Hacker News: philiplu

New comment by philiplu in "Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar"

philiplu — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:47:01 +0000

Or Puyallup, WA. Those two are definite shibboleth tests in the PNW.

New comment by philiplu in "I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs"

philiplu — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:12:40 +0000

Sorry, but this 65 yo grey-beard disagrees. A TUI to me, back in the 80s/90s, was something that ran in the terminal and was almost always ncurses-based. This was back when I was still using ADM-3A serial terminals, none of that new-fangled PCs stuff.

New comment by philiplu in "Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): An incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy"

philiplu — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 22:36:11 +0000

Huh, my childhood version was almost the standard US one, but the ending was “and Alfred saved the day”, not shown in the article’s diagram. This would have been learned in the Midwest US (St. Louis vicinity), late 1960s.

New comment by philiplu in "Project Euler"

philiplu — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 22:26:00 +0000

Not only are they still releasing problems weekly, they have a long backlog of problems waiting for release. I submitted a problem back in April 2024, and it didn't get published until October 2025 (problem 963). There's an excellent core development team that works with problem-submitters to get problems tuned up for Project Euler.

New comment by philiplu in "Addictive-like behavioural traits in pet dogs with extreme motivation for toys"

philiplu — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 18:51:01 +0000

Sorry - my 9 year old golden doodle still doesn't get the concept of fetch. He's an expert at keep-away though. Throw the toy or ball, he'll chase it gleefully, then come back to just out of reach, drop the toy, and hover over it waiting for me to make a move at it. He'll lunge for the toy, back up a bit, drop it, and the cycle continues.

New comment by philiplu in "Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant"

philiplu — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 01:49:11 +0000

I’ll have to remember that one

New comment by philiplu in "Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant"

philiplu — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 01:17:11 +0000

I had heart surgery 2 months ago to repair my mitral valve. In the lead-up to that, I had to make a decision what to do if it turned out replacement was needed instead of repair. Choices were metallic valves requiring me to be on warfarin the rest of my life or pig-derived valves. I chose the latter, mostly to avoid warfarin for life, but also because my surgeon was a PhD for work on creating biological-derived valves that didn’t trigger the immune system. Just mind-blowing what can be done. But I’m glad repair and not replacement worked out - and I now have GoreTex fibers attached to my valve.

New comment by philiplu in "After 50 years, The Magic Circle finally inducts Penn and Teller"

philiplu — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 01:01:03 +0000

He has a speaking role in an old 1987 baseball movie, "Long Gone", with William Petersen and Virginia Madsen, as the son in a father/son partnership who own a minor league team (Henry Gibson was the dad). Very disorienting to hear him talk when I first saw the movie way back when.

New comment by philiplu in "A visual history of Visual C++ (2017)"

philiplu — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 08:13:22 +0000

No clue. I left as a full-time employee in 2007, did a few contractor gigs with various old teams of mine to help out, but that was done by 2013. I lost touch with how things were going internally after that.

New comment by philiplu in "A visual history of Visual C++ (2017)"

philiplu — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 06:04:37 +0000

I worked on that! I was a dev on the team that built the first IntelliSense engine for C++. It’s a miracle it worked at all. It was based on a hacked-up version of the C++ front-end, but when it inevitably hit errors attempting a single-pass parse of the current source, it would silently bull its way through and try not to get too screwed up. Doing that in the presence of templates was not a good time. But with the RAM and processing speeds available then, I’m still kind of shocked it worked at all, 28 years ago.

New comment by philiplu in "A visual history of Visual C++ (2017)"

philiplu — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 05:57:28 +0000

No, there were two devs working on the 68k Mac compiler, with ~10 devs on the x86 side (though both targets shared a lot of code and differed mainly in the late codegen and peephole optimization phases). I never worked on the 16-bit code; the 32-bit and later 64-bit x86 backend was a different codebase from the 16-bit stuff.

New comment by philiplu in "A visual history of Visual C++ (2017)"

philiplu — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 05:22:09 +0000

No, that's not really true. I was on the C++ compiler team from 1991 to 2006. When I first started, the DevTools team reported up through the Windows team, but never really felt a well-integrated part. We were never in the same building as the Windows team, for instance. I remember, probably 1992 or 1993, driving from building 4 where the compiler team lived to the Windows building (forget which one that was, maybe in the 12 to 15 block back then?) to get a copy of the Windows NT source on a hard drive. That's because I was a dev on the C++ compiler back-end team then (moved to the front-end in '95, IIRC), and compiling that source was a major test of the 32-bit compiler I was working on.

Don't remember when DevTools was re-orged out from under Windows, but I'm pretty sure it was by '95, and well before VC++ 6.

New comment by philiplu in "Someone keeps stealing, flying, fixing and returning this man's 1958 Cessna"

philiplu — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 07:05:12 +0000

A 40-year younger body :-) I'm blind in one eye nowadays; highly doubt I could pass the medical. It was a fun hobby in my 20s, though.

New comment by philiplu in "Unmasking the Sea Star Killer"

philiplu — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:20:27 +0000

It’s been really sad to watch the decline of sea stars the past 10+ years. Tide-pooling just hasn’t been the same at Cannon Beach or the San Juan Islands. It’s very encouraging to pin down the culprit.

New comment by philiplu in "Someone keeps stealing, flying, fixing and returning this man's 1958 Cessna"

philiplu — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 22:29:05 +0000

Never got far past my PPL decades ago (less than 100 hours total iirc) but landing was always such a fun dance in Pipers and Cessnas, slipping the plane into the cross-wind to line up the plane at the last moment before touching done.

New comment by philiplu in "The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated (1996)"

philiplu — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:06:57 +0000

I’m pretty sure that’s due to Unix’s early existence on PDP machines from DEC, which used octal instead of hex for encoding binary values. Why DEC did that I don’t know - I never got a chance to use DEC equipment back in the 70s.

New comment by philiplu in "I have tinnitus. I don't recommend it"

philiplu — Thu, 22 May 2025 04:31:29 +0000

I've had tinnitus since my teen years, half a century ago. At least, what I normally hear is, I assume, tinnitus, but it comes in two forms. There's a constant sort-of grey noise, not too loud (definitely softer than people talking in the same room), which wavers in amplitude over a sub-second period. The more annoying form is a pretty pure sine wave, much louder, which thankfully is more infrequent. Not really sure if that quieter form is something everyone gets, or an actual tinnitus form. Anyway, after 50+ years, it's not a big deal to me.

New comment by philiplu in "Yes, the Apple II MouseCard IRQ is synced to the VBL"

philiplu — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:05:22 +0000

My first computer, purchased in 1978 for about $700, was an 8k Commodore PET. I've just finished building my first new PC in 15 years; a Zen 5 9950X with 96G RAM and a 4TB PCIe-5 SSD for about $2800. That's roughly the same, inflation-adjusted, as that PET!

It's been a real trip watching the accumulation of exponential improvements the past 50 years.

New comment by philiplu in "Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)"

philiplu — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 05:12:51 +0000

Compuserve had a port of this available for playing, back around 1980. I spent so much money I couldn't really afford as a broke college student, logged in for hours.

New comment by philiplu in "A tricky Commodore PET repair: tracking down 6 1/2 bad chips"

philiplu — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 18:36:35 +0000

That PET is in amazingly good physical shape. I think the keyboard on my 8K PET back in 1978 looked that bright for at most a year or so, before the plastic overlays started fraying.