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Stratoscopeon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2026)

Location: Menlo Park, CA

Remote: Yes, or hybrid if nearby

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data

Résumé/CV: https://www.geary.com/resume.html or https://www.geary.com/resume.pdf and https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgeary/

Email: mike@geary.com

Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:

• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.

• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.

• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.

• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.

• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.

• Technical and general interest writing.

Open to full time or contract.

I look forward to talking with you!

Stratoscopeon The Road to MS-DOS 2.0

16KB and no floppy drive. That was my first PC!

I could get the extra 48KB memory for less than IBM charged. More importantly, double sided floppy drives were already on the market but you couldn't get them from IBM at any price.

So I went to a local component supplier and got a pair of double sided drives. They worked "out of the box" in DOS, but unsurprisingly, only side 1 of each drive showed up as A: and B: drives.

So I wrote a TSR to add C: and D: drive letterss which were side 2 of each drive.

It was super easy.

Later I heard about a fancier TSR that combined side 1 and 2 of each drive into a single drive letter with twice the capacity.

But that was a much more complicated task, and I was happy enough with my four-drive-letter solution.

Stratoscopeon Engineer used 360-degree cam hidden in bag of snacks to steal DRAM process tech

Full title:

Engineer used 360-degree cam hidden in bag of snacks in attempt to steal DRAM process tech for China — IT security team pinpointed perp due to camera's leaky wireless signals

Stratoscopeon Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

Thanks for the correction! It was a long time ago that I used TypeScript, and making things worse (for my memory) it was an Angular project.

So today, most people and teams avoid the parts of TS that require compilation into different JS, and --erasableSyntaxOnly lets you enforce this, right?

Stratoscopeon Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

The other one I read about was parameter properties in constructors.

And thank you for the correction! It was quite a few years ago that I used TypeScript, and I think the landscape was different then.

Making things even fuzzier in my mind, this was an Angular project, and it was hard to keep track of what was Angular and what was TypeScript.

It sounds like people these days actively avoid the parts of TypeScript that require translation into different JS code.

Stratoscopeon Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

That is true only if you confine your TS code to be pure JS plus type annotations.

There are TS constructs that require compilation into equivalent JS, such as enums and namespaces.

Stratoscopeon The Mysterious Case of the JetBlue Flight That Went into Free Fall

https://archive.ph/AWMz8

Stratoscopeon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)

Location: Menlo Park, CA

Remote: Yes, or hybrid if nearby

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data

Résumé/CV: https://www.geary.com/resume.html or https://www.geary.com/resume.pdf and https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgeary/

Email: mike@geary.com

Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:

• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.

• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.

• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.

• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.

• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.

Open to full time or contract.

I look forward to talking with you!

Stratoscopeon Don't be a meat proxy

For anyone unfamiliar with the meat reference, here is Terry Bisson's delightful 1991 short-short story, "They're Made out of Meat":

https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...

Stratoscopeon The Cold Email

Here's my cold email story.

In the Netflix series The Good Place, there is an AI character named Janet, who helps assist people who have gone to that place where you go after you die.

One quirk when you're in the Good Place: you can't use swear words. If you try to say "fuck" it comes out "fork".

Janet is portrayed brilliantly by D'Arcy Carden. Her dad is Dennis Erokan, who published MicroTimes and BAM (Bay Area Music) Magazine and produced the Bammies award festival. MicroTimes was one of those big thick magazines like Computer Shopper, full of interesting ads and a few articles.

After I discovered this, I found Dennis' email and wrote to him:

---

Hi Dennis!

Yes, I know it's usually D'Arcy who gets the autograph requests.

My friend Ro and I recently finished watching The Good Place. What a wonderful series!

I always enjoy learning about the people who worked to create a great show like this.

After a bit of research I was like "What the fork? Janet's real life dad is the MicroTimes guy!"

So I checked my archival drawer and found one of my old MicroTimes from 1996.

Ro lived in New York in the late 1980s, and she flew to SF a few of those years just to go to the Bammies.

Her secret hope was to somehow get acquainted with Steve Perry. But she did see Ted Nugent staring at her in a bookstore. So that was at least a consolation prize.

Ro's birthday is coming up later this month. I stealthily searched eBay and got the 1986 and 1988 BAM Magazines with the Bammies Scrapbooks.

I wonder if you could autograph these? I would be more than happy to take you out for lunch or dinner at any of your favorite places up in your neck of the woods. Or I could just bring them to your office or any location you want if that's more convenient for you.

And if we can work out a time when Ro could join us (probably easier on a weekend), she would be delighted to meet you!

---

Dennis was quite tickled by this. We took him to lunch at his favorite restaurant, he signed our MicroTimes and BAM magazines, and we all had a great time sharing stories about some of the people we knew.

Stratoscopeon Substack writers, you need a website

What if I'm 74? ;-)

Stratoscopeon Substack writers, you need a website

Excellent point! In fact I do have an automatic monthly donation to The Internet Archive.

Of course the URLs all change in archived pages, but at least the content is there for anyone motivated enough to find it.

