Hacker News: ochrist

New comment by ochrist in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

ochrist — Sat, 09 May 2026 16:25:15 +0000

Same here (Firefox on Windows). But when I opened it in Firefox on my Android phone, it seems fine.

New comment by ochrist in "Show HN: s@: decentralized social networking over static sites"

ochrist — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:47:43 +0000

Some years ago I was involved with a society (club), and we wanted a webforum. But as we were geeks as well, we created a combination of a web-based solution, mail-lists and NNTP. These three solutions were syncronized, so it didn't matter which one you used. This worked well for several years.

New comment by ochrist in "Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?"

ochrist — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 09:20:48 +0000

My first modem (from 1987) was 300 baud, but it could be used in a split mode called 75/1200.

Before that I used 50 baud systems in the military as well as civil telex systems.

New comment by ochrist in "Danish Armed Forces expand their presence and continue exercises in Greenland"

ochrist — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:31:13 +0000

Currently USA only has one base left: Pituffik Space Base (previously called Thule Air Base). They used to have about 17 bases and several thousand military personnel, but now it's down to about 200. If USA wanted it, they could establish all the bases they wanted and send more people, but they chose to cut down on military presence over the past years. Source: Have worked on that last base several years ago. Also check wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pituffik_Space_Base

New comment by ochrist in "Floppy Disk / Diskettes // retrocmp / retro computing"

ochrist — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 20:21:20 +0000

I still have a few floppy disks packed away at the loft, but I wonder if they still work the next time I turn on my BBC or Archimedes.

New comment by ochrist in "Denmark reportedly withdraws Chat Control proposal following controversy"

ochrist — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 19:58:36 +0000

As a Dane I am ashamed of the current government, but I didn't vote for them. Hopefully we'll get a more liberal government next year. But a lot of people seems to think that more surveillance means less crime. Problem is that this has not been proven.

New comment by ochrist in "The last European train that travels by sea"

ochrist — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 09:42:50 +0000

Yes, sorry. I sometimes pass the connection Rødby - Puttgarden by car, and I have seen trains there recently. But they obviously don't use the ferry anymore.

New comment by ochrist in "The last European train that travels by sea"

ochrist — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 09:41:16 +0000

My bad. Sorry. I see that they changed the route to go via Jutland because of the upcoming tunnel. So yes, the Italian line is probably the last one of its kind. The Danish-German connection will probably not be reestablished, as the new tunnel will replace the ferry.

New comment by ochrist in "The last European train that travels by sea"

ochrist — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 09:28:30 +0000

That's not the last European train that travels by sea. If you go from Sweden or Denmark towards Germany the train crosses from Denmark to Germany by ferry (that is until the new Femern tunnel is finished): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8DPuDsYe_k https://femern.com/the-tunnel/fehmarnbelt-tunnel/

New comment by ochrist in "Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)"

ochrist — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 07:46:41 +0000

SQL

New comment by ochrist in "What do we do if SETI is successful?"

ochrist — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 07:32:34 +0000

There are a few facts you should know about this:

Formally Norwegian is West-Scandinavian (together with Icelandic and Faeroese), whereas Danish and Swedish are East-Scandinavian.

Also, please remember that the Norwegians have two different written languages (and the average Norwegian might not even speak any of those, as there are many dialects in Norway). One of those written languages is based on Danish from when Denmark ruled Norway.

In practice Norwegians and Swedes understand each other well when speaking, as their pronunciation are similar. Similarly Norwegians and Danes understand each other in writing, as the written language (and the vocabulary) are similar.

I know a lot of Danes who do not understand Swedish or Norwegian, and those movies or TV shows are normally subtitled in Denmark.

Source: I am Danish having worked a lot with both Swedes and Norwegians.

New comment by ochrist in "Pasta/80 is a simple Pascal cross compiler targeting the Z80 microprocessor"

ochrist — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 09:00:43 +0000

For those that don't know it, Anders Hejlsberg is the guy behind Turbo Pascal, Delphi, J++, C# and TypeScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

New comment by ochrist in "Webbol: A minimal static web server written in COBOL"

ochrist — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 06:36:05 +0000

Almost correct. However, this is not a float but a fixed decimal value with two decimals. The V is not stored but just used to indicate where the decimal sign should be. Source: I've written a lot of COBOL years ago.

New comment by ochrist in "The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh"

ochrist — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:18:34 +0000

In Danish knee is 'knæ' and the K is pronounced very clearly. It's interesting that English speaking people have forgotten how to pronounce K before N, so the Danish king Knud became Canute.

New comment by ochrist in "A history of ARM, part 1: Building the first chip (2022)"

ochrist — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:51:34 +0000

Nice article. Just a couple of comments:

Doesn't the x86 chips also use microcode? There are several differences between RISC and CISC not mentioned here.

(also Sophie was called Roger at this point in time, so the article has been retconed)

New comment by ochrist in "History of the Gem Desktop Environment"

ochrist — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 10:33:19 +0000

The original BBC computer was way to small for something like this, but you could get a version of the BBC Master that was able to run GEM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Master

New comment by ochrist in "History of the Gem Desktop Environment"

ochrist — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 08:59:44 +0000

I used GEM on some PCs around 1990. At that time I had an Archimedes and was studying in a computer school. I did some DTP (a school magazine) together with a couple of classmates, and we could have done it on my Arch. But then they would have been out of it, so we used their more ordinary PCs and used GEM on them. It worked smoothly and was very responsive.

New comment by ochrist in "European ant is the first known animal to clone members of another species"

ochrist — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 08:45:52 +0000

Also, mules are the result of a male donkey and a female horse. The other version (male horse and female donkey) is called a hinny in English. They have different characteristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinny

New comment by ochrist in "Danish supermarket chain is setting up "Emergency Stores""

ochrist — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 08:21:02 +0000

Please check your history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Greenlandic_self-governme...

New comment by ochrist in "Danish supermarket chain is setting up "Emergency Stores""

ochrist — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 07:48:53 +0000

The distance between Kalilingrad (Russia) and the island of Bornholm (Denmark) is only about 300 km (or 200 miles). They don't have to go to 'many many countries' to get to Denmark. Please look at a map.