Hacker News: rootbear

New comment by rootbear in "Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)"

rootbear — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:32:12 +0000

One of Asimov's best. I've often thought of naming a computer "multivac", as I'm a fan of the first generation computer names like ENIAC, EDSAC, etc. Multivac was, of course, a play on UNIVAC, suggesting multiple vacuum tubes instead of one! Multivac is, however, depicted as so powerful, I just don't think I've ever owned a system that deserved that name.

New comment by rootbear in "Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)"

rootbear — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:09:57 +0000

Will this image also work on the 3B+? I have a spare one of those that I can try this out on.

New comment by rootbear in "Arm AGI CPU"

rootbear — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:28:21 +0000

My friend M. Goode’s father was a urologist named Dr. P. Goode. For real.

New comment by rootbear in "Arm AGI CPU"

rootbear — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:17:52 +0000

This sort of thing really bugs me! Marketing departments appropriate an existing term and use it in some new, often deceptive way. This goes all the way back to when IBM released “The IBM Personal Computer”, at a time when “personal computer” was a category name. Then Microsoft released Windows, when “windows” was a generic term for windowing systems. Intel did it with their “core” architecture. The list goes on.

(Disclosure: I am a casual investor in ARM.)

New comment by rootbear in "Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80"

rootbear — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:37:58 +0000

A counter argument is that Mauchly was actually interesting in using computers for weather modeling and I’m sure that influenced the design of ENIAC. He could only get ENIAC funded if it was valuable to the war effort. I’ve read quite a lot about that machine and I’m not aware of any architectural features that were specific to ballistics calculations. This is unlike the British Colossus, another early computer, which was specifically designed for code breaking and wasn’t general purpose.

As for the objection that it wasn’t stored program, I was interested to learn that it was converted to stored program operation after only two years or so of operation, using the constant table switches as the program store. But the Manchester Baby, which used the same memory for code and data was more significant in the history of stored program machines.

On the general question of “first computer”, I think the answer is whatever machine you want it to be if you heap enough conditional adjectives on it.

New comment by rootbear in "Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)"

rootbear — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 02:26:23 +0000

The Dead Past is one of my favorite Asimov stories. We don’t have the tech that’s in the story, but the idea of lost privacy is relevant today.

New comment by rootbear in "[dead]"

rootbear — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 22:15:17 +0000

I am a boomer and I absolutely give a "flying fink". Stop stereotyping my generation. The group I worked in at NASA Goddard did visualizations of climate data. I heard directly from climate scientists what was going on in the world and it terrified me. When I heard about what's being done to NCAR I nearly cried. I have no children but I have told all my friends' kids how sorry I am that we're leaving them a mess to clean up. How's that for a "flying fink"?

New comment by rootbear in "Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs"

rootbear — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:46:20 +0000

It's fun to play around with, but unless I'm missing something, it's not possible to specify the size, in rows and columns, of the screen, such as 24x80. It's an odd omission.

New comment by rootbear in "Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects"

rootbear — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 14:52:18 +0000

Agreed! Bees are my favorite social insect (we share a love of hexagons, for one thing) and they seem to be especially intelligent.

New comment by rootbear in "The 'Toy Story' You Remember"

rootbear — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:35:26 +0000

I remember those monitors, but I forget what resolution they were. For what it's worth, Toy Story was rendered at 1536 x 922. I believe they re-rendered the whole thing from the RIB files for the bluray release.

New comment by rootbear in "The 'Toy Story' You Remember"

rootbear — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:32:29 +0000

Film weave is also the bane of the VFX world. If a shot is going to have, say, a matte painting added in post, then a pin registered camera must be used. These cameras have a precisely machined pin that centers the film stock in the gate after the pull down claw retracts. Later post processing stages also use pin registered movements, so each frame is in exactly the same place every time it's used. Otherwise, the separate elements would weave against each other and give away the effect.

New comment by rootbear in "AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B"

rootbear — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:58:55 +0000

Ah, yes, you are correct, I had forgotten it was Yahoo that took over Verizon mail.

New comment by rootbear in "Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)"

rootbear — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:55:34 +0000

Larry Niven called them slidewalks and I've always been sorry this terminology never caught on.

New comment by rootbear in "AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B"

rootbear — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 18:23:13 +0000

Verizon handed their email service over to AOL some years ago. I wonder if this will be the end for my unused @verizon.com account.

New comment by rootbear in "The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge"

rootbear — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 19:37:18 +0000

I always wanted to rig up a laptop that has an IMU to detect when it was in free fall and play the Wilhelm scream.

New comment by rootbear in "Action was the best 8-bit programming language"

rootbear — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:53 +0000

That was from Algol 68. Algol 60 used BEGIN/END blocks when the body of a do loop (or a then or else block, etc.) had more than one statement. Bash was influenced by Algol 68.

New comment by rootbear in "Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Microprocessor – Version 1.1"

rootbear — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 19:00:57 +0000

All I can think of is that it was a way to look at the end of a long program which wouldn't all fit on a display. Predating, I suppose, the 'tail' program, or whatever the DECSYSTEM 20 equivalent was.

New comment by rootbear in "You know more Finnish than you think"

rootbear — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 13:38:09 +0000

Vowel length is generally not semantically significant in English. Vowels are lengthened before voiced consonants, for example, and we don’t even think about it. Compare “cab” and “cap”. As noted here, some Hungarian vowels, such as ’a’ and ‘e’ do change sound when lengthened, but some don’t. Those are the ones that are harder to distinguish for speakers of languages like English.

New comment by rootbear in "You know more Finnish than you think"

rootbear — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 03:00:51 +0000

My best friend George (Gyuri) from college is Hungarian and I've picked up a few words (mostly cuss words) from him. One of the hardest parts for an English speaker to learn about Hungarian and Finnish is that the length of a sound (how long you articulate it) is significant. Finnish uses doubled letters for this, Hungarian uses accents (a vs á, o vs ó, etc.) for vowels and doubled letters for consonants. I've gotten to where I can hear the difference when listening to George speak Hungarian but it took some effort.

New comment by rootbear in "Debian switches to 64-bit time for everything"

rootbear — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 15:23:21 +0000

Vernor Vinge could absolutely have included that in some of his stories.