A funny coincidence... I registered geary.com (my last name) in 1994, and just used it for email. A few years later I got a letter from a group of civic boosters in Geary, Oklahoma. They even enclosed a Geary Water Tower T-shirt which I still have. They saw that I didn't have a website up on this domain and asked me if they could have it.

I explained that this would be impractical since it was also my email address.

So they registered gearyok.com instead and put up a website built around Java applets. Oops.

But it got me thinking. I put up a static page (frequently edited by me) that I called Geary Central: A Guide to Gearys on the Net. This page is still up:

https://www.geary.com/oldsite.html

Naturally I gave Geary, Oklahoma top billing for inspiring this.

A few years after that I changed geary.com to a MoinMoin wiki devoted to the same topic, and moved the old static page to its current location.

Just a few days ago, someone emailed me about how they had stumbled onto my oldsite.html page and enjoyed this "blast from the past".

In 2011, my old ISP decommissioned the server I had the wiki on. I was planning to migrate it to something more modern like Drupal, but the time and effort weren't worth it to me at the time.

I did find the latest version of the "new" Geary Central on archive.org and shared it in my reply:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110927053309/http://www.geary....

Stratoscopeon Substack writers, you need a website

> I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com.

I thought about this question when I recently started writing a few articles on Substack.

I chose not to use my own domain, even though I have a few.

Why? I want my writing to outlive me.

When I am no longer able to pay for domain renewals, my own domains will expire. Hopefully {my-hn-username}.substack.com will still be around.

Time will tell.

Stratoscopeon What's the story behind the names of Cloudflare's name servers? (2013)

The classic version...

There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off by one errors.

Stratoscopeon The American E.V. Has Been Crushed. Will It Take the U.S. Auto Industry with It?

NYT gift link (no paywall, valid for 30 days):

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/magazine/electric-cars-am...

Stratoscopeon Doctors die. It's not like the rest of us, but it should be (2016)

"does some heavy lifting"

Stratoscopeon How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

Title should be corrected to the original:

---

How doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us, but it should be

---

Note to submitters: Check the title after submitting. If the HN algorithm mangled it as badly as this one, edit it!

Stratoscopeon The Mind-Bending Company That Gets a Million Job Applications–and Rejects 99.9%

https://archive.ph/kY6Th

> Getting an offer from Bending Spoons, which owns AOL [and Evernote and Vimeo], has become harder than getting into Harvard

Stratoscopeon How RCA Victor sold Sound Service to classrooms in 1939

The Bell System did this when dial telephone service was first introduced.

They held town meetings with a giant rotary dial onstage where someone explained it and demonstrated how to dial your calls.

And they made an instructional film about it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p45T7U5oi9Q

Stratoscopeon I Need a Job, Anything

Here's a clickable link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gm9oSxKFKhNoDrahETs00At2...

Stratoscopeon It's officially the end of an era for Adobe

This is a better article than the clickbait title suggests. An interesting account of Adobe's history and business practices.

Stratoscopeon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026)

For anyone as confused as I was about the ICHRA initialism, here is some information about it:

https://ichra.com/

As a more general tip to teams with unfamiliar terminology, it only takes a moment to add a link to a resource like that.

Stratoscopeon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2026)

Location: Menlo Park, CA

Remote: Yes, or hybrid if nearby

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data

Résumé/CV: https://www.geary.com/resume.html or https://www.geary.com/resume.pdf and https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgeary/

Email: mike@geary.com

Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:

• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.

• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.

• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.

• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.

• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.

Open to full time or contract.

I look forward to talking with you!

Stratoscopeon Have you restarted your computer this week?

Because someone submitted it, and people found it interesting and upvoted it.

Did you have a different qualification in mind?

Stratoscopeon 1983 Northern Telecom Commodore Phone

I love the em dash–and I didn't even notice them in this article.

Stratoscopeon Ask for no, don't ask for yes (2022)

Hello $BOSS!

I have a code change that is so vital to the survival of our company that:

1. It requires your immediate review.

2. If you fail to respond by Monday, I will push it to production.

---

Can anyone suggest what is wrong here?

Stratoscopeon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)

Location: Menlo Park, CA

Remote: Yes, or hybrid if nearby

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data

Résumé/CV: https://www.geary.com/resume.html or https://www.geary.com/resume.pdf and https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgeary/

Email: mike@geary.com

Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:

• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.

• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.

• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.

• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.

• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.

Open to full time or contract.

I look forward to talking with you!

Stratoscopeon United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

> it was probably in checked luggage

Which would violate FAA regulations if it was powered on (as it obviously was):

"When portable electronic devices powered by lithium batteries are in checked baggage, they must be completely powered off and protected to prevent unintentional activation or damage."

https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/packsafe/portable-electronic-devi...

Stratoscopeon Boston and Bermuda

This must be Bermuda Week. Just yesterday I saw an interesting video about Bermuda from Geography by Geoff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NVb5M7m9xg

Stratoscopeon Hindenburg’s Smoking Room

Of course there were smoking and non-smoking sections on airplanes. The same air recirculated through the entire airplane, and the non-smoking section began the very next row after the smoking section.