Hacker News: mmcgaha

New comment by mmcgaha in "Men in their 50s may be aging faster due to toxic 'forever chemicals'"

mmcgaha — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:15:51 +0000

I have no concern for young generations wanting to blame our age group. The day will come soon that their generation is pointed at for not solving the complex problems of their day. Now if they will show me the same grace when I start a story with "back in my day" we will all get along.

New comment by mmcgaha in "Suicide Linux (2009)"

mmcgaha — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:50:08 +0000

And here is thought sl was a pain in the ass. I hate that train.

New comment by mmcgaha in "A practical guide to observing the night sky for real skies and real equipment"

mmcgaha — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:48:16 +0000

I live in rural Maine so it may not be the same everywhere but a few months ago I was just enjoying the outdoors and noticed all these fast moving objects. Turns out they were satellites. You could see one or two fly over every couple of minutes.

New comment by mmcgaha in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

mmcgaha — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:03:22 +0000

Christmas dinner for my immediate family almost $500. That was pretty much dinner and our favorite appetizers but does not count the liquor and wine. This was just me, my ex, five kids, a daughter in law and grandchild. I can see getting to 3k pretty fast.

New comment by mmcgaha in "X.org Security Advisory: multiple security issues X.Org X server and Xwayland"

mmcgaha — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 02:37:04 +0000

I bet you are the life of the party. Seriously though, what makes you write that so matter of factly?

New comment by mmcgaha in "The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog"

mmcgaha — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 03:33:59 +0000

I just wish someone would make a first person version of AMFV. It would need to be a really different game to stay true to AMFV but I think it could revolve around not getting shut down by the bureaucrats.

New comment by mmcgaha in "RPi 500 arrives with mechanical switches, RGB LED backlit keys"

mmcgaha — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 03:18:53 +0000

I like that it is a well maintained unix like environment with full on vendor support. Since the pi 5 performance has been good enough for everything I do and the 400 is still my go-to when I need an extra machine for something. Given that, there is almost no way I will buy one but if I didn't already have a pi 5 workstation I probably would.

New comment by mmcgaha in ""Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec""

mmcgaha — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 18:34:11 +0000

I use it to maintain our product catalog at work. The server does the final rendering of the complete document but as a page is getting edited the preview is getting rendered in the browser. Back to what everyone is saying, this isn't important enough to move the needle for people making these decisions.

New comment by mmcgaha in "Croatian freediver held breath for 29 minutes"

mmcgaha — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 05:50:57 +0000

When I was in high school I could hold my breath all the way through comfortably numb. None of my friends could even come close. My technique was to breath in and out real fast until I felt tingly.

New comment by mmcgaha in "We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness"

mmcgaha — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 15:10:14 +0000

Yep, this is it exactly. When I was young TV, including HBO, would go off the air at night. You could not have hours of fun playing an Atari. Having fun at home was cards and board games. Late night fun . . . well that will probably never change.

New comment by mmcgaha in "Rolex Caliber 7135: new indirect impulse escapement and high frequency movement"

mmcgaha — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 20:21:23 +0000

I would say shut up and take my money but they don't want my money.

New comment by mmcgaha in "Rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia"

mmcgaha — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 13:40:38 +0000

When my son was six he found a girly magazine at a friends house and was sneaking away to look at it. When my wife caught him she told him the magazine was bad and he should not be looking at it. His simple reply was "But I like it Mom."

Even if Unix is bad, I like it.

New comment by mmcgaha in "The History of Toontown’s SpeedChat (2007)"

mmcgaha — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 02:27:10 +0000

I met a lot of folks playing TT and the method that I used most was to jump for numbers and the first letter of speed chat was the letter. Adults and older teens picked up on it and kids did not so it worked out well.

I played some TT rewritten a couple of years back and everyone can just chat away. My opinion is that restricted chat was better.

New comment by mmcgaha in "Invisible Electrostatic Wall at 3M plant (1996)"

mmcgaha — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 20:27:02 +0000

I used to work for a company that bought off cuts from this plant and the static that comes off of these rolls is scary. I heard this story years ago and no one in our plant had a doubt about it being true because 3M ran enormous rolls.

New comment by mmcgaha in "Consumer-grade routers on puny power supplies (2024)"

mmcgaha — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 21:33:11 +0000

I used to run my mother's vacuum cleaner plugged into the same outlet as my C64 to keep it from crashing.

New comment by mmcgaha in "Uncut Currency"

mmcgaha — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:02:16 +0000

I have too many family stories of the things police used to do to believe that it was better back then. My gut tells me things are better now but maybe I am just not in the know.

New comment by mmcgaha in "The Power Mac 4400"

mmcgaha — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 17:06:35 +0000

I could not agree with you more.

I am replying to you from my third mac. I got it less than a year ago and it is the first Mac I have used since 2010 or so. Sure I am getting used to it but it does surprise me how different some things are from my typical XFCE/Win10 environments. I know unintuitive is the wrong word but at least for my own intuition, it is unintuitive.

New comment by mmcgaha in "Half My Life with Perl"

mmcgaha — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 15:31:30 +0000

In my mind Perl was the Rust of the 90s. Perl evangelists were everywhere and wanted to rewrite everything in one line of Perl.

New comment by mmcgaha in "What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)"

mmcgaha — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 19:27:11 +0000

When I was a kid I used to think that having variables A... without any gaps in the letters meant that I did a good job of thinking out the program in advance.

New comment by mmcgaha in "Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen"

mmcgaha — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:57:30 +0000

I was looking for a reference but I am afraid it is lost in some news group in the distant past but my understanding is that all of Meta Kernel was written directly on an HP calculator.