Hacker News Reader

remlovon 30 years of CPUs at Tom's Hardware – looking back on three decades of processors

...allowed you to change CPU settings through software rather than physical jumper cables...

This should have read as: physical jumpers.

For the past couple of years I’ve stopped taking seriously or even reading many of the tech sites that were once beacons of hardware journalism. Too much of the content now feels like AI-generated slop, published by mediocre writers without basic proofreading or an understanding of the subject matter, let alone a commitment to factual accuracy.

Sadly, errors like this will be fed back into future AI training data, further distorting facts and degrading the quality of information online.

remlovon I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

Would love some details how you enabled controlling the display with motion sensors.

remlovon Show HN: Gocd – a lightweight Go-based CI/CD tool that runs on your dev machine

The name of this project clashes with another open-source CI/CD system by Thoughtworks Inc. https://github.com/gocd

remlovon I don't like curved displays

I found the LG 38GL950G-B to be a good compromise with a resolution of 3840x1600 that I purchased back in 2020.

remlovon AOL closes its dial up internet service

They definitely made more than a little money from this. For example, my ex–mother-in-law kept paying for AOL dial-up after she was already paying for AT&T DSL, thinking that was the only way she could keep using AOL. And yes, she would still log in through the AOL browser.

remlovon Sandy Bridge-era motherboard gets M.2 SSD boot support 12 years after launch

Definitely was faster than standard SATA but nowhere near NVMe potential. It still came with all the AHCI warts as AHCI was optimized for spinning disks and had 32 commands per queue, while NVMe supports up to 64,000 and so on and so forth. The major limiting factor was utilizing SATA-based command structures over PCIe.

remlovon Sandy Bridge-era motherboard gets M.2 SSD boot support 12 years after launch

My guess is at the time it was a familiar protocol stack which apparently made it easier to retrofit legacy systems before NVMe? AHCI was already well-supported across major OSes then (Windows, Linux, macOS), but UEFI firmware still needed to understand this abomination.

remlovon Sandy Bridge-era motherboard gets M.2 SSD boot support 12 years after launch

I did something similar, I patched a Gigabyte Z77-DS3H bios with the SAMSUNG_M2_DXE module to get a Samsung SM951 AHCI M.2 SSD working. It's not SATA and not quite NVMe, PCIe AHCI existed for a short while before NVMe became ubiquitous.

This was to enable a screamer of a Hackintosh based on Mavericks which didn't have native NVMe support at the time.

remlovon Zhaoxin's KX-7000

Haswell/Broadwell with embedded 128MB of eDRAM Level 4 cache are some extremely awesome hidden gems.

remlovon Show HN: I486SX_soft_FPU – Software FPU Emulator for NetBSD 10 on 486SX

Good thing this has nothing to do with NetBSD.

remlovon I thought I bought a camera, but no DJI sold me a license to use it [video]

A01GR2 is a pretty good open source alternative available on the play store. Miles better than Ricoh's own app.

remlovon We asked camera companies why their RAW formats are all different and confusing

Pentax/Ricoh really is a hidden gem. I love my "dinosaur" K1 Mark II and my GR IIIx goes EVERYWHERE I go.

remlovon Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

If you look at the company they founded it's a service to protect yourself. Not to willy-nilly go out into the open web to find hidden subdomains.

remlovon Half-Life

No you were originally correct. The Ati card mentioned was most likely a Mach64 or original Rage 3d.

remlovon Half-Life

I'm 100% certain your memory is incorrect. Radeon came after Rage in 2000 and was the first Ati 3D accelerator with hardware T&L. Your 1MB 2D only Ati card was most likely a Mach64 or original Rage 3d.

remlovon Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

There aren't any official methods, but with a little elbow grease, several ways to run a vanilla boxed copy of Half-Life 2 are outlined in this thread: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=70250

I've also wanted to run HL2 in DirectX 6 as well on period correct GPUs. Specifically a TNT2 Ultra and a Voodoo 5 5500 I have laying around. I just haven't gotten around to it.

remlovon Ask HN: How would you improve job search?

Requiring job postings to include clear salary details, such as whether they use a sliding pay scale dependent on location, would be a win in my book.

remlovon Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb

It blows my mind that HN post submitters don't do a simple spell check on their post titles.

remlovon 3600 MHz Raspberry Pi 5 with Liquid Nitrogen

How did this work?

By swapping crystal oscillators with a higher frequency.

remlovon Is Erlang.org down?

Ah. I was looking at these resources last week and they resolved then just fine:

    https://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2020-November/100198.html
    https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

But apparently not anymore.

remlovon Is Erlang.org down?

    ping -c 4 erlang.org

    PING erlang.org (192.121.151.106): 56 data bytes
    Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
    Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
    Request timeout for icmp_seq 2

remlovon COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

Several years ago I briefly worked at a major telecommunications provider with services across the southern United States that ran Python 2.4 on their production provisioning servers. Worked just fine.

remlovon Developing Inside a Container (2022)

Unfortunately no, the remote development feature is not what I mentioned or alluded to at all. Remote interpreters and docker services were supported even before 2019 in JetBrains IDEs which easily covers the articles use case.

remlovon Developing Inside a Container (2022)

I fail to see how this is any better than IntelliJ/PyCharms remote interpreter feature and Services tab and a proper docker-compose file. It feels like VSCode is finally catching up.

remlovon Redbox Owner Chicken Soup for the Soul Files for Chapter 11

That's a nonsensical reach. The United States, especially in rural areas have internet access that is considered laughable and has nothing to do with their financial situation.

remlovon Retro Pocket 386 Win 95 laptop sub $200, comes with 386SX40 processor, 8 MB RAM

Most likely they do not have a license to distribute their product with Windows on it but on 3.11 and 95 the key 111-1111111 is considered legit. Anyone can grab a clean copy from archive.org. Looks like they could have saved future heartaches by pointing the buyers this direction and having them install the image themselves (which I consider part of the charm in retrocomputing).

remlovon Wipeout XL/2097: The Making of an Iconic PlayStation Soundtrack [video]

Sometime in the mid 90s young me came across a PlayStation demo kiosk at Best Buy that happened to be demoing Wipeout. When I started playing, the soundtrack "Messij" started.

I don't ever remember a song giving me goosebumps that way when I listened to that track for the first time.

remlovon Intel undercut a standards body to give us the PCI connector

That's the equivalent of saying we should have gone straight from black-and-white television to 4K HDR without color TV and HD in between.

remlovon How to recover lost Python source code if it's still resident in a running inter (2017)

I've had several instances where I accidentally nuked my local git copy. Thankful for Pycharm/<Your jetbrains tool of choice> Local History: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/local-history.html

remlovon Pyramid3D Real-time Graphics Processor (1997) [pdf]

TFW I didn't pull the trigger on a Pyramid3D TR25202 listing on ebay several months ago. These cards are truly rare when you are collecting mid 90s to early 2000s graphic accelerators.