Hacker News: tcbawo

New comment by tcbawo in "Show HN: An 8-bit live gamecast for baseball"

tcbawo — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:12:23 +0000

I was somewhere recently where the World Cup games were on the TV, but the current score was also on what appeared to be a split-flap board mounted to the wall. Seeing your post had me look up commercial availability of these (it seems they exist, but are pricy). Serving up baseball scores in that kind of display would be pretty cool.

New comment by tcbawo in "APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs"

tcbawo — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:11:41 +0000

I always loved the story of the "three-sided" Monty Python record, where the B side had two parallel concentric grooves, causing different tracks to play depending on where the needle was dropped. I always wondered what kind of equipment went into producing it.

New comment by tcbawo in "Usborne 1980s Computer Books"

tcbawo — Sun, 24 May 2026 17:53:27 +0000

There isn't a lot of money in 40 year old computer books targeted at children

New comment by tcbawo in "Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server"

tcbawo — Wed, 06 May 2026 11:46:46 +0000

This game was created before virtual currency and pay to win was a thing. The potential money is probably too corrupting.

New comment by tcbawo in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"

tcbawo — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:04:26 +0000

> Yes, the AI may have produced the recommendation but a human decided to follow it, so that human must be held accountable

It is common and a mistake IMO to rely on the AI as the sole source for answers to follow-up questions. Better verification would have humans sign off on the veracity of fundamental assumptions. But where does this live? Can an AI model be trusted to rely on previous corrections? This seems impossible or possibly adversarial in a public cloud.

New comment by tcbawo in "Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection"

tcbawo — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:04:25 +0000

We now live in a courtier world where flattery and politics determine successful outcomes.

New comment by tcbawo in "British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years"

tcbawo — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:58:57 +0000

I love the accessibility and diversity of large city living in the US, but it is definitely the exception to the rule. The US is hoping for technological breakthroughs in self driving electric cars to bail us out from the sprawl we've created.

New comment by tcbawo in "The Great Unwind"

tcbawo — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:26:33 +0000

The actual smart money isn't selling knowledge to anyone else. They are using it to make money.

New comment by tcbawo in "Text-based web browsers"

tcbawo — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:48:44 +0000

I had an idea once for connecting an old 8-bit computer to the modern web by connecting to a text-based web browser running on another device using the terminal. Maybe one day when I find more time.

New comment by tcbawo in "Dell admits it made a mistake when it abandoned XPS"

tcbawo — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:20:34 +0000

I have a Framework laptop. It was expensive for the specs, but I really appreciate the philosophy of openness. I have replaced both the keyboard and battery, which was easy and painless. At least for Dell, I don't think Framework's target market is a fit for acquisition like Alienware's was. Although, Dell is big enough that they could probably build a competing brand themselves. It would be great for consumers if they did.

New comment by tcbawo in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

tcbawo — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 17:36:44 +0000

From what I remember, trying to fix configuration was mostly to recover from whatever broken state package/distro updates caused. Thanks for the Silverblue suggestion. In recent years, I enjoyed using Pop!_OS, at least on VMs.

New comment by tcbawo in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

tcbawo — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 16:45:30 +0000

It has been a few years, but for example breaking the display, bluetooth, power states/sleep, or wifi. Or subtly messing up dependencies of various other packages that I was trying. I just don't want the overhead of system administration. These days I mostly use VMs or WSL. But I am thinking that I want my host OS to be Linux.

New comment by tcbawo in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

tcbawo — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 16:22:29 +0000

I am pretty sure that my previous attempts at a Linux desktop have failed because I would tweak my setup by installing packages and updates until I broke it and needed to reinstall. But I want my machine to be indestructible and "just work". Waiting day(s) to diagnose and fix an issue just isn't worth it. I have been contemplating a switch to Linux again. This time, I will embrace a LTS distribution and virtualization so that my tinkering doesn't break things. I always want a safe level to fall back to. Also, I would enthusiastically pay for a support subscription. I know they are out there. Which companies/organizations have the most positive impact in the open source community?

New comment by tcbawo in "Dialtone – AOL 3.0 Server"

tcbawo — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 16:38:44 +0000

The dial tone was prior to dialing. Upon connection, there was an audible sound from the modem handshake. Through some google searches, I came across this recording: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo

New comment by tcbawo in "How exchanges turn order books into distributed logs"

tcbawo — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 13:29:47 +0000

It would not surprise me at all if the sequencing step was done via FPGA processing many network inputs at line rate with a shared monotonic clock. This would give it some amount of parallelism.

New comment by tcbawo in "Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board"

tcbawo — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 04:57:16 +0000

Which policies contributed to income inequality?

New comment by tcbawo in "GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code"

tcbawo — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 17:09:19 +0000

For certain jobs, I've done development for Linux while also having a Windows box for other things. Opening Linux GUI apps remotely on my Windows desktop is nice and allows me to consolidate my displays. This is an edge case, for sure. How well does Wayland support this?

New comment by tcbawo in "Visopsys: OS maintained by a single developer since 1997"

tcbawo — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 03:18:11 +0000

Here is a dumb question. In an OS with user-space drivers, can't many existing drivers be wrapped and repurposed? Does this shorten the path to mainstreaming more new OSes?

New comment by tcbawo in "EVs are depreciating faster than gas-powered cars"

tcbawo — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 12:14:22 +0000

Is it really true that ICE has been stable? Cars seem to have been getting many innovations, especially with power, torque, and reliability. We probably don't hear much about it because it is low profile stuff and a mature product.

New comment by tcbawo in "SEC approves Texas Stock Exchange, first new US integrated exchange in decades"

tcbawo — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 12:06:38 +0000

Is there anything interesting or novel about this exchange, other than its headquarters are located in Texas? From what I can tell, the primary data centers will be in New Jersey like all the others.