Hacker News: soneil

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

soneil — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:09:38 +0000

2100 entries over 40 years is pretty much a show a week. Talk about artefacts of a life well lived.

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

soneil — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:08:10 +0000

Sigur Ros have a surprising number of shows on their ftp, which is delightfully retro.

New comment by soneil in "The Seasons Are Wrong"

soneil — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:47:11 +0000

I think it's interesting that traditionally Ireland used a different calendar for seasons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_calendar

So Winter is Nov, Dec, Jan - and Spring is Feb, March, April. Which honestly, makes sense to me.

Except it's the middle of April, I'm freezing, and got pelted with hail yesterday. The west coast cares little for seasons!

New comment by soneil in "Judge orders restoration of Voice of America"

soneil — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:39:57 +0000

The last one is so close to the point. Iran had Internet blackouts earlier this year, Russia has been experimenting with the same - options like shortwave are just as relevant as ever.

New comment by soneil in "Head of FCC threatens broadcaster licenses over critical coverage of Iran war"

soneil — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 02:32:04 +0000

I think "odious" really undersells it. A free press is an important part of a functioning democracy. What's the use in being able to vote against people doing wrong, if no-one's allowed to tell you about the wrong?

New comment by soneil in "MacBook Neo"

soneil — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:50:48 +0000

> Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?

I believe IBM hardware is still applicable for this, the Thinkpad just isn't IBM hardware anymore.

New comment by soneil in "DNS Explained – How Domain Names Get Resolved"

soneil — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:41:58 +0000

I have to admit - I still grind my teeth every time I see "dns propagation" used without a direct follow-up that it's a myth, you're looking at cascading cache expiry.

Propagation might be a useful way to visualise it, but doesn't match reality unless every cache is a warm cache.

New comment by soneil in "FBI couldn't get into WaPo reporter's iPhone because Lockdown Mode enabled"

soneil — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:37:21 +0000

Compelled speech is protected, fingerprints aren't.

Imagine it's 1926 and none of this tech is an issue yet. The police can fingerprint and photograph you at intake, they can't compel speech or violate the 5th.

That's exactly what's being applied here. It's not that the police can do more or less than they could in 1926, it's that your biometrics can do more than they did in 1926. They're just fingerprinting you / photographing you .. using your phone.

New comment by soneil in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

soneil — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:50:59 +0000

later, like 1956? The world's first commercial HDD was 5,000,000 characters.

New comment by soneil in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

soneil — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 20:44:50 +0000

> with the context mostly being HDD manufacturers who want to inflate their drive sizes

This is a myth. The first IBM harddrive was 5,000,000 characters in 1956 - before bytes were even common usage. Drives have always been base10, it's not a conspiracy.

Drives are base10, lines are base10, clocks are base10, pretty much everything but RAM is base10. Base2 is the exception, not the rule.

New comment by soneil in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

soneil — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 20:24:19 +0000

It goes back way further than that. The first IBM harddrive was the IBM 350 for the IBM 305 RAMDAC. It was 5 million characters. Not bytes, bytes weren't "a thing" yet. 5,000,000 characters. The very first harddrive was base-10.

Here's my theory. In the beginning, everything was base10. Because humans.

Binary addressing made sense for RAM. Especially since it makes decoding address lines into chip selects (or slabs of core, or whatever) a piece of cake, having chips be a round number in binary made life easier for everyone.

Then early DOS systems (CP/M comes to mind particularly) mapped disk sectors to RAM regions, so to enable this shortcut, disk sectors became RAM-shaped. The 512-byte sector was born. File sizes can be written in bytes, but what actually matters is how many sectors they take up. So file sizing inherited this shortcut.

But these shortcuts never affected "real computers", only the hamstrung crap people were running at home.

So today we have multiple ecosystems. Some born out of real computers, some with a heavy DOS inheritance. Some of us were taught DOS's limitations as truth, and some of us weren't.

New comment by soneil in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

soneil — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 20:21:36 +0000

They almost always mean power of 10, unless you're discussing RAM, RAM addressing, or RAM pages. (or flash, which has inherited most of the same for most of the same reasons)

New comment by soneil in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

soneil — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 20:20:31 +0000

This is the bit (sic) that drives me nuts.

RAM had binary sizing for perfectly practical reasons. Nothing else did (until SSDs inherited RAM's architecture).

We apply it to all the wrong things mostly because the first home computers had nothing but RAM, so binary sizing was the only explanation that was ever needed. And 50 years later we're sticking to that story.

New comment by soneil in "Reliable 25 Gigabit Ethernet via Thunderbolt"

soneil — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:31:32 +0000

Pretty much anywhere you have networked storage? Gigabit is about on-par with pre-sata ATA133.

New comment by soneil in "Debian's Git Transition"

soneil — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 03:28:12 +0000

This was one of the "lessons learnt" from the XZ incident. One of the (many) steps they took to avoid scrutiny was modifications that existed in the real tarball but not the repo.

New comment by soneil in "Modern Walkmans"

soneil — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 13:31:16 +0000

The sad thing is that's pretty accurate.

I do value the inconvenience. When I put an album on, I put an album on. I don't hit next, random, go wandering off down rabbitholes. I put the album on.

And I do see the cost as a feature, somewhat. It feels like I got something for my money, in a way that paying for a zip doesn't.

New comment by soneil in "Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image"

soneil — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 15:50:39 +0000

What you'll tend to notice with "willing participants" is that they're not looking for truth, they're looking for confirmation. No-one asks for proof when you tell them what they want to hear.

New comment by soneil in "Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image"

soneil — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 15:48:42 +0000

In my family it's the other way around - it's the people that used to tell us not to talk to strangers on the internet, and not to believe everything we see on the internet, who are now doing precisely that.

New comment by soneil in "Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright"

soneil — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:15:23 +0000

Isn't it great being able to rely on tech that isn't doing what we think it's doing.

I don't even need to keep an eye on my cooking anymore, the smoke alarm beeps when I get too close.

New comment by soneil in "RFCs: Blueprints of the Internet"

soneil — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 22:16:30 +0000

My understanding is that the "nugget of truth" that birthed the "routing around nuclear attack" myth, is that it was a consideration in Paul Baran's packet-switching work at RAND.

So it wasn't a design consideration for ARPANET, but it would have shown up in enough early papers to give the myth some legs.