Hacker News: xxr

New comment by xxr in "15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram"

xxr — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 07:51:11 +0000

When I read the title, I thought "morg" was one of those goofy tech words that I had missed but whose meaning was still pretty clear in context (like a portmanteau of "Microsoft" and "borged," the latter of which I've never heard as a verb but still works). I guess it's a goofy tech word now.

New comment by xxr in "15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram"

xxr — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 07:48:05 +0000

Yeah, isn't this why we're told everything "moves so much slower at a bigco" than at a startup?

New comment by xxr in "Joedb, the Journal-Only Embedded Database"

xxr — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:35:51 +0000

Was going to say that I hope Joe doesn't end up going to prison for an unspeakable crime, but then I saw it was an acronym.

New comment by xxr in "Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle"

xxr — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:34:50 +0000

>they broke all the time

While I was reading the OP I kept thinking about how an accounting firm's entire ability to do business rested on the continued functioning of a parallel-port dongle. I just have to imagine that they had a box full of these.

New comment by xxr in "The sword-wielding man hired to kick squatters out of empty Oakland homes"

xxr — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 21:21:43 +0000

I imagine this is a temporary gig until the burbclaves build out their own armed security services and he moves on to high-speed pizza delivery.

New comment by xxr in "I'm just having fun"

xxr — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 05:48:47 +0000

> The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade.

Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?

New comment by xxr in "8-bit Boléro"

xxr — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 05:16:37 +0000

“Initially, Ravel was to create a variation on the music of Isaac Albéniz, but copyright laws prevented him from doing so.” [your article]

“[Koji Kondo] had planned to use Maurice Ravel's Boléro as the title theme as it perfectly matched its speed, seeing as under Japanese copyright law, music is released into the public domain 50 years after the composer's death. However, Kondo was forced to change it in November 1985, late in the game's development, after learning that it had only been 47 years and 11 months after Ravel's death.”[1]

Funny how things rhyme.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_(video_gam...

New comment by xxr in "The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)"

xxr — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 14:58:52 +0000

A few years after this, a documentary was made about some of the men still living at the Sunshine (mentioned in the first paragraph): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0m2FaC8GUs

New comment by xxr in "Facts about throwing good parties"

xxr — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 01:41:51 +0000

Great assessment of Dave Barry

New comment by xxr in "Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)"

xxr — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 03:28:16 +0000

> The most timeless thing here is Linux retaining its "highest hacker to user ratio".

More so than BSD? Or still more than just the OSs Carmack listed?

Chuck E. Cheese's Annual Report For Kids (1982) [pdf]

xxr — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 22:49:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.showbizpizza.com/info/documents/ptt/ptt_annualreport1982kids.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45087784

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by xxr in "Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room"

xxr — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 04:10:00 +0000

I’ve been seeking out classic phpbb-style forums more and more for community. I just stopped browsing Reddit a few weeks ago after realizing there was nothing I’d truly miss: no characters that I’d come to know, and no reason to maintain a relationship with anyone there in particular. Regarding “identity,” I actually feel that Reddit (and of course Facebook) rely on it too much: maybe I want to be someone in one place and someone else entirely somewhere else (or at least not be easily traced between the two).

New comment by xxr in "New treatment eliminates bladder cancer in 82% of patients"

xxr — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:32:30 +0000

Very sorry for your loss. An uncle had bladder cancer about 15 years ago, and while he survived, it began a very steep decline that led to his passing in 2022.

New comment by xxr in "303Gen – 303 acid loops generator"

xxr — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 18:06:25 +0000

Right off the bat I get something that sounds like something Frank Klepacki would have used in the Red Alert 2 soundtrack (likely pulled from Methods of Mayhem). Nice.

New comment by xxr in "Welcome to url.town, population 465"

xxr — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:24:33 +0000

> For example, TFA looks like a page I'd have browsed in IE5 as a kid, but if you look at the markup, it's using HTML5 tags and Flexbox (which became a W3C WR in 2017), while a period site would have used an HTML table to get the same effect.

Are they going out of their way to recreate an aesthetic that was originally the easiest thing to create given the language specs of the past, or is there something about this look and feel that is so fundamental to the idea of making websites that basically anything that looks like any era or variety of HTML will converge on it?

New comment by xxr in "Personal aviation is about to get interesting (2023)"

xxr — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 15:17:54 +0000

Does this result in a “you get to live but you’re never allowed to fly a plane again” situation?

New comment by xxr in "What went wrong for Yahoo"

xxr — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 01:54:50 +0000

> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.

People also like to point to how foolish of Blockbuster it was not to buy Netflix when they had the opportunity to, but I’m also inclined to believe that the merged companies would never have made the decisive moves involving streaming video and content production. It’s tempting to say that Amazon would have filled in the streaming video gap (although perhaps late enough for feature film and TV piracy to proliferate a little further into the mainstream), but I wonder whether Apple would have adapted its iTunes service into Apple TV first. (Another dark horse I like to think about here would be RealMedia which may have identified a niche.)

New comment by xxr in "Do not download the app, use the website"

xxr — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:22:29 +0000

Does it work the way CAN-SPAM is supposed to work (marketing can be unsubscribed from with rules about what constitutes "transactional" messages)?

New comment by xxr in "Do not download the app, use the website"

xxr — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:11:21 +0000

>app icons are just "advertisement"

You wouldn't believe the volume of actual advertisements that show up as push notifications on my wife's phone

New comment by xxr in "Ozzy Osbourne has died"

xxr — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:35:38 +0000

I feel like everyone on the inside knew it was coming very soon which is why it seemed so peculiarly Ozzy-focused down to the cake that Geezer Butler brought out to him at the end of the show (and I imagine the contingency plan was to have vocalists from all the other bands fill in during the Black Sabbath set).