Hacker News: psim1

New comment by psim1 in "LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation"

psim1 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:54:59 +0000

LibreOffice almost seemed irrelevant; with cheap to free (*included) tools in abundance, such as MS Office, Google Workspace, Apple Pages/Numbers/Keynote, the need for LibreOffice is not what it once was, back when StarOffice and OpenOffice were liberating people from the tyranny of Microsoft.

Now it's worse than irrelevant, it's a liability.

Mystery jump in oil trading ahead of Trump post draws scrutiny

psim1 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:25:52 +0000

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-5...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504060

Points: 570

# Comments: 392

New comment by psim1 in "Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids"

psim1 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 01:03:48 +0000

Janky is directly proportional to cost. Grandstream are the jankiest and least expensive. I like the Cisco 191; it is a fine unit but costs about $100-120.

New comment by psim1 in "Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids"

psim1 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:07:39 +0000

For three or four endpoints all within the home, you could do this with just ATAs and not even need a SIP server. Many ATAs have a configurable "dial plan" that will let you map a number to an IP address, thus giving you the ability to call the other terminals directly within the LAN.

New comment by psim1 in "It feels like Claude goes down almost daily now"

psim1 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:04:12 +0000

Yeah, this was the confirmation I needed that it's "not just me."

New comment by psim1 in "The 49MB web page"

psim1 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:32:42 +0000

And this! https://www.mcmaster.com/help/api/ Linked from the footer of every page!

I'm so happy to have seen their web site that I want to do business with them, even though I have no business to be done.

New comment by psim1 in "Gemini Said They Could Only Be Together If He Killed Himself. Soon, He Was Dead"

psim1 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:45:27 +0000

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemini-ai-wrongful-death-lawsuit... is the Gift Article link. This was what I submitted, but the query params got stripped.

Gemini Said They Could Only Be Together If He Killed Himself. Soon, He Was Dead

psim1 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 15:56:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemini-ai-wrongful-death-lawsuit-cc46c5f7

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249381

Points: 53

# Comments: 61

New comment by psim1 in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

psim1 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:02:45 +0000

Carriers both land/VoIP and wireless must attest to having fraud mitigation measures; this is the "Robocall Mitigation Database" and in Cape's record they exempt themselves from STIR/SHAKEN attestation but state they have measures to prevent fraudulent calling. (which is required for them to be permitted to operate)

What kind of measures are possible to prevent fraudulent calls when the caller is your anonymous customer? The answer is obviously "none," unless you respond to every complaint by terminating service of the offending customer and hoping they don't come back.

New comment by psim1 in "Claude Opus 4.6"

psim1 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:43:40 +0000

I need an agent to summarize the buzzwordjargonsynergistic word salad into something understandable.

Defining Moments in TV History

psim1 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:59:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/television/tv-history-usa-defining-moments-593edf50

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722835

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by psim1 in "IP Addresses Through 2025"

psim1 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 20:58:01 +0000

In 2021 I speculated on IP and acquired a /23 block by ARIN wait list. I figured on running some services from the IP space for a while and after the 5 years mandated wait time would cash in when surely it would fetch $100k from some party desperate for IPv4.

At this point the services I am running are far more lucrative than the IP space itself is turning out to be.

New comment by psim1 in "What Killed Perl?"

psim1 — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:14:58 +0000

Around 2010 I ditched Perl for PHP because I had been using PHP for web and could write the same systems scripts in PHP as I used to write in Perl. Sticking with one go-to language is easier on the brain.

New comment by psim1 in "Questions for Cloudflare"

psim1 — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 17:29:53 +0000

> It is unfair to blame Cloudflare (or AWS, or Azure, or GitHub) for what’s happening

> Ultimately end-users don’t have a relationship with any of those companies. They have relationships with businesses that chose to rely on them

Could you not say this about any supplier relationship? No, in this case, we all know the root of the outage is CloudFlare, so it absolutely makes sense to blame CloudFlare, and not their customers.

New comment by psim1 in "Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues"

psim1 — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 14:51:24 +0000

Later today or tomorrow there's going to be a post on HN pointing to Cloudflare's RCA and multitudes here are going to praise CF for their transparency. Let's not forget that CF sucks and took half the internet down for four hours. Transparency or no, this should not be happening.

New comment by psim1 in "That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus"

psim1 — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 21:09:11 +0000

Your description can only refer to Kevin Mitnick. They threw the book at him to set an example. I remember being amazed at what a hacker he must have been. Later I read about his crimes and thought "that's all?" RIP Mr. Mitnick.

New comment by psim1 in "Why is your open source project still hosted on GitHub?"

psim1 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 18:05:01 +0000

Because that's how and where people find them.

Related questions with same answer: Why do you still use Facebook? Why do you still use LinkedIn? Why do you still use YouTube?

New comment by psim1 in "Making the most of a dumb fax switcher box in the old days"

psim1 — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 19:23:48 +0000

T.38 is actually a fine way of transporting fax bits but unfortunately it is quite uncommon to see T.38 end-to-end. While a VoIP provider may negotiate T.38 with a customer's fax ATA, it is likely being transcoded to G.711 by a gateway at some point as it traverses the telephone network, ultimately making T.38 a less-reliable choice. (Better to have the same codec end-to-end.) A comparison might be cellular or VoIP providers offering wideband codecs, which sound great when you stay on-network, but when the call crosses the PSTN and is transcoded, the sound is worse than if you used the standard narrowband end-to-end.

New comment by psim1 in "Monodraw"

psim1 — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 17:54:27 +0000

Reminiscent of TheDraw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw), a tool I used "back in the day" to create BBS artwork.

New comment by psim1 in "Teletext in North America"

psim1 — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 14:49:44 +0000

Can anyone recommend a good CSS replacement for viewing this site? The author posts interesting content but the site itself is unbearable.