Hacker News: nickdothutton

New comment by nickdothutton in "Double-double: 31 digits of precision without leaving the FPU"

nickdothutton — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:24:50 +0000

At least Dekker is referenced.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Finger: the 1971 social network that never died"

nickdothutton — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:41:05 +0000

I've begun and abandoned a "modern take on finger" a couple of times. Sits in the pile (folder) of unfinished projects and at the back of my mind cluttering up the synapses. The reason I began thinking about this... my dissatisfaction/annoyance with all the dark patterns, mode of participation, and ensh*ttification in social networks. I began using UNIX in the early 90s when finger was still quite useful, and yes we did connect it to a named pipe for all sorts of fun (like a finger to SMS gateway).

New comment by nickdothutton in "Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure""

nickdothutton — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 22:09:26 +0000

Once had a lengthy battle with a marketing person. They attempted to change "uninterruptible" (as in Uninterruptible Power Supply) into non-interruptible, and then finally into interruptible. Took the best part of a week to get it fixed.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years"

nickdothutton — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:23:22 +0000

I found it essential for the same reasons, in those early Internet days... PAD, -> UNIX host (x.25), -> VMS "mainframe" (dual stack), on to Internet (TCP/IP).

New comment by nickdothutton in "Toot.community is shutting down"

nickdothutton — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:52:47 +0000

Selective newsgroups vs the firehose/feed/timeline of modern platforms who generally do not want you to tightly discriminate according to your tastes/interest.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Toot.community is shutting down"

nickdothutton — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:49:59 +0000

I think it was the rate of change. Previous waves were small by comparison and had been absorbed/integrated after a period, with a degree of gradual change. Nothing is forever, but Eternal September was abrupt. To a degree there was an echo of it (not on USENET, but on forums and other places) with the advent of the smartphone in 2007, and another with the mass take-up of Internet services in 2016 on the Indian subcontinent by a huge population.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Toot.community is shutting down"

nickdothutton — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:42:24 +0000

As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in any way “my people”. The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Hooray for the Sockets Interface"

nickdothutton — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:35:50 +0000

While TCP/IP was open source and not controlled by any 1 vendor, quite a few companies made good money from selling TCP/IP stacks and won themselves billion dollar valuations in the process[1][2]. Of course this was during a time when Microsoft saw no point in including an IP stack with their OS, or indeed much point in connecting to the Internet at all! Some of the younger readers may find these things hard to believe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTP_Software [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetManage

New comment by nickdothutton in "I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore"

nickdothutton — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:46:43 +0000

At some point many years ago I read that the family, not the individual, is the building block of society. It might have been Chesterton or Friedman as I read a lot of both when I was young. It certainly is a lot easier to hold the line when you have a squad of half a dozen to a dozen with you (wife/husband/children/brothers/sisters/uncles etc). If the state is there, then you are fortunate, but I wouldn't want to count on it myself.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Classic WTF: Server Room Fans and More Fun"

nickdothutton — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 21:58:56 +0000

In the 90s I visited a datacentre in an a central London location. The providers charged for both power and space (and bandwidth). I had cause to lift one of the floor tiles to reposition a power cable slightly for the rack I was working in. What I saw stayed with me.

Stuffed under the floor of the adjacent rack were perhaps a dozen-or-so small servers, switches, the odd modem or 2, and perhaps a kvm box. The tenant had obviously exceeded his physical space but not his power allocation. He had simply "gone underground". Like a little farm of blinking LED mushrooms in the dark.

New comment by nickdothutton in "The case for MUDs in modern times (2018)"

nickdothutton — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:39:33 +0000

We had a MUD at our university and many of us contributed to it as well as playing/hanging out there. The university was quite strict in terms of the use of central resources (mostly VAX VMS 6000 and 8000 series, already pretty long in tooth). I later learned that the faculty decided to permit the MUDs consumption of scarce resource because they considered the development work a valuable lesson in itself on maintenance of a large code base and division of labour.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract"

nickdothutton — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:53:59 +0000

Many of the worlds solvable problems are "information problems", and therefore have a good chance of being solvable by software. Sometimes you'll even encounter a problem that looks like something else, but is in-fact an information problem in-disguise as something else. However I do not think the UK housing crisis is an information problem, either plainly or in-disguise.

New comment by nickdothutton in "The Zilog Z80 has turned 50"

nickdothutton — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 08:09:35 +0000

I started out on Z80 when HLL compilers were expensive for me and the shareware alternatives weren’t so accessible as open source is today. Everyone should do at least a little assembler to gain an appreciation of what they are asking the machine to do, and the Z80 was simple enough to reason about.

New comment by nickdothutton in "British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply"

nickdothutton — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:08:27 +0000

The 2 remaining blast furnaces need about 500m to 750m GBP spending on them within the next 2-5 years or they are just scrap themselves. UK Gov has ditched plans to fully fund the armed forces (would have meant a lot of new warships etc), which would have provided orders for virgin steel from such furnaces. It's hard to see how this has a happy and sustainable ending.

New comment by nickdothutton in "LinkedIn is a cesspool of scammers and identity theft"

nickdothutton — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 05:43:22 +0000

I really wish LinkedIn would collapse and close so that something useful could take its place. At the moment I feel like it's squatting the "business networking" square on the board, but I don't know what it would take to dislodge it. I wrote a little about this on my blog about a decade ago and I don't feel we are any closer to it being dislodged.

New comment by nickdothutton in "The Estranged Worlds of J. G. Ballard"

nickdothutton — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:36:10 +0000

Seek out his various interviews on YouTube.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Vint Cerf, a “father of the Internet”, is retiring"

nickdothutton — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 10:39:56 +0000

Worked with some of his team when I was at MCI/Worldcom. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal"

nickdothutton — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:44:26 +0000

The "real banned books" are (in my opinion) generally those which have not been translated.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network"

nickdothutton — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 02:46:02 +0000

Reminder: In the UK we do not know where the trains are. We know what section of track they are on, but not where within the section. A section could be miles long. To know more precisely, we telephone the (manned) signal boxes to ask if they can see the train or how recently it passed them, and occasionally phone the driver on his mobile to ask them directly.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Al Vigier: Canada's AI strategy shouldn't include secret Palantir bills"

nickdothutton — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:59:39 +0000

I don't think the Canadian government is dropping a big contract on a company that is 24 months old vs one 24 years old, more or less.