Hacker News: seoulbigchris

New comment by seoulbigchris in "cp: -r or -R?"

seoulbigchris — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:58:41 +0000

This was back in the early 90s. Our company used DOS and Windows machines for the most part, but we had a brand new Sun workstation for an advanced PCB layout tool (Cadence?). One day my buddy was working on the Sun, and wanted to make a backup before starting a new task. He did something like `mkdir backup` and `cp -r * backup`. It started churning away, and we went to lunch. Came back from lunch, and the machine was frozen. It took us a few moments before we realized what went wrong. He had copied recursively forever, or rather, until there was no more free disk space. In our defense, we were new to Unix and still learning.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Gakutensoku"

seoulbigchris — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:32:22 +0000

Korea does this, also. Sometimes I'll get confused at a restaurant or other sign that is just 2x2 array of syllables. Is this horizontal or vertical? Even more confusing is when it can be sensibly read either way.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Finger: the 1971 social network that never died"

seoulbigchris — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:43:57 +0000

In the mid-90s I taught a night class on Unix, and was experimenting with shell scripts from The Unix Programming Environment. There was an example using a loop and the who command to alert you when someone logged onto your local system. My cousin was a professor at a university several states away, and we had already figured out the talk command. So I decided to expand the examples in the book to use finger. By parsing the reply, somehow I could tell if my cousin was logged on, and I would send myself a notice. There was an ISP in the same building, and one day the ISP engineer came to visit me with a stern look. He asked, "By any chance are you sending a finger command every two minutes to this university's mainframe?" I proudly answered, "As a matter of fact, yes, I am!". I eagerly got out my Unix book to show him what I was doing. He just said, "Stop doing that. They have a system console logging program that has churned out dozens of pages of paper printouts because of you". I sheepishly acknowledged my mistake and quit running the script.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams"

seoulbigchris — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:56:39 +0000

I knew a few ham radio guys who could copy Morse code at greater than 20 WPM and simultaneously carry on a conversation.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "I switched from VSCode to Zed"

seoulbigchris — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:24:53 +0000

At first, I thought you meant restaurants which had a big scrolling ticker along the wall so patrons could watch the market while they dine.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Six-decade math puzzle solved by Korean mathematician"

seoulbigchris — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:18:16 +0000

yep, I see those often here -- scary. Another sofa-related irony is that a lot of Koreans don't actually sit on their sofas. Rather, they sit on the (heated) floor and use the sofa as a back rest.

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2024-05-18/culture...

New comment by seoulbigchris in "How to make a Smith chart"

seoulbigchris — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 14:17:23 +0000

If you liked the Smith Chart, you'd love using the Spirule to solve root locus problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_locus_analysis

New comment by seoulbigchris in "How to make a Smith chart"

seoulbigchris — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 14:04:00 +0000

Oh, found a picture of one of these plastic ones flikr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonsphotos/218609214/in/album-...

New comment by seoulbigchris in "How to make a Smith chart"

seoulbigchris — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 13:58:06 +0000

I felt the same way. At some point shortly after graduation, I found a heavy plastic Smith chart that was designed to be written on with a grease pencil, and erased with a cloth when you're done.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Google to obey South Korean order to blur satellite images on maps"

seoulbigchris — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 16:09:19 +0000

I just did a spot check, since I live very near an airport. The airport is blurred / obscured on Naver and Kakao Maps. Google maps and Google Earth still show the actual imagery. I guess Google's blurring hasn't begun yet.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Ask HN: Should there be new RPN calculators to replace the TI-84?"

seoulbigchris — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 16:04:04 +0000

Most of our professors did allow them. As they explained their reasoning, the information you could store in your calculator memory at that time was roughly equivalent to what you could write on a single piece of paper. So they would usually allow either a cheat sheet or a programmable calculator, and designed the tests accordingly.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Ask HN: What kind of whiteboard does not use dry erase markers?"

seoulbigchris — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 12:45:45 +0000

I have a product labeled Boogieboard that I bought on a whim at Costco years back. I want to say it was less that $10? Really simple, no connectivity, it does really seem like an etch-a-sketch with a stylus instead of knobs. Stuck it on the fridge with tacky-tack and it’s been going strong for many years. About the size of A5 (or half an 8-1/2 x 11 piece of paper).

