Hacker News: michaelsmanley

New comment by michaelsmanley in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

michaelsmanley — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:20:55 +0000

Bisson once lived in the town just across the river from where I grew up and was an inspiration for me as a nerdy kid from the sticks who just wanted to write science fiction. His novels Talking Man, Fire on the Mountain, Voyage to the Red Planet, and Pirates of the Universe (don't be fooled by those last two titles; he was always undermining old sci-fi tropes) were among my favorites. This story is one of his goofier ones. I wasn't as big a fan of his short stories as they tended towards the jokey style of absurdism, but a favorite of mine is his "Bears Discover Fire."

New comment by michaelsmanley in "George Goble has died"

michaelsmanley — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:43:32 +0000

Oh, so sad to read. Everyone knew him when I was at Purdue. A rare mind. RIP, ghg.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Oedipus is about the act of figuring out what Oedipus is about"

michaelsmanley — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:34:36 +0000

"All art is ultimately about the creation of art," was the kind of reductive thinking that made me drop any pretense of continuing in academia after I finished my MFA. While I thought that was a marginally better stance than taken by the folks who insisted that all "texts" were fungible (which led to one student, when we were assigned to write a review of a short fiction collection published in the last year, instead wrote a scholarly paper covering his thesis chair's years-old volume of television criticism, which the professor accepted as equivalent), the whole discussion put me off literature for years and I scuttled back to programming, where at least when things didn't make sense there was some chance of fixing them.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "The Nature of the Beast: Charles Le Brun's Human-Animal Hybrids (1806)"

michaelsmanley — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 21:05:57 +0000

Oddly enough, I happen to be reading this book right now (though my edition is titled "An Island Called Moreau"). I had just finished re-reading Wells and Silvia Moreno Garcia's "The Daughter of Doctor Moreau" (a re-telling of the story set in colonial Mexico), and thought I'd try Aldiss's version. I am still trying to decide if he wrote it as a satire or not.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Mod. 5140 - IBM's First Laptop Computer"

michaelsmanley — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 14:41:28 +0000

Yeah, when I say "nice" about the screen, it is all relative. Mine was nice compared to the original screen on the Model 1.

There are very few pieces of laptop/notebook hardware that I really enjoyed. The 5140 was one of them. I doubt I'd enjoy it now, but 40 years ago I found it just lovely.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Mod. 5140 - IBM's First Laptop Computer"

michaelsmanley — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 13:41:18 +0000

That was almost 40 years ago, so little I recall other than it was an 8088 variant in there, the peripheral bus was unique to that machine and the only documentation was in the tech manuals (as opposed to the hardware reference book I had for everything else), and I got lucky and the lab had requisitioned a Model 2, so the screen was nice and they'd gotten the full 640Kb RAM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_Convertible has all the details on that machine you could want.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Mod. 5140 - IBM's First Laptop Computer"

michaelsmanley — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 02:49:55 +0000

When I was a co-op student employee at IBM in the late 80s, I was given a desk in what was otherwise a storage room piled with stuff that had been used and then set aside. One box contained a 5140 convertible laptop with one of each peripheral "slice" -- printer, modem, expansion ports -- and the full set of technical manuals.

I was allowed to take that beast home with me. I learned so much tinkering with that machine. Eventually, I sold the whole set at a ham fest and I have regretted it often.

Nice to see an appreciation of it, though I would never have looked at it as alligator-like.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "I hacked Monster Energy"

michaelsmanley — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 17:55:11 +0000

That made me laugh when I read it, too.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Processing: Mattie Lubchansky Wrote and Illustrated Simplicity"

michaelsmanley — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 12:21:57 +0000

Thanks for pointing this interview out. I've really enjoyed Mattie Lubchansky's comics. I first ran into her work on The Nib, which was as close to a successor to the zine World War 3 Illustrated as I've yet seen. I miss that site.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Why do military personnel wear watches upside down?"

michaelsmanley — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 19:55:54 +0000

Only a single data point, but my father, who was Vietnam-era USMC in "special weapons," wore his wristwatches this way all his life. He never really said why other than that was what he learned in the Corps (he had never owned a watch prior to then). I always assumed it had some practical purpose in the field, but I'm not sure what that might have been.

Open-Source Security Chip Released

michaelsmanley — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 19:13:25 +0000

Article URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/open-titan-chip

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39401623

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Security Program Is Shit"

michaelsmanley — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 16:51:06 +0000

This so accurately describes the last week of my life. Years of shrugs and "we will get to that when " when security concerns are brought up. Thankfully, we had done some of the work anyway and were teed up to do the rest quickly enough. Still sucked pretty hard.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Show HN: Clone someone and talk to them like in real life"

michaelsmanley — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 16:56:24 +0000

Others have said it here, but I read this and thought, "Why not just prioritize spending time with them now, while they're still alive?"

I'm not convinced that the human condition would be improved by simulation of the deceased. I could be convinced that would be a project with unexpected consequences that aren't so good.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Moonbase Alpha Travel Tube Details"

michaelsmanley — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 23:11:15 +0000

IIRC, that decision has been covered in one of the many documentaries covering Nuclear Waste Disposal Area 2 and the 9/13/1999 accident.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Odorant diffuser improves memory and neural functioning in older adults"

michaelsmanley — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 17:45:22 +0000

As a lifelong (congenital) anosmic, I often think about the practical consequences of lacking that sense. A whole therapeutic avenue cut off, if I'm thinking about this correctly, is a new one.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Why don’t Americans eat mutton?"

michaelsmanley — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 17:36:20 +0000

I was about to post the same thing here. BBQ mutton from Moonlite in Owensboro, KY is one of my favorite foods, second only to their burgoo made with mutton. Long, long ago, Owensboro was a major wool production center and river port and there was often a surplus of sheep, so they ate mutton.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Yurt Calculator"

michaelsmanley — Mon, 01 May 2023 18:47:30 +0000

I'm so glad there are still sites like this.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "The End of the English Major"

michaelsmanley — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:22:25 +0000

That's close to what I did. Major in software engineering, equivalent of a second major in English (back then, the university I attended didn't have the concept of "minors" for engineering students, or recognize double majors). That led to a fellowship offer for my MFA. After three years of intensive writing, I went into software development.

Given the cost of higher ed these days, I would imagine that path is not nearly as feasible now as it was in the late 80s/early 90s. (Definitely not at that university, which just discontinued its MFA program in writing.)

New comment by michaelsmanley in "Ask HN: How do you balance support and sprint tickets?"

michaelsmanley — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 21:00:05 +0000

This is how we manage things as well. Support is a totally different stream of work from product development.

I've often had a difficult time getting non-engineering management to understand the difference between proactive work that can be planned and reactive work that is unplannable by its nature. All of it looks like deficiencies in the product to a certain cohort of stakeholders. Eventually, once they see things smooth out by separating those workstreams, they catch on.

YMMV.

New comment by michaelsmanley in "They Rule"

michaelsmanley — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:02:24 +0000

This seems to surface once in a while. I recall it was originally constructed with Flash, 20-ish years ago. That's some longevity.