neilv

I wonder whether this could still pop up at estate sales, or when a retiree is cleaning out their garage.

Not all gear got junked. When I was a teen intern, I got some obsolete Apollos (and 2 logic analyzers and a terminal) from my employer, and other people were also bringing home gear the company "sold" them.

Somewhere, there might well be an industry or university sysadmin or programmer who brought home a box of old QIC tapes, and one of them says "AEGIS" on the label, and it's in a garage/attic.

Also, rumor has it that at one point Boeing physically archived at least one Apollo network, because they apparently take documentation integrity extremely seriously. If that's true, they might have an engineering librarian or someone who could take an interest in making sure any versions of Aegis/Domain they need (and have preserved media for) can run on emulators or something?

Often, if you visit a few of the top PageRank-ish search hits for a query, you can find where the "AI" answer was mostly plagiarized from...

(For example, a random Redditor once said something, and the AI repeats it confidently and authoritatively, as if it is universal truth widely accepted by experts and applicable to the query.)

Impressive curation effort. One comment: at least a few of the examples in the gallery seem to be of the "last, greatest" version, which actually isn't necessarily the greatest, and definitely not the most interesting.

For example, the "Domain_OS SR10.4 - 01 VUE desktop" is a bit confusing, and may cause people to miss actual DomainOS.

Apollo DomainOS (or Domain/IX, or simply Domain) had many unique and interesting things about it, but disappeared soon after being acquired by HP. It looked more like it might look if you took a programmer who had mostly only seen text terminals, and gave them a megapixel display with pixel framebuffer, a mouse, and the freedom to design the keyboard hardware, and told them to make what they would want to use.

VUE (around when the Unix workstation vendors collaborated on standarding on a common desktop environment) was for HP-UX , which was a very different operating system, and entirely different user experience. More of an early attempt at let's give non-power-users an accessible computer with virtual desktops and everything.

Similarly, Solaris had innovative OpenWindows (including but not limited to a networkable display system based on PostScript) before they got the common desktop environment.

SunOS 4.x (retronym "Solaris 1.x") and earlier could run the earlier SunView environment, which was more like monochrome early Mac than the later Open Look look and feel of OpenWindows.

Anyone want to comment on what it's like to work for Anthropic (as an ordinary software/AI engineer, not as Karpathy)?

Compare and contrast with working at OpenAI, Google, etc.?

Another thing to appreciate while reading is that Risks started pre-Web, when the Internet was a much smaller place, so PGN's work on Risks was well-known, and presumably influenced the thinking of a lot of people.

As one example, I bumped into Risks in my teens (I think through Usenet comp.risks), at the internship start of my software engineering career. I now think back to things I said and did back then, and the formative influence of Risks is unmistakable.

Correctness? Safety? Security? Privacy? Societal implications? Responsibility?

The MBA-ification of the Internet came later, but before that, PGN helped educate and guide a generation of Internet-savvy people in the best direction.

If you buy replacement laptop keyboards, be sure to test them promptly, not just stockpile them as spares.

I started to see some poor-quality 'genuine' replacement ThinkPad keyboards. Bad action, bad fit of assembly with keycap catching on bezel, etc.

I considered it not-unlikely that no more good ones would be made, since Lenovo had stopped selling laptops that used that part.

So I stockpiled some good ones while I could, by sampling from a diversity of sellers. I wound up with 3 good spares, and 2 bad.

I just had my 25th ThinkPad anniversary, which started with a ThinkPad that was 5(?) years old at the time, and which I carried all around town (parks, cafes, student centers, libraries), every day, wrapped in a towel in my bag: https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/

ThinkPad was a very expensive taste. The key to being affordable to a poor student or open source developer was to acquire gently-used older models, keep them working, and run Linux. All useful skills, which I still apply.

At MIT, Ted Selker (TrackPoint inventor mentioned in the article) had some retail boxes of the IBM SpaceSaver II TrackPoint keyboard on a shelf in his office, and one time he casually offered to give me one. I had to decline, since I craved that exact keyboard, knew exactly how much they cost, and couldn't accept such an expensive gift. They still fetch a good price used, and their looks aged pretty well (the alternative at the time was almost certainly a beige or light gray 104-key): https://www.ebay.com/itm/227342514769

1. Plea to anyone doing TrackPoint projects: consider using a 6mm TrackPoint assembly that can accommodate an off-the-shelf 6mm Soft Rim cap.

