Hacker News Reader

Thoreandanon Aging may be a program, not a breakdown

Had to go look it up ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protector_(novel) ) but now the 'upgrade pak' joke in the next comment makes sense :)

Thoreandanon Stallman: Thousands Dead, Millions Deprived of Liberties (2001)

Huh, small world, I'm the one who submitted that to Slashdot.

Thoreandanon Coreutils for Windows

Close, it's MinGW/msys - different pathname semantics and under-the-hood approaches.

Thoreandanon The Adventure Family Tree (2024)

TIL that Knuth made a Literate Programming port of Adventure in 2002.

Thoreandanon Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

This reminds me of the 9/11-era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market

...which was shut down in 2003 "after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market".

Thoreandanon DJB's Cryptographic Odyssey: From Code Hero to Standards Gadfly

Considering the amount of random hate he’s conjuring up from green HN usernames, he must be doing something right that’s upsetting to some community or another. :-D

Thoreandanon A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts

Similar technique was used in Daisy Dot II

https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n3/daisydot2.php

Thoreandanon My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

Reminds me of an excellent paper I just read by a former Google DeepMind Ethics Research Team member

https://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/114/1/4 - Reinecke, Madeline G., et al. "The double-edged sword of anthropomorphism in llms." Proceedings. Vol. 114. No. 1. MDPI, 2025 Author: https://www.mgreinecke.com/

Thoreandanon ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss

Does your source .pdf material have FlateDecode'd chunks or did you fully uncompress it?

Thoreandanon Multi-User Dungeon (MUD)

Harry says: What are you waiting for?

Thoreandanon Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

Checking in - it's not possible to disable from the app anymore, is it? The preference setting is still there, but ignored, afaict.

Thoreandanon Choose Your Own Adventure

Today I learned: The creator of Chose Your Own Adventure is currently 94 and has a website at https://edwardpackard.com/

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Packard_(writer)

Thoreandanon Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson

Huh. Posting a screenshot of the tweet just got my FB account suspended.

Thoreandanon Executed Chinese prisoners likely used in UK exhibition (2021)

Bonus: They leak! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jun-04-et-quick...

Thoreandanon A Mysterious Website I Stumbled Upon

Viewing it under Chrome, as soon as the scrollbar reached a certain point, it started progressively zoom-increasing the text size. Weird bug.

Thoreandanon Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre

I'm waiting for BoringX or OpenX or, well, any other fork. Search for 'xorg drama'.

Thoreandanon Show HN: 90s.dev - game maker that runs on the web

Mentioning the licensing up front would be nice.

Thoreandanon Getting Older Isn't What You Think

Feels.

Not gonna blow condescending garbage your way. Your feeling is not unique but not in the majority, and it’s exhausting to hear the ‘have’ ppl with no actual ability to relate jabber on.

Hope you can find bits of joy where you can make them.

Thoreandanon Careless People

It's right there in the URL, along with #ZDGAF

Thoreandanon The Gruen Transfer is consuming the internet

That's a fun coincidence, I just learned about Myrtle last Friday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T-8E-dEbwc

Thoreandanon I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

I'd always wanted to see a physical copy of the $5,000.00 'Deluxe Distribution' -

https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/16/gnu_bulletin_23....

> The FSF Deluxe Distribution contains the binaries and sources to hundreds of different programs including GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, the GNU Debugger, the complete MIT X Window System, and the GNU utilities.

> You may choose one of these machines and operating systems: HP 9000 series 200, 300, 700, or 800 (4.3 BSD or HP-UX); RS/6000 (AIX); Sony NEWS 68k (4.3 BSD or NewsOS 4); Sun 3, 4, or SPARC (SunOS 4 or Solaris). If your machine or system is not listed, or if a specific program has not been ported to that machine, please call the FSF office at the phone number below or send e-mail to gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu.

> The manuals included are one each of the Bison, Calc, Gawk, GNU C Compiler, GNU C Library, GNU Debugger, Flex, GNU Emacs Lisp Reference, Make, Texinfo, and Termcap manuals; six copies of the manual for GNU Emacs; and a packet of reference cards each for GNU Emacs, Calc, the GNU Debugger, Bison, and Flex.

> In addition to the printed and on-line documentation, every Deluxe Distribution includes a CD-ROM (in ISO 9660 format with Rock Ridge extensions) that contains sources of our software.

I wonder how many (if any?) were sold, it'd be an excellent museum piece.

Thoreandanon The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

It'd be a privilege to be able to disconnect from the feeds, but trying to rebuild in-person social interactions when you're old and have no family or local friends really sucks. Facebook's become:

* Who died this week

* Spammers liking your posts and asking for friend adds

* Gofundme's for ppl who will now spend the rest of their lives in medical debt

* Interesting articles maybe twice a week or so.

Nobody I know in town is on Mastodon or BSky.

The silence is deafening.

Thoreandanon BitNet b1.58 2B4T Technical Report

I guess B1FF@BITNET posts are gonna come from an LLM now.

Context: https://web.archive.org/web/20030830105202/http://www.catb.o...

Thoreandanon mIRC 7.81

I registered my copy. I also remember that in the Help->About, if you clicked Khaled Mardam-Bey's nose it would squeak.

Thoreandanon Show HN: Resurrecting Infocom's Unix Z-Machine with Cosmopolitan

Game Developers Conference Classic Gaming Postmortem: Zork (2014)

  "Dave Lebling, co-author of Zork and co-founder of Infocom, gives a postmortem talk on the classic text adventure. Lebling, who currently works as a senior principal software engineer at BAE Systems, created the "grue," co-authored Zork I-III and wrote seven other text adventures. He plans to give an hour-long talk explaining, among other things, the creation of both the mainframe and microcomputer versions of Zork, the trials and tribulations of coding a cutting-edge text parser, and what it was like to experiment with self-publishing at a time when most PC games were sold in hand-packed plastic bags.

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020612/Classic-Game-Postmorte...

https://archive.org/details/GDC2014Lebling

Thoreandanon The Church FAQ

Seconded - https://bsky.app/profile/scalzi.com is one of the more interesting feeds on the site.

Thoreandanon IO Devices and Latency

I was reminded of Mel as well! If you haven't seen it, Usagi Electric on YouTube has gotten a drum-memory system from the 1950s nearly fully-functional again.

Thoreandanon A 19yo woman graduated from high school with honors even though she can't read

Fun fact: If a student in my state is handed a diploma, they've effectively been kicked out of the educational system and aren't eligible for remedial assistance. Context: Tried helping someone not dissimilar to the person in the article.

Thoreandanon Apple's Software Quality Crisis

I'd consider the tools in the iPhone's Photos app to be amongst the most "core" features - yet there've been glitches in it for the past year where if you annotate a picture (say, by adding text), the position of everything you've added is screwed up when you hit 'Done'. I'm sure that's the tip of the iceberg.

Thoreandanon A decade later, a decade lost (2024)

Context: This is remembering his daughter, Rebecca. (2008-2014)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Meyer#:~:text=In%20201...