Hacker News: simmons

New comment by simmons in "Ted Turner has died"

simmons — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:18:33 +0000

Ah, that took a second to get. If anyone is stumped, it's a reference to Turner Time [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TBS_(American_TV_channel)#Turn...

New comment by simmons in "Who Killed the Florida Orange?"

simmons — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:58:21 +0000

A Sam's Club in my area has started selling fresh squeezed orange juice. It's quite delicious. (And yes, it's pricey.) I've looked around at many other stores (including places like Whole Foods) and nobody else seems to be doing this.

New comment by simmons in "Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989"

simmons — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:01:29 +0000

Yes, the latest chips were very expensive back then, and out of reach for most people who would continue buying new computers with older chips. (As opposed to how most people today buy an iPhone or a Mac or whatever with the latest semiconductor technology.) I got my 25MHz 386 in 1991, over two years after the 486 was announced, and I had one of the fastest computers of anybody in school... for a short time.

New comment by simmons in "A list of fun destinations for telnet"

simmons — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:37:39 +0000

Wow, that takes me back. It reminds me of the pre-web days when people would set up telnet services for providing information about the weather, ham radio callsigns, lyrics, FTP search engine (archie), and of course BBSs. An acquaintance of mine maintained a list of telnet BBSs and services that was fairly popular at the time. [1]

[1] http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/internetinfo.txt

New comment by simmons in "Micron to exit consumer memory business amid global supply shortage"

simmons — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:26:16 +0000

I was excited earlier this year to discover that Micron (Crucial) was manufacturing 64GB DDR5 "laptop memory" modules, allowing me to pick up a couple in early September to build an ASUS NUC VM server with 128GB of RAM. It was a little hard to get even then, but I found a vendor selling it at a reasonable price.

It worked out so well that I decided to get some more. Needless to say, it went from unavailable to being available for double the price. Now, I guess it won't be available at all in the future. :(

New comment by simmons in "The AirPods Pro 3 flight problem"

simmons — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 19:31:14 +0000

I don't think it was ever common, since earphones weren't that popular until people started calling them "earbuds", but the term was historically used in at least some circles in the U.S. The 1988 Radio Shack catalog [1] seems to mention "earphone" 57 times, including two mono earphone products.

[1] https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Catalogs/Radio-Sha...

New comment by simmons in "StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game"

simmons — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 15:21:22 +0000

When you become good at using Palm graffiti, it's not too bad. I remember playing through all of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ game on a Palm IIIx while commuting on the bus between Boulder and Denver back in 1999 or so, and being amazed that I could play an actual computer game on a handheld device.

New comment by simmons in "Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account"

simmons — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 18:39:50 +0000

It's just a matter of buying from the right web page at Microsoft's web site. At least as of June, I was able to buy a license with a traditional license key here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...

New comment by simmons in "Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account"

simmons — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 16:37:46 +0000

I was in this same situation earlier this year with one machine that was using a license attached to my Microsoft account. From what I read online, I thought I was freeing up the license by running "slmgr /upk" and "slmgr /cpky" on the old machine, but I guess not. I was eventually able to get the license transferred to the new machine, but only after a very painful morning of working with an MS support person.

I learned that there are two ways of buying a Windows 11 license. One way results in getting a traditional license key that can be reliably transferred, and the other way (tying the license to your Microsoft account) risks losing your license. :( I'm very careful to only buy licenses the former way, now.

New comment by simmons in "Bear is now source-available"

simmons — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 18:01:36 +0000

I would love to hear your other theories!

I don't think it would exactly be "create a fork of this repo", but if a developer invests significant time and effort solving hard problems where the solutions are implemented in the released source, once an LLM model is trained on it, then someone else could quickly and easily have the LLM generate a new program that implements the novel solutions. Whether this is a problem or not may depend on the motivations of the developer, but this potential for IP laundering may very well begin influencing the licenses and methods of distribution that people choose.

(Of course, I suppose at some point AI will be able to analyze and learn from binary executables or obfuscated source...)

New comment by simmons in "1981 BASIC adventure game comes to a new platform, the TRS-80 MC-10"

simmons — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 17:42:16 +0000

Very cool! I had an MC-10 when I was a little kid. It was my first computer, and I didn't know anyone else who had one. I didn't have the book with this Arctic Adventure program, but I had another book with an adventure game you could type in. [1] I stayed up past my bedtime and spent significant time typing it in. However, after typing in much of the program, I encountered my very first "out of memory" error. I was astonished that 4KB of RAM wouldn't be enough, and that I was going to need a better computer!