See this comparison of the shortening and changing of the TrackPoint cap over time, and you can imagine how the current 3mm caps end up requiring more finger pressure than the 6mm soft rim cap, to get pressure to register:

https://saoto28.wixsite.com/trackpoint4life/comparison

I own a very nice ThinkPad P1, but my daily driver is currently a ThinkPad W520 battleship from 2012, entirely because its TrackPoint is more comfortable to use. (I acclimated to the P1's chiclet keyboard easily, but the slippery TrackPoint cap was definitely harder on my finger and hand.)

On the W520, I can type prolifically, all day and evening, 7 days a week, without discomfort. I don't want to break the TrackPoint soft rim magic that helps make that possible.

2. If someone in the US wants to try to make good soft rim 3mm caps that will fit modern ThinkPads, and save Lenovo from losing TrackPoint adherents, here is a starting point that Saoto kindly shared:

https://grabcad.com/library/softrim-trackpoint-cap-for-3-mm-...

If you can do soft rim with high-quality molding (not 3D printing, and determine the right materials and processes, and red top), some people are so desperate that they're paying $50+ for a single tiny 3D-printed cap to be mailed from Japan. If I was confident that high-quality caps gave a W520-like experience, I'd gladly pay $100 for 10 of them, just to start with.

> Goodacre told The Register he tested awareness of the Management Engine with various attendees at the CyberUK conference in April 2026. "Almost no one" knew about it, he reports.

That's surprising. I would've expected most people at a cybersecurity conference to have heard of it, for over a decade.

Is this conference not for people who understand the technology at all, but rather for purely management-track people who oversee the people who understand the technology?

> It has already submitted forum posts and social media evidence showing some users employing the system to disable emissions controls.

Is right-to-repair going to get scrod by illegal activity, like everyone got scrod by media piracy?

We knew we'd get scrod back when MP3 piracy started, and many people were warned what would happen, but they still did it, and it played out just like was warned.

Illegal activity creates both reason and pretext for forcibly taking away what should be rights. And those rights will be forcibly taken away, for both reasons. Often by crappy people, because you either forced their hand, or you handed the pretext to them on a silver platter.

This is one reason for tech freedom advocates to fully appreciate that they're operating in a political context, so that they're a sustainable positive force, not a counterproductive one.

BTW, I appreciate people's candor, and don't want to spoil it, but I feel obligated to point out, to people criticizing big-tech employers, that HN pseudonymous/anonymous identities aren't very secure...

You might have a good amount of faith in dang (as do I), to not, say, let the investment firm sell HN account identity info to data brokers.

And HN is almost unique among popular sites, in not running any apparent third-party trackers at all.

But HN occasionally turns on Google reCaptcha, which I suspect could unmask most pseudonymous/anonymous identities here. Especially since it wasn't expected.

Unmasked, along with their entire past and future comment history, of which Google and other tech companies might have firehose feeds.

(I've emailed hn@ my concerns about people not expecting big-tech trackers on HN, but I suspect that HN is occasionally in a difficult position, due to attacks.)

I wouldn't blame company culture on neurodivergents. It's explained by a stereotypical ruthless flavor of business, which reinforced itself with the culture they hired and nurtured.

The company has been known as kinda sketchy almost continuously since it was founded, yet people went there because it paid the most money.

If leadership is now thinking that an executive "ideas person", plus a small execution team fortified with AI, can bang out a product more quickly than the massive army of corporate workers they've been feeding at top of the market rates, and at the same quality level as the previous inefficient bureaucracy managed... isn't that plausibly correct?

Now, the company just needs to be the best-paying job available to enough of those workers. And the company believes this is getting easier for the company, due to the state of the job market. The workers who remain will remain motivated by money.

And the company may think they're not losing anything of value, since they knew that their culture was already sick.

Example: They think they weren't getting creative, aligned, diligent brilliance, amidst all the backstabbing and politics they'd created, and so mechanically executing on an executive ideas person's vision yields the same product result, faster.

