Hacker News Reader

Go to telehack.com and type 'notes'.

It's not comprehensive, but will give you a taste of the flavor of what Usenet was like.

osswidon What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

Minsky and Sussman slaving away in front of that apocryphal PDP-10 in 1970. And 50 years later…last November..suddenly BOOM. Everything they yearned for comes into view.

osswidon What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

  In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.  "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
  "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe."
  "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
  "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play"
  Minsky shut his eyes,
  "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
  "So that the room will be empty."
  At that momment, Sussman was enlightened.
 -- AI koan

osswidon You can list a directory containing 8M files, but not with ls

ls -f

osswidon It feels lonelier at the top with everyone working from home

But why is this bad? Let people choose how to spend their money how they want. On geo, on food, on trips, on saving..on whatever. Pay them for their work, let them allocate their spending as they wish for their own priorities. Why does it matter where they live, or where groups cluster? Seems like a fear-driven response.

osswidon Build Your Own Weasley Location Clock

Well done! This must have been a massive project. 1000 hours?

Don't miss the project photo album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7yxiuzpsFReUh5Yy5

osswidon Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time

“The pennies you save will be the dollars your widow’s husband spends.”

osswidon How Much Land Does a Man Need? (1886)

Why is it important to leave something behind?

osswidon Beyond Mortality: Older Frail Adults Considering Surgical Intervention

https://startingstrength.com/article/barbell_training_is_big...

osswidon Facebook has been granted patent on shadow banning

We had shadow banning in the Topix forums in 2005.

osswidon Fast and flexible observability with canonical log lines

We've been using logging like this but with jsonl lines. Still easy to grep as straight text, but very handy to be able to parse with jq or other tools and be able to have rich values (or even substructures) as part of the log lines.

osswidon I’m Leaving IBM

IBM's 3 year vest schedule on cash retention packages was 10% at 6 months, 10% at 12 months, 30% at 24 months, and 50% at 36 months. So half of your retention pay happens on the 3rd year anniversary.

osswidon Elon Musk’s Boring Company Gets Preliminary Permit for NYC-DC Hyperloop

A previous genius industrialist - Isambard Kingdom Brunel - built an "atmospheric railway" in 1844.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2014/apr/04/b...

osswidon Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)

Did something change recently with the HN ranking algorithm?

osswidon Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

'eq' does the test you are asking for.

osswidon Facebook Co-Founder Saverin Gives Up U.S. Citizenship Before IPO

Agreed. The IRS doesn't take stuff like this lying down; see http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/0328/092.html

osswidon Atari Archives: BASIC Computer Games

I've got most of those games up in http://telehack.com/

Just type basic and then dir to list them.

osswidon "Sorry Larry, the cloud can't be stopped"

Salesforce is a publicly traded company with a market cap of $16B, with $2B in annual revenue.

The gap between the reality of their place and power in the market they enjoy, and the commentary here is ... surprising.

osswidon Show HN: type to me, old-school unix talk for the web

http://telehack.com/ has a 'talk' command and a web interface, although you'll have to make an account to use it and CLI your way to the command.

The simple web interface at typeto.me is pretty slick.

osswidon Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago

Wow...this is seriously cool. I like how the old threads are preserved in the newsreader interface. There is also something about having the clock advance in "realtime" that makes it more fun to run that just skimming through the old archive.

Nice work Joey.

osswidon Telehack retro command line museum

There are about 25,000 hosts, mostly mined from old uucp maps. You can login to the hosts or finger @them and see users logged in who posted from them at the time. Try e.g. finger @sgi.

osswidon Telehack retro command line museum

From http://telehack.com/telehack.html

"Telehack is a simulation of a sylized arpanet/usenet, circa 1985-1990. It is a full multi-user simulation, including 25,000 hosts and BBS's the early net, thousands of files from the ero, a collection of adventure and IF games, a working BASIC interpreter with a library of programs to run, simulated historical users, and more."

osswidon Linked list patent

Nobody "invents" lifeforms. They hack a few strands of dna cobbled together from other sources and wait until a batch actually grows.

Which is what the plants do all by themselves. Copyright, maybe. But not patent.

osswidon Just Let Basic Die

One of the nice things about Basic was that you didn't need to know how to use a text editor to program in it. Line numbers and the LIST command got you started. vi and emacs are a bit much for the wee ones. You can use a simple text editor, but there's still the concept of files, saving, extensions, vs. the integrated environment that a microcomputer Basic provided.

10 print "Hello, World."

RUN

Doesn't get simpler than that.

osswidon How to read a book

I used to revere books, but after buying one too many that would have been better at article length (and often started out as such), I've become more guarded with the time I'm willing to invest in a book. Some books are worth a re-read, but an increasing fraction that I encounter now aren't worth a first.

"The 48 Laws of Power" is an example. I originally read this as a magazine article, which was great. I excitedly bought the 452 page book of the same title when it came out, but unfortunately it didn't cover much more than the magazine article I had already read; it was just book length.