Hacker News Reader

robarron 90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars

For example, it's used as a kind of internal bookmarking system. I don't necessarily star a repo because I think it has good code, but maybe a good idea or something related to something I'm interested in developing.

robarron Ask HN: How do you track 2026 AI price wars? I built a tool to help

It should be posted under'Show HN'

robarron Almost a quarter of UK GPS are seeing obese children aged four and under

It took me a second to realize it is GP's .

robarron eBay bans illicit automated shopping amid rapid rise of AI agents

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46711574

robarron The Apple II color hack - How Wozniak created color from monochrome

How Steve Wozniak exploited TV timing to bring color to the Apple II

robarron Tell HN: John Friel my father, internet pioneer and creator of QModem, has died

I want to comment on something that seems important to me. In the third world, in countries where the internet arrived much later and where money was much scarcer, the effect of qmodem was quite long lasting and profitable for the tech savvy community. A PC and a modem were the support for many of the adventures and beginnings in computer science and in general to satisfy that insatiable curiosity for the computer revolution. Engineers working in big companies and using the resources of these and local volunteers installed BBS with Walnut Creek cds and other shareware CDs and gave access for the first time to that universe that we now take as evident and accessible from our phones. Without qmodem I would still be waiting for my copy of unarc!.

In my personal case, I want to also thank your father for pointing us thru it's company name to the book and movie "the forbin project" :-). In our present of promises of supercomputing AIs, maybe we should all read the book or watch the movie.

robarron A Little History of the Anchovy

Peruvian anchovy, the anchoveta, had and still has aprofound impact on peruvian economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peruvian_anchoveta

By the way of Wikipedia:

"The anchoveta has been characterized as "the most heavily exploited fish in world history"

https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/183775/102904317

robarron Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori dies at age 86

https://www.hrw.org/report/2005/12/21/probable-cause/evidenc...

robarron Why is Chile so long?

Quite the contrary, the management of the different ecological floors was the specialty of the inhabitants of the Andes, even now. The same community owns and uses land at different altitudes, which can range from 1000 to 4000 meters above sea level. This generated an economy based on the exchange of goods along vertical lines.

https://haubooks.org/reciprocity-and-redistribution/

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/obituaries/24murra.html

robarron Apple Vision Pro review

Was it not a mailing list before a site?

I let the next guy explain what a mailing list was.

robarron The Database for Bootleg/Unauthorized Video Game Consoles

Here you can find thousands of Atari VCS/FC/NES/MD/SNES/GB (and more) clones, from historic bootlegs products to modern legal ones. Soft-emulator based multi-platform consoles are not supported.

robarron Israel was duped as Hamas planned devastating assault

Should we avoid this topic, at least at this time, on HN?

I really think there is a rational conversation to be had but I do not see how we could achieve such at feat without heavy moderation and even then.

robarron F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

“The Caterpillar Club is an informal association of people who have successfully used a parachute to bail out of a disabled aircraft. After authentication by the parachute maker, applicants receive a membership certificate and a distinctive lapel pin. The nationality of the person whose life was saved by parachute and ownership of the aircraft are not factors in determining qualification for membership; anybody whose life was saved by using a parachute after bailing out of a disabled aircraft is eligible. The requirement that the aircraft is disabled naturally excludes parachuting enthusiasts in the normal course of a recreational jump, or those involved in military training jumps.“

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterpillar_Club

robarron Pegasus Mail

does anybody remembers dialing up to a Unix server to uucp your organization’s emails and using Pegasus DOS to make it available thru netware?

robarron Simula – The forgotten programming language

Both Algol and Simula were ported to the 68000’s Atari ST. I remember having a box of diskettes with implementations of forth, modula , lisp, prolog, smalltalk.

I miss the those times when using a computer meant ‘programming on a computer’, and programming on a computer meant trying to find your foot on any of a dozen languages popping left and right.

robarron DESKTOP2 – A Graphical User Interface for DOS

Check out ztreewin. It’s xtree gold only windows native.

https://www.ztree.com/

robarron DESKTOP2 – A Graphical User Interface for DOS

Xtreegold reincarnated in ztreewin https://www.ztree.com/. It is not free but it is a native windows program. There is even a fan page with a list of clones resembling more or less to xtree https://www.xtreefanpage.org/x63clone.htm

robarron Align Your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models

I understand the technical marvel, but there are obvious inconsistencies in all the images and I would call them more animations than video sequences.

robarron Jordan Mechner Journal: Prince of Persia 2 and the Last Express

I'll share the first entry:

January 11, 1993 [San Francisco]

Jake let me sneak a peek at this month's sales numbers. Guess I can go ahead and buy a car after all.

robarron Arkansas: No need to age verify kids working in meat processing plants

OP here, I am not an US native but it still is inexcusable. I cannot edit the post anymore, so thank You for posting the correct abbreviation.

robarron Computing e to 116,000 Places with a Personal Computer (1981)

Even the cheapest electronics/computing ads nowadays taught me something. From memorizing electronic components codes to watch microcomputers slowly develop capabilities that only minis had. Ads where also window into an industry and hobby arms race.

robarron Abraham Lempel has died (the L in LZW compression)

Ditto

Also, GIF runs on LZW.

robarron Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

It was very common on old ‘cowboys and Indians’ movies’, at least on the old Spanish language translated reruns I watched as a kid: Some scout returned to some army fort and reported the presence of ‘500 braves’ coming from the north o hidden beyond some mountain or something like that.

robarron ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

i tried and it does not requieres to login to browse the site, but to download a book is says that the limit of downloads has been reached (apparently a tor connection appears as a localhost one 127.0.0.1) and then asks to login.

robarron What’s the probability of 3 quakes hitting Mexico City on the date September 19?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/english.elpais.com/internationa...

No payllawed and in english.

robarron Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

Westerners of the XIX century were the ones who brought many species to extinction, traditional cultures demonstrating a far more advanced sensibility to these creatures, often considered embedded with sentient attributes. Traditional cultures lived mostly in equilibrium with the fauna they consumed. For example bison went almost extinct as westerners arrived, while their numbers thrived when the the Native Americans ate their meat.

robarron Dr. DOS Betamax's DOS Fansite

I did all the computer related admin work at an ngo back in the day (and the transition from dos to windows was painful to say the least. Netware, word processing, mail clients, front-end menus, you name it, it all became a problem , not only due to the switch, but to be able to maintain two systems working, make them compatible AND interconnected. In our case Windows got itself thru the door only because we wanted to be able to use Aldus Pagemaker to do our DTP in-house.

The www was also a big windows ally. I remember having a perfect setup for uucp our mail, some gopher interfaces for the most savvy users, but once the web started to grow, it was all windows and trumpet winsock. Thank god for Peter Tattam!

robarron Hacker News was down

I am at gmt-5. I cannot sleep, my wife is out of town, I lost mi kindle the day before yesterday and HN was down. If I turn in the lights to read a book I will not sleep for the rest of the night so I listened to our cats fighting over what I assume was some big moth as my only distraction.

robarron Charlie Root

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/109387/what-is-char...

robarron Ncommander: 5/7 at 9AM ET,stream trying to compile the Movie Maker source

@Ncommander: Tomorrow, 5/7 at 9AM ET, I'm going to stream trying to compile the Movie Maker source while fundraising for @AbortionFunds because of SCOTU's draft judgment against Roe vs Wade.