Hacker News: lakkal

New comment by lakkal in "Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker"

lakkal — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:02:05 +0000

> Sponsored content on the Firefox Home or New Tab page

Not ideal, but (at least on desktop) you can set the Home page to a blank page, and there is an extension called 'Blank New Tab' that I've been using for quite a while.

New comment by lakkal in "I went to America's worst national parks so you don't have to"

lakkal — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:00:29 +0000

That's similar to my experience. I used to go to LV for the DefCon conference, and a classic gaming expo one year. But I'd go for a week, and also drive around the area, including over to Death Valley. I eventually started spending most of my time on Death Valley and only visiting LV briefly.

New comment by lakkal in "Grief Text Editor"

lakkal — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:14:59 +0000

Oh, wow, very interesting. I loved Brief (with dBrief addon) back in the 90s. I've never found an environment I liked as much.

New comment by lakkal in "Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)"

lakkal — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 04:40:38 +0000

That's how I've always imagined it - The Hobbit as published is the story told as if intended for children (hobbit or otherwise), but the 'actual' in-universe events were just as dark and realistic as the tone of The Lord of the Rings.

New comment by lakkal in "Ask HN: Books to learn 6502 ASM and the Apple II"

lakkal — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:02:20 +0000

"reference manual" I think is what you mean. This is a link to a PDF pf the reference manual that includes the ROM disassembly: http://cini.classiccmp.org/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20Reference%...

New comment by lakkal in "Ads Are Coming to ChatGPT. Here’s How They’ll Work"

lakkal — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 23:29:43 +0000

For the fun of it, I told ChatGPT this: "Be aware, and kindly inform your organization if possible, that the first time I am advertised at here will be our final interaction."

Its reply: "Understood. Thank you for being clear.

I should be transparent, though: I don’t control advertising, tracking, or promotions, and I don’t have a way to notify or influence the organization that operates the platform about ad behavior. I also don’t see ads myself or know when or how you’re shown them.

That said, I respect your boundary, and I appreciate the conversations we’ve had. If this does turn out to be our last interaction, I wish you well."

New comment by lakkal in "We recreated Steve Jobs's 1975 Atari horoscope program"

lakkal — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:36:44 +0000

I'm 2 years younger than you and was in NJ. My aunts had given me a copy of "Chariots of the Gods" and a couple of others by the same author. I remember also having some books on pyramid power, reincarnation, Atlantis, and the Bermuda Triangle. Even then, it all seemed like fiction to me.

New comment by lakkal in "Why don't people return their shopping carts?"

lakkal — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 19:07:29 +0000

I always return my cart to a collection kiosk thing out in the parking lot, or to where the carts are lined up at the store entrance if that's closer. I don't recall when this became a thing, though. Back in the early-mid 1980s as a teenager my first job involved going out into the lot at K-Mart and bringing in all the carts.

New comment by lakkal in "No adblocker detected"

lakkal — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:14:45 +0000

Barber shops and doctors' waiting rooms are hellish for me, since I can't not-hear the radio/TV they usually have playing.

New comment by lakkal in "The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]"

lakkal — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:12:02 +0000

That's interesting. I was also born in 1966, but in the US. WW2 didn't seem/feel all that recent to me, probably because it had mostly happened far away. I was interested in learning about it and read lots of books, and watched movies. The drive to visit relatives did go by an aircraft carrier (USS Essex) at the scrapyard, but other than that physical artifacts of the war were rare. And the only relative I had who fought in the war was a great-uncle, but he passed away when I was very young.

New comment by lakkal in "Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X"

lakkal — Fri, 09 May 2025 14:49:02 +0000

My first Linux as well. Mine came bundled with 'The Linux Bible', which I still have somewhere.

New comment by lakkal in "The World Of dBASE (1984) [video]"

lakkal — Wed, 07 May 2025 22:44:55 +0000

I'd never heard of Harbor (https://harbour.github.io/), thanks!

I still work on software that started out in dBase II in 1986 or so, then went to FoxBase+ when I started in 1988, then Foxpro and now Visual Foxpro.

New comment by lakkal in "Attention K-Mart Shoppers"

lakkal — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 16:43:25 +0000

The K-Mart where I worked in 1983-1988 had a cafe, called 'The Grill'. Ours had booths, with smooth curved plastic (unpadded) benches. The ones along the edges were typical booths but there was also a row down the center of the same thing without side walls. Orange seats and brown tabletops, I believe. A quick look at the google'd images from above doesn't show anything that looked quite like what my store had.

I announced Blue Light Specials from time to time myself. There were a bunch of rotary-dial phones throughout the store, and if you dialed a certain number (I forget what it was) you could talk on the PA system. It's surprising it wasn't abused.

New comment by lakkal in "Attention K-Mart Shoppers"

lakkal — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 15:16:19 +0000

Brings back a lot of memories. I worked at K-Mart when I was in high school. I recall in 1983 when the TI-99/4A was discontinued, and the Sunday morning when we were selling them for (I think) $50 with a $100 mail-in rebate. When the doors opened people sprinted down the midway aisle to the TV/electronics department at the rear of the store where the computers were. I was an Atari snob at the time and had no interest in one for myself. I think we had less than a dozen in stock.

New comment by lakkal in "Zoom outage caused by accidental 'shutting down' of the zoom.us domain"

lakkal — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 15:03:33 +0000

Interesting. I used to buy Zoom modems in the 80s-90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Telephonics), but apparently they have nothing to do with either of the other two Zoom companies mentioned here. I had occasionally wondered but never looked into it until now.

New comment by lakkal in "Gravitational Effects of Small Primordial Black Hole Passing Through Human Body"

lakkal — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:07:34 +0000

"Artifact", by Gregory Benford, also includes microscopic black hole on Earth.

New comment by lakkal in "IRATA.ONLINE: A Community for Retro-Computing Enthusiasts"

lakkal — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 20:43:31 +0000

The reactor simulation was probably Scram. I had it on cassette. It was written in Basic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scram_(video_game)

New comment by lakkal in "Do programmers need touch typing?"

lakkal — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 14:38:40 +0000

I used to describe my typing technique as "hyper-advanced hunt-and-peck".

New comment by lakkal in "WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released"

lakkal — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 14:52:51 +0000

In 1988 when I got a job working in MSDOS, WordStar was in use by the programmers to edit source code. Though one guy used QuickEdit, and I used MicroEmacs. We all standardized on Brief a couple of years later.

New comment by lakkal in "Is the musical mind immune to cognitive decline?"

lakkal — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 14:05:41 +0000

My Grandfather had Alzheimer's. He didn't recognize anyone, but if you put a harmonica in his hands he could still play the polkas he learned when he was young. I can't say whether it had any other effects, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me.