I clearly had the wrong book for that computer. ;)

[1] https://www.retroprogrammez.fr/listings/aventure/cia/

New comment by simmons in "Ask HN: What's Your Car?"

simmons — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 15:15:52 +0000

2002 Honda Accord. An immensely reliable car that is built to last, and is inexpensive to maintain.

New comment by simmons in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)"

simmons — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 23:45:45 +0000

Neat! I sometimes play around with the idea of reverse engineering and transcompiling a tiny game that I think was probably written in Turbo Pascal 4.0. Maybe 4.0 supported optimizations, but this program seems to have been compiled in a debug mode. (At least, it seems to have no optimization, and has the default {$S+} stack overflow checking at the start of every function.) The lack of optimization makes it (and perhaps other programs written in Turbo Pascal) a really attractive artifact to experiment with transcompiling. When I realized that only the first segment was the actual game, and the other three segments corresponded to standard units used for I/O (etc.), which could be harder to analyze, I realized I could just omit those segments and replace them with new functions suitable for the transcompilation target. Maybe some day I'll get around to finishing it.

Good luck!

New comment by simmons in "The April Fools joke that might have got me fired"

simmons — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:48:33 +0000

> In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display. > ...Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST

You mention Netware, but as I recall the Netware function you describe was just "SEND" and "NET SEND" was a Microsoft networking thing. (But maybe there was some integration between the two after my experience with Netware, who knows.)

I mainly wanted to say, as someone who used/abused a Netware network in high school, I disassembled the SEND program and discovered that the username included in the message is not authenticated at all -- the IPX (or NETX, I forget which) software interrupt just took a string, and the SEND executable formatted the username into this string. So by crafting your own SEND program that used the software interrupt directly, you could easily forge any username you wanted. So you could very easily send a message from "ADMIN". :)

This should not be construed as a confession of any network shenanigans that may or may not have occurred at my high school. ;) :D :)

New comment by simmons in "The History of S.u.S.E"

simmons — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 15:12:55 +0000

Wow, the mention of SLS takes me back. SLS was the first Linux distribution I ever used. (Not counting the very early days of manually extracting tar archives of userspace binaries to make a system...) I remember passing around the precious shoebox of SLS floppies from person to person in high school. :)

New comment by simmons in "David Lynch has died"

simmons — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 19:50:16 +0000

I thought I was the only one who preferred David Lynch's Dune. I'm glad to find out I'm not alone. I explain to people that it depends on if you're a bigger David Lynch fan or a Frank Herbert fan. I have nothing against Herbert, but I guess there's something about Lynch's work that speaks to me, even a movie like Dune that he himself hated.

New comment by simmons in "Ask HN: What do you look for in a work monitor?"

simmons — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 15:53:46 +0000

Even outside of gaming, people's needs are going to vary a great deal. Some people are sensitive to refresh rates, some people really need great color reproduction, etc.

But since you asked what I optimize for... I'm cheap, and tend to opt for inexpensive, no-frills, but reliable 4K monitors. I have several Philips 278E 27-inch 4K monitors. I don't see these on Amazon any more, so maybe this model has been discontinued, but they ran about $250 USD or so. I use a couple on my main workstation for coding, my wife has a couple (that are secondary to an Apple Studio Display), and I have a floating one for the workbench. I find this model to be a sweet spot for my needs. They aren't as beautiful as an Apple display, but they're sufficient.

Potential cons include no camera (I have a separate camera on top, although it sometimes obscures some of the display due to narrow bezels), lousy speakers (I use headsets), and they seem oddly sensitive to electrical fields in the environment (for example, they'll turn off momentarily if I static shock myself on something nearby).

New comment by simmons in "My Google developer account was terminated and I can't open a new account"

simmons — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 18:06:30 +0000

It's not completely clear to be that the original poster did anything nefarious. (Although the Stack Overflow post has been deleted, so I don't know what was mentioned there.) It seems to me that section 10.3 could cover termination due to a mundane administrative detail via "You cease being an authorized developer".

For example, my developer profile is slated for removal in a few weeks because I haven't provided a verified phone number and email address that can be publicly available for the world to see. (And I don't care to, since I haven't used this developer account in years, and I'm not actively doing Android development.) Does this mean I'll be barred for life?

New comment by simmons in "Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?"

simmons — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 22:19:49 +0000

I've been doing this for years, as well. I've also found that the majority of companies I give an email address to are actually surprisingly good stewards of that information. However, I have found a number of email leaks. It looks like my block list is up to 31 addresses. Most of those are leaks that led to spam. (Although one was a smoothie chain that insisted on sending me email every single day, and their unsubscribe page always seemed to be "malfunctioning".)

I don't think all or most of these companies on the list are intentionally selling my address to spammers. I suspect most of these leaks are due to poor handling of the data or server compromises. (Surely Adobe, for example, isn't so desperate that they would sell my address to spammers.) But whether by malice or incompetence, I can easily block them.

New comment by simmons in "Self-Driving Cars Get Help from Humans Miles Away"

simmons — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 13:01:37 +0000

The idea of cars being driven remotely by someone on the other side of the world was mentioned in Charles Stross's 2007 science fiction novel Halting State. I think about it sometimes, but I always come to the conclusion that the latency would be too high. A 100ms latency might make the difference between a near-miss and a collision.