EDIT: looking at the link above, it is called the Jot and sells for $18. Still made apparently.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Ask HN: What kind of whiteboard does not use dry erase markers?"

seoulbigchris — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 12:35:52 +0000

A long time ago, a colleague and I visited a supplier in another state. While we were waiting alone in a conference room, we noticed an unusual looking note taking device at the front of the room. It was a very large easel that looked like a white board, with a tray of markers and an eraser. But it was clearly electronic because it had stuff attached to the top and bottom, some buttons, and was plugged in. We walked up to the easel, drew a large circle on it, and pressed what looked like a COPY button, curious how it was going to perform that task.

The machine whirred into action, scrolling the white board material (which turned out to be a flexible plastic-like film) over the top of the easel, and paying out fresh whiteboard up from the bottom. A perfect duplicate of our circle on paper spat out of a slot in the machine, akin to a FAX machine. As the scrolling came to a stop, it revealed a previously hidden drawing -- someone had drawn a large "X" in the middle of the page. I guess we weren't the only ones who were curious how the machine worked.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained"

seoulbigchris — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 12:30:05 +0000

When I first was exposed to Lynx, I was also working on a project using the Lynx realtime Posix OS. To my knowledge, the two aren't related other than by name. I checked a couple of years ago, Lynx OS still exists but under a different name.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update"

seoulbigchris — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 12:16:21 +0000

Here in South Korea, everyone who uses online banking has to renew and reissue banking certificates every year. While I'm not convinced the certificate process is 100% safe, using certificates is one good concept in the sh*t show of Korean online "security" malware users are required to install.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Firmware update bricks HP printers, makes them unable to use HP cartridges"

seoulbigchris — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 14:15:33 +0000

I also just remembered, these things had option slots. Which I had to use on my III, because I needed more memory to print many kinds of documents / images (I vaguely remember it may have been for printing from AutoCAD). Can't remember a modern printer having add-on circuit boards these days.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Ask HN: Should there be new RPN calculators to replace the TI-84?"

seoulbigchris — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 14:10:25 +0000

Back in college one summer, I had an HP calculator crammed full of programs I had written for various circuit and RF design courses I was taking. I didn't have any way to store them, other than writing them down on paper. On a whim that summer, I went to take the Ham Radio Extra class exam one weekend. The proctor said I needed to erase all the memory from my calculator before using it on the test. I told him no way was I going to do that, but suggested an alternative.

I had been curious how slide rules worked, and had found one after searching high and low for in half a dozen stores before finding probably the last one for sale in Atlanta. The slide rule was in my backpack, so I asked the proctor, could I used the slide rule instead? He chuckled, and said no problem. During the test, one of the proctors tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if he could bring me a bucket of water to cool down my "slip stick". I did pass the test that day, and I used to brag that I got my Extra Class license with a "Slide Rule endorsement".

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Firmware update bricks HP printers, makes them unable to use HP cartridges"

seoulbigchris — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:54:35 +0000

I had a LaserJet III that lasted forever, like over ten years. It just wouldn't die.

New comment by seoulbigchris in "How to Debounce a Contact (2014)"

seoulbigchris — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 13:27:11 +0000

I've used that article several times in the past. I'll also note that many years ago, on projects which were not cost sensitive, we would often use the MC14490 IC for hardware debouncing (mentioned in part 2 of this article).

New comment by seoulbigchris in "Jeju Air Jet Crashes in South Korea With Over 170 Dead or Missing"

seoulbigchris — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 15:06:02 +0000

I live less than a km from a small airport in South Korea, and hear that "cannon" going off all the time. Now I'm curious, is it propane or a person? I'm going to be on the lookout now.