Hacker News: ntac

Voting machines said the budge proposal failed. A recount said otherwise

ntac — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:24:09 +0000

Article URL: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/stephentown-memorial-library-proposal-passes-21232821.php

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46233386

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ntac in "Kids Love Landline Phones"

ntac — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:01:41 +0000

I've never had a cell phone that can match the latency of a 80s or 90s landline for local calls. Maybe the audio is as good, but that delay makes calls distinctly worse.

New comment by ntac in "Desktop Windowing on Android Tablets"

ntac — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 21:07:51 +0000

I did the same thing - replaced my laptop with a tablet for a trip. Lenovo P12. It I thought the windowing was great.

The whole experience would have been great, except for one thing which made it unusable for my purposes. Android has that clipboard editor popup that can't be disabled. When using Emacs within Termux, every time I hit ctrl-k, I got that damn popup which blocked a significant amount of the screen for ~10 seconds.

New comment by ntac in "Common mistakes in salary negotiation"

ntac — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 18:18:54 +0000

I ask the recruiter what the salary range is. If they refuse to say, I tell them to get back to me when they know what the range is.

I'm not going to waste my time if they want to play games like being secretive about the pay.

New comment by ntac in "Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase"

ntac — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 19:35:48 +0000

I can't say how they compare, but I've had no complaints with Domain Monger in 20+ years.

New comment by ntac in "Amazon Tried Not to Pay a Woman After Driver Totaled Her Car"

ntac — Mon, 08 May 2023 02:42:51 +0000

It's possible Amazon self insures. A lot of large companies do and in my experience, it's a nightmare for their victims.

New comment by ntac in "Two containers with same number detected in Chittagong port"

ntac — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 02:48:30 +0000

In the late 90s I worked for a company that was afraid of the Internet. They had one computer in a common area that had access to the Internet but not the company's internal network for the ~50 engineers to use.

The internal network was coax Ethernet. I was working on a networking project at the time and ran a packet sniffer on the internal network and saw that some MAC addresses could access the outside world.

I'm lazy and I didn't like having to go halfway across the building, sit at a slow ass computer to download a datasheet, copy it to a floppy, then walk halfway across the building back to my cube, and finally copy it to my computer. Ain't nobody got time for that.

So I modified my network driver to use one of the macaddrs that had internet access. When I needed something from the Internet, I'd load my modified driver then unload it when I was done. Much easier.

I thought I was doing it for such short periods of time that nobody works ever notice. Of course I was wrong.

After about a month I got called into the IT manager's office. And of course the the macaddr I picked belonged to the VP of engineering who also was the son of the president.

Fortunately they understood that young engineers are dumb and do dumb things and let me off with a warning.

New comment by ntac in "Ask HN: Anyone ever consider bringing a coding exercise for the interviewers"

ntac — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 22:17:11 +0000

I have.

A couple years ago, I had a phone interview with one of the big tech companies. The interviewer almost immediately started asking a series of pretty basic questions - something a new grad should be able to answer, where if you can answer one, you can answer them all. I don't have an issue with couple of questions like that to verify the info on my resume is accurate, but he was going on and on with them.

I told him I had a question for him and gave him the question. He giggled and said, "That's an interesting question", then started to ask me another question. I stopped him and asked him to answer my question. He said something along the lines of "this isn't for me to answer your questions".

I ended the interview. I don't think I would have liked working there.

New comment by ntac in "Ask HN: How did I get a Slack notification while in UEFI Settings?"

ntac — Sat, 12 Feb 2022 05:01:41 +0000

Don't feel bad. Everyone is an idiot from time to time. I can see myself doing the same thing.

Thanks for the closure.

New comment by ntac in "Xsnow"

ntac — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 16:52:45 +0000

I had forgotten all about this.

There was a derivative called xoj where police cars chased a white bronco across your screen while a crowd gathered to watch.