From the outside, I think this shouldn't be a surprise, nor blamed on possible neurodivergence of individuals.

(Of course this isn't my own philosophy about morale and effective product teams, and I wouldn't want to work at a company like that. But you can see some company cultures from thousands of miles away.)

> if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it [...] Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning

I wouldn't reduce student motivations to career vs. learning.

College can also be about aspiring to a better society, with the university as microcosm.

For example, a society in which people are honest, and have integrity.

I'm very interested in how this cheating is perceived by other students.

There is no peer pressure not to cheat?

Students aren't considered sketchy or jerky for cheating?

Being seen cheating has no adverse affect on their ability to date, to join group projects, to join student startups, etc.?

Nice and helpful article.

Cloudflare is a kinda funny choice to pick to trust, and maybe they'll re-evaluate that soon.

GitLab is overall nice, and I recommended their on-prem product a few years ago, at an AI hardware tech startup with unusual security requirements. Today, I'd still consider GitLab, but I'd first evaluate how Forgejo fits requirements.

Are you making a joke, like I did about 32767, when I hit 31337? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46760058

I tried asking, years ago, with the rationale of I'm not wasting people's time, since they could get more money if they knew about bootloader unlocking.

Then I decided everyone who knows about bootloader unlocking would've already checked and mentioned if it was unlockable (but not if it wasn't, since why confuse normal buyers with a fringe thing), and I've never gotten a positive response trying to tell any seller about it, so I think I'm just wasting everyone's time.

Your mileage may vary.

I answered this in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076522

Basically, buy a Pixel 6 or later (I suggest Pixel 7 or later, since Pixel 6 will be minimal support soon) that you are sure has an unlockable bootloader. The majority you'll see don't have an unlockable bootloader.

Which mostly means either buy direct from Google, or buy one on eBay that already has GrapheneOS/CalyxOS/LineageOS on it or for which the seller expressly says it has an unlockable bootloader.

(IME, don't bother trying to ask a seller to check bootloader, if they haven't already said. Almost no one is going to go through the process to check, the answer is probably no anyway, they might misunderstand your question and answer that it's "unlocked", and they may be tired of people asking.)

Carrier-sold Pixels generally don't have "OEM-unlockable" bootloaders.

Your best bet for now is to buy a new Pixel direct from Google, or a used one from eBay that the seller advertises as already having GrapheneOS on it (or otherwise guarantees that the bootloader is unlockable). These ones are worth a lot more than the ones that can only run Google/carrier Android.

https://grapheneos.org/install/web#prerequisites

I own two GrapheneOS Pixel 7 units, which should get any Google blob security updates (which GrapheneOS incorporates) through October 2027, and GrapheneOS may still support it with source updates after that. So in a year or so, I might get the GrapheneOS Motorola if it's available, or a later Pixel. (I never buy these new, since I don't want to carry a several hundred dollar phone when a 2 gen old one is still great, thanks to GrapheneOS.)

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705

I had more the thought like being skeptical of anyone who would take a job at company Foo or stay there, when they tell you. To me that seems preferable to trying to -- what risks devolving into -- a witch hunt of fall guys (persons), and doxxing people.

I think we are already starting to have that with a couple more infamous other companies in the news the last year: if someone goes to work there, I suspect a lot of people are going to think what is wrong with you, since you must know that company does very harmful things,

Maybe it's time to start wondering that about anyone who'd work for a lot of additional companies?

(I actually had a recruiter recently who was pitching a startup, and the headline featured the "ex-" pedigrees of the founders, including an especially infamous company. I figured any company touting that pedigree as a selling point is probably a bad fit for me. I thanked the recruiter, but said that infamous company as selling point probably isn't a fit. The recruiter seemed to not only understand, but to agree with my vague sentiment about that pedigree company.)

After all the surveillance capitalism abuses over the last 2-3 decades of Web, it's a little late to be pushing back, but... should we start shunning individuals from companies who implement this?

Whether it's from companies that create the tech, or companies that use it.

In the orgy of money, we've had a kind of industry-wide sociopathic convention of individual engineers considering it perfectly OK to further surveillance capitalism.

