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flomo

2,565 karma · joined May 10, 2010

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flomo··on Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics
IIRC they did have streets, but people were allowed to camp 'off the grid'.
flomo··on What even is an OS now?
Because you could get pirated games from the other kids at school. Or at least that seemed like the most popular reason.
flomo··on What About Rails?
Yeah, good point about local containers being the future. And maybe the local LLM just auto fixes your COM registry or whatever.

Just remember the classic fails such as Java, Flash, Silverlight, etc. Web always had the better UI for 95% of usecases, and it gets better by the year. And I expect our machine overlords will continue that.

flomo··on What About Rails?
Aside from the actual politics, DHH is clearly in "fuck you mode". I certainly don't trust that he's going to make decisions in the interest of the broader rails community.
flomo··on What About Rails?
As Zed said, it was fastcgi. But yeah, Rails 1.x got a lot of hype before it had a functional application server.
flomo··on What About Rails?
IMO, something like Basecamp would not be any better as a 'native' app. (probably worse as web tech makes the 'polish' more accessible.)

Not to mention, those VB client/server apps were not as popular with users as HN likes to reminisce. And modern IT departments have often completely banished that stuff.

flomo··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
Just for the record, I did see him posting on HN, and he seemed highly motivated by $$$ (and pride). He certainly seemed rational, other than the fact he shouldn't have been posting here. Businessman makes bad business decision and doubles-down. Not quite insanity.
flomo··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
> He is surely very evidently mentally ill.

I agree and upvoted your post. But can I just say that it is super-reddit to diagnose someone based on your B- undergrad psych classes.

We should go back to the classics like "he went off his rocker!", or "he's totally unhinged!" or "completely delulu!"

(of course the people who know, know, and they shouldn't tell you.)

flomo··on .name Termination
> city.state.us

In reality, it wasn't that simple, and a lot of those .us domains looked like line noise.

Government sites are used to distribute public information. They need something they can print on a poster/sign. Not some bogus 'logical' hierarchy.

flomo··on Recovering Corrupt Zip Files
> This is very common for archive files.

Maybe. But Unix types have always been all-in on tar. They love tar. They continue to use some form of tar to this day.

This was actually a 'cultural issue' back in the day, because Sun Java JAR files were just ZIPs. For good reason. But that wasn't the blessed holy unix archive format.

flomo··on SQLite as a Document Database (2020)
It's a much older term, eg. Lotus Notes was described as a document database.
flomo··on IBM Unveils Next Generation Dual-Architecture Processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE
Yeah, a huge chunk of IBM's service revenue has always been effectively mainframe services, with wall street accounting spin.

I suspect that almost zero companies adopted mainframes after 1980 or so, so it's ALL legacy market. However, IBM always invests a lot of money in hardware to keep the mainframe perceptually leading edge and "sexy", so they can hold-on to those customers. So you gotta give them credit for that.

(IBM and Microsoft were always 'in the same breath' for years, Microsoft totally out-smarted them, and IBM gave up on that.)

flomo··on Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin
> I want my browser to prevent random extensions from directly reading web page data. The declarative API idea is pretty good.

Agreed. And you would think most paranoid HN types would too.

> It's just that uBlock Origin is so insanely useful, important and trusted

Maybe I'm foggy on the history. But isn't this like Fork #4 or #5 of some previous AdBlock extension?

Seems like the only business model for this type of extension is "selling out" for certain ads. And then the cycle repeats and forum posters tell you to install qBlock Omega or whatever. Maybe Mozilla doesn't want to get in the middle of this?

flomo··on Only 2.6% of the most visited websites have fully valid HTML
IIRC, that "w3c validator" was overly strict, and would error on attributes it didn't recognize, even though they were technically 'valid' (and supported in ~every browser). So there were always a couple things like, ehhh, doesn't matter.
flomo··on CP/M-386 – CP/M for 386 protected mode, derived from CP/M‑68K
> MS-DOS became obsolete only at the launch of Windows 95.

Not even. The genius of Windows 95 was you could still run most of your DOS crap. (Maybe not games, but business apps.) Novell shops for example had a huge pile of DOS drivers and all that just worked underneath 95. DOS only faded away afterwards.

flomo··on CP/M-386 – CP/M for 386 protected mode, derived from CP/M‑68K
Just as some off-the-top history, MS-DOS was clearly obsolete, but it hung around for like 10 years too long because people couldn't quit it. It was a DOSSY DOS world.

