Hacker News: pimlottc

New comment by pimlottc in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

pimlottc — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:04:17 +0000

Publicity from the gimmick is the whole point

New comment by pimlottc in "The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock"

pimlottc — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:25:26 +0000

> Accursèd

For those who don’t know, the accent indicates that the -ed ending is pronounced as a separate syllable, I.e. “a-curse-ed”. For that extra mysterious, old-timey feel!

New comment by pimlottc in "I made a terminal pager"

pimlottc — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:51:54 +0000

The TL;DR doesn’t really say what this new pager offers compared to less; it seems to mostly be a learning project:

> lore supports only a subset of what less does, but in a more intuitive and useful manner for my daily activity. I also find value in understanding it from the ground up, bytes to terminal views, and continuing to refine it as I learn more about what I actually want and need in a terminal pager.

New comment by pimlottc in "The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew"

pimlottc — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:59:32 +0000

I would imagine this is to make them look less machine-perfect and more "home-made"

New comment by pimlottc in "Good Sleep, Good Learning (2012)"

pimlottc — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:02:54 +0000

Clickable link: https://justgetflux.com/

New comment by pimlottc in "Good Sleep, Good Learning (2012)"

pimlottc — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:59:42 +0000

Got a link for some of those open source CPAP hackers?

New comment by pimlottc in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"

pimlottc — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:57:56 +0000

There is also the legitimate view that a concert is a physical, ephemeral experience shared by the people in the room on the night. That is it fleeting is part of its beauty, in the same manner as live theater.

Which is not to say no concert should ever be recorded, but I could understand why it wouldn’t be a priority for some artists.

New comment by pimlottc in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"

pimlottc — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:52:20 +0000

You probably meant to reply to a different post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764164

New comment by pimlottc in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"

pimlottc — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:47:04 +0000

Trent also famously mourned the closing of Oink.fm, at one time the world largest largest music torrent tracker

https://www.wired.com/2007/10/trent-reznor-on/

New comment by pimlottc in "Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict"

pimlottc — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:32:09 +0000

And honestly what’s wrong with the ads? Sure, they’re a bit cheesy, but not really that much out of the ordinary for magazine ads back then. There were certainly much worse (sensational, sexiest) ones…

Let’s not forget, IBM themselves used Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” [0][1][2] in their home computer ads for quite a while back then, so this isn’t that different.

0: https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1o2y2gs/m...

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4qPlTbJG4

2: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC35folder/IBMt...

New comment by pimlottc in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"

pimlottc — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:27:19 +0000

Really interesting to see how far this story has spread, I saw it in my Chicago groups first and now it’s popped up in outlets all over the world. I guess it shows how nostalgic we are for an earlier time, both in music and internet culture.

New comment by pimlottc in "Tax Wrapped 2025"

pimlottc — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:59:51 +0000

I was half-afraid this would start with a form prompting you to upload your tax return :P

New comment by pimlottc in "Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K concerts into an online treasure trove"

pimlottc — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:35:54 +0000

These are all almost 10 years old, many are 20 or 30 or even 40 years old. Time makes a big difference.

There's a 2004 article about the taper [0] posted elsewhere in the thread, he definitely did get into a bit of trouble at the time.

> When he got back from England, Shanahan–who’d known Jacobs’s family for years–lectured him, warning him always to get clearance from bands before recording them and to be careful when trading tapes. Soon after this, though, Jacobs snuck his gear into a Bob Mould solo gig at Metro–he’d been unable to get permission, Shanahan says–and was caught by venue staff. Shanahan didn’t let him on the premises again for six years, relenting only after Jacobs got Flaming Lips manager Scott Booker to plead his case.

0: https://chicagoreader.com/music/tapehead/

New comment by pimlottc in "Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K concerts into an online treasure trove"

pimlottc — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:16:33 +0000

https://www.nintourhistory.com is great too, you can make an account and see personalized stats

New comment by pimlottc in "Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K concerts into an online treasure trove"

pimlottc — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:25:34 +0000

You (probably) mean “heroin”

New comment by pimlottc in "Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?"

pimlottc — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:35:07 +0000

Disabled in the sense that you can no longer receive email (which for many is the primary purpose for a Google account), not that you can’t login.

New comment by pimlottc in "Charcuterie – Visual similarity Unicode explorer"

pimlottc — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:31:49 +0000

This is cool but the characters are awful small on my iPhone 14 Pro. Decent bit of wasted space too. Why are the characters in the previous history list (on the “rim” so much bigger than the characters I’m actively exploring?

New comment by pimlottc in "Haunted Paper Toys"

pimlottc — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:10:04 +0000

Way back in the day there was a fantastic piece of software from Brøderbund (of Lode Runner fame, among others) called The Toy Shop [0] that let you print customized papercraft designs that you would then assemble into working toys. Some of them were quite impressive - a steam shovel, a balloon-powered dragster, a mechanical clockwork bank, even a model steam engine!

It is still one of the most unique and creative pieces of software I've ever seen. I guess maybe it didn't do that well, though, since there's unfortunately not a lot about it on the Internet now. There is a copy in the Internet Archive [1], though.

It would be an interesting project to resurrect this, or at least extract the models into a modern format.

0: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3278-the-toy-shop

1: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Toy_Shop_The_1986

New comment by pimlottc in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

pimlottc — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:26:19 +0000

Pair programming are wit?

New comment by pimlottc in "Show HN: 41 years sea surface temperature anomalies"

pimlottc — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:25:32 +0000

This looks cool but it's missing a clear legend on the default view to help the viewer understand what they're looking at.

It's not immediately clear if it's just absolute temperatures or relative temperatures or what. You have to look at the color scale to notice that it's from -5 to +5. But relative to what? Over what timescale? Is it a moving average?

I guess I could dig into the data link to figure it out but most people aren't going to do that.