Can we reverse that?

If someone says we can't, because "everyone does it", are they saying that we're a field of baddies?

I'd expect a group that cared about privacy and security... not to need a cookie consent dialog like that.

> Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more.

Buy why do this, unless you're in the business of arming both sides of a conflict?

(With a side bonus of designing a defense product in such a way that you reverse much of the ground that was gained with "HTTPS everywhere", to give you centralized cleartext access to much of the Internet traffic.)

Two questions prompted by this disclosure:

1. I didn't see mention of a bug bounty program giving limited authorization. How do independent researchers do this with legal safety? Especially when DoD is involved?

2. If a researcher discovered a vulnerability at a DoD contractor, and the contractor didn't seem to be resolving the problem, is there a DoD contact point that would be effective and safe for the researcher to report it?

If you care about the information and communication, and you think you can do a good job of the slide deck if you think through it for this venue and audience -- and maybe even have new insights by going through the process -- then it can be enjoyable/rewarding.

But I've also seen situations in which the presenter doesn't care, or the slides are just a backdrop for some better communication/selling/maneuvering they're doing, or they know the information is bogus or the presentation pointless, or they know the audience doesn't care, or for everyone it's just a meeting to be able to say you had a meeting.

I'd guess that at least half the current use of LLMs is for "cheating on your homework" tasks, in which the person prompting it simply doesn't care -- whether it's for schoolwork, professional work, or socializing.

I haven't seen much of business owners being ornery like the article describes, but there's other challenges:

Business owners (thinking SMBs) tend to have a holistic view of their entire business, to know what everything costs, how the numbers work out, etc., and to personally feel the risk. They also generally don't have a lot of time to invest in changes, and may not want to delegate too much. And they know that a lot of vendors are full of poo.

(Source: Our anti-counterfeiting slash supply chain integrity startup ended up working with major brands, but we also tried small businesses (e.g., designer who had their own production line of huge CNC machines in their studio). We tried tailoring solutions to some of these upscale small businesses, but in the end we only ended up getting money from large enterprise prestige brands. Enterprise sales, OTOH, is a painful and risky slog of numerous stakeholders, foot-dragging dependencies, opaque politics, changing priorities, etc.)

Now that you mention it, I infrequently see behavior like that.

I wonder whether I see it less often because my bookmarked search queries are careful to avoid things in the URL that look like they might be IDs for cached queries/results.

Also, a few times I wondered whether I was accidentally triggering anti-scraping poisoning measures, even though I was doing the search and paging manually.

I worked on a somewhat similar system in a fringe language (Scheme, and later, Racket) that got huge, but that remained manageable and high-velocity over a long period by a small team.

We didn't create many bugs, and usually functionality could be added very rapidly (e.g., we were the first to achieve a certain certification for hosting sensitive data on AWS).

Though occasionally functionality had to be added more slowly, because we had to write from scratch what would be an off-the-shelf component in a more popular platform. But once we did it, it worked, and we were back to our old velocity, and not slowed by the bloat and complexity of dozens of off-the-shelf frameworks. We could also adapt rapidly because we controlled a manageable platform, which is how we were able to move fast to AWS when there was a need.

The system also had some technical bits of architectural secret sauce from the start (for complex data, and Web interaction), which enabled a lot of rapid development of functionality, and also set the tone for later empowering smartness.

One difference with our system, from the Haskell fintech, was that our team size was very small (only 2-3 software engineers at a time, and someone who managed all the ops). So we didn't have the challenges of hundreds of people trying to coordinate and have a coherent system while getting their things done. Instead, there was usually one person doing more technical and architectural changes to the code, and a prolific other person doing huge amounts business logic functionality for complex processes.

With careful use of current/near-term LLM-ish AI tools, software development might find some related efficiencies of very small and incredibly effective teams. But the model that comes to mind is having a small number of very sharp thinkers keeping things on an empowering and manageable path -- not churning massive bloat to knock off story points and letting sustainability be someone else's problem.

I might vaguely recall Mozilla being in an easter egg or alternate throbber in a Netscape browser, and my impression was that it had been an internal codename at Netscape which was then adopted for the open source project.

Thanks, I forgot about Phoenix.