"Protected Mode DOS" went through the IBM/MS gristmill and became OS/2, which was a compromised product in a lot of ways. Then Windows (still mostly a DOS program) got a little traction, and Microsoft had hired Dave Cutler to write a real OS. And David overthrew Goliath and the rest is history. On topic, nobody really wanted protected-mode DOS or CP/M etc.

flomo··on Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF
Just one little thing: East of Buena Vista Park, you have a lake, it is actually the road which goes around the park.

Also, I would love to zoom in more. (pls give me the pixels)

flomo··on Lego building instructions through time
Those sets were marketed as 'Expert Builder' in the USA, so maybe the challenge was part of the point?
flomo··on Lobste.rs is now running on SQLite
It's fine not to be an AI user, just some people there seem to be holding their breath and stomping their feet until it goes away. Which leads to a really repetitive and boring discussion. (I'm not a member there, but they often have better technical links vs HN.)
flomo··on The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
I don't think that was it. Slashdot would only run stories from their 'content partners' like ZDNet and the Register, so they were always 2 days behind Reddit/HN/Twitter/etc.

(When RMS was 'cancelled', that would have been a huge deal there in the old days, they had one post days later.)

Also Digg wasn't just a graphical redesign, they changed how the site worked. I don't think Slashdot ever did that.

flomo··on AUR packages compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit
Hey, your response improves my opinion of 'car guys'. Because the analogy is thin and they are looking directly at what is coming out of the 'sausage machine'. And if the result is good, they could sell the machine for profits! (Unlike computer nerds.)

I'm sticking with "hobbyists/dabblers" here, because almost nobody runs Arch in real production scenarios. Its just a fun high-touch thing people can enjoy fucking around with. Nothing wrong with that.

(That is why someone could trivially trojan hundreds of packages and it's NBD. Because "Nobody Cares." Wipe it and start over, funguy.)

flomo··on AUR packages compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit
To be honest, it took me way too long to figure the Arch etc crowd are hobbyists who enjoy having something which always 'needs maintenance' over the weekend. (And maybe they don't want to admit they are hobbyists because what they are doing seems Very Important.)

Sorta like 'car guys' who recommend some old thing you can wrench on.

flomo··on We Think the SpaceX IPO Is Overvalued
Certainly not a Musk fan, but IMO the real point of hyperloop was more that it's on a route that could be constructed within our lifetimes. (Unlike CAHSR, check their website.) Of course, California knows this because that's where they built Interstate 5.
flomo··on CVE-2026-28952: Apple macOS 26.5 Kernel Vuln found by Claude
It's just another tool in the belt. Someone will say that's cheaper than rewriting in safe rust or whatever. (Apple must have a bunch of 1980s code written to 1980s standards. But that is their moneymaker.)
flomo··on Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
Ok, lets start planning its 10th birthday party.
flomo··on Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
Cool, a super technical dude like you can just spin a secure Win11 VM to run TurboTax then. You probably have a bash script or something. What are you complaining about.
flomo··on Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
Easy question because you need to evaluate every dependency for Win10 compatibility, Win10 bugs that MS fixed in Win11, running unsupported Win10 CI somehow, QA testing team for Windows 10 (programmers won't do this)... and on and on.

All for an dead operating system. I guess this works in your basement mind where people work for free or something.

flomo··on Comparing an LZ4 Decompressor on Four Legacy CPUs
Bumbershoot is a great blog if you are a 1980s home computer/console enjoyer, but were never quite sure how it all worked. He is trying to figure this out himself, so he goes step-by-step through getting his games working on a particular system.

So there are a lot of ASM 'deep dives' like this entry (which probably won't get too much traction.) My one complaint is he has a lot of content, but the blog is hard to navigate.

flomo··on Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
You know it as well as I, no gotcha here buddy.

It's getting tough for shitters with some old ass legacy PC who depend on online services. Hopefully they were smart enough to understand they were living on borrowed time.

edit, also there are government subsided smartphones if you need one.

flomo··on Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
TT was/is old-style "slick", like at the time it put my bank to shame in terms of UI. It probably wasn't using a 'popular framework' and if it was, it wasn't a naive implementation. It also was/is optimized for desktop, while many financial corps now only care about mobile. So as of last April, it was still good enough for me.

Was it fast? No. Just fast enough. That's why I doubt the desktop app is really any different. They must have a bunch of API endpoints, and the 'slowness' is all on the backend.

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