.

It was a partnership. I miss it.

New comment by kabdib in "Ethiopian volcano erupts for first time in nearly 12k years of records"

kabdib — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 06:52:57 +0000

I was hoping for a secret society of volcano watchers, handing down carefully guarded records from generation to generation . . .

("There's nothing written in here, Dad")

New comment by kabdib in "India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app"

kabdib — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 01:11:34 +0000

> 4. Verify Device Genuineness: Confirm if a phone (new or used) is authentic before purchase.

    DisplayDialog("Yup, perfectly genuine, trust me!");

:-)

New comment by kabdib in "PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage"

kabdib — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 21:25:08 +0000

Old enough here to remember Intel entering the DRAM business :-)

New comment by kabdib in "The R47: A new physical RPN calculator"

kabdib — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 17:54:07 +0000

I use an HP-16 (the SwissMicros version, my originals are in boxes) and a 35s pretty much every day (these days, I'm writing firmware).

New comment by kabdib in "The first interstellar software update: The hack that saved Voyager 1 [video]"

kabdib — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 09:57:32 +0000

Henry S F Cooper wrote a wonderful account of debugging OS race condition on the Magellan (Venus) orbiter in The Evening Star

New comment by kabdib in "Building the heap: racking 30 petabytes of hard drives for pretraining"

kabdib — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 16:55:13 +0000

I've built and maintained similar setups (10PB range). Honestly, you just shove disks into it, and when they fail you replace them. You need folks around to handle things like controller / infrastructure failure, but hopefully you're paying them to do other stuff, too.

New comment by kabdib in "Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place"

kabdib — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 15:46:00 +0000

my dad was an ecologist in the 70s, and did a lot of early climate change stuff (getting ground truth for LandSat, etc.)

that's always been a fun conversation

New comment by kabdib in "Easy Forth (2015)"

kabdib — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 18:20:42 +0000

i understood how to use IF/ELSE/THEN in FORTH. my "revelation" was figuring out how to do the code generation for it. i was in high school :-)

i definitely prefer assembly to FORTH. i have direct and rather terrible experience with this after watching a few people try to ship a cartridge video game in FORTH

New comment by kabdib in "Easy Forth (2015)"

kabdib — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 18:59:09 +0000

> My problem is that I cannot see how control flow works in Forth, e.g. a simple if-then-else.

figuring this out for my own FORTH interpreter was a moment i still remember, nearly 50 years later. quite a revelation

New comment by kabdib in "Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Microprocessor – Version 1.1"

kabdib — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 19:36:41 +0000

in 1978, emacs was a possibility

but i'm gonna guess SOS or TECO, if they were running a bog standard PDP-10 OS from DEC

New comment by kabdib in "The Synology End Game"

kabdib — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 17:32:20 +0000

i have maybe $15K in Synology gear. it's getting old and should be replaced with something with better efficiency

the replacement will NOT be from Synology