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cpr

5,257 karma · joined April 6, 2008

Chris Ryland, founder/president, Em Software, http://emsoftware.com cpr@emsoftware.com

Long-time "lifestyle" software entrepreneur (small company since 1990), grizzled Silicon Valley start-up scene veteran (1980's), homeschooling father of 8, Harvard grad.

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cpr··on If you can't hold it, you don't own it
The same holds true of precious metals, most definitely.

If things really HTF, you're gonna want to not be blocked by a closed bank, etc.

cpr··on Curly braces: An evolution of Unix and C
I remember reading Unix source in Geoff Steckel‘s office at Harvard who got the first Unix distribution outside of their labs and the line printer would just would use overstrike on parentheses to designate curly braces and upper case (lower case was printed as upper since the line printer didn’t have lower).
cpr··on Byte magazine artist Robert Tinney, who illustrated the birth of PCs, dies at 78
Helped Carl Helmers start Byte along with another Intermetrics co-worker Dan Fylstra (who founded VisiCorp a bit later, the first PC software company that published VisiCalc) in the summer between semesters at Harvard.

Wrote a couple of articles and spent some time in Nashua (IIRC) with Helmers and Green (the publisher), but had to get back to school in the fall so faded out, and didn't overlap with Tinney's work.

Fun times.

cpr··on Israel used thermal and thermobaric weapons in Gaza?
Look up "where did the towers go?" on Youtube, a lecture by materials scientist Judy Wood. She argues I think conclusively that the towers were turned into dust by directed energy weapons.

(I know this will get downvoted to hell, but I suggest you find out for yourself.)

cpr··on Have Taken Up Farming
I think he was referencing Ted Kaszinski (sp?).
cpr··on Have Taken Up Farming
Would love link to olive oil farm…
cpr··on I Wasn't Worried About the Fed. Now I Am
"Muh Russia".

C'mon, that's such a cheap take. The Fed has done nothing but destroy the value of the dollar since its founding in 1913.

cpr··on The average college student today
> When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?

If you think of education as trying to lead people into being whole humans, seems like literature and philosophy (properly taught) are some of most critical subjects.

cpr··on First C compiler source code from 1972
Wow, that brings back memories!

First saw the C compiler sources on Geoff Steckel (local guru)'s desk around 1973 at the Harvard graduate computing center, and was absolutely floored at this fascinating-looking language. (Harvard got the first Unix tapes outside of Bell Labs; not sure of the connection there.)

All upper-case, of course, as the DEC lineprinters didn't have lower case yet. Real upper case was struck-through upper.

cpr··on Work at the Mill Or, the Story of Digital Equipment Corporation
I loved visiting the Mill back in the day when I was part of the crews buying DECSystem-20's for Columbia University and later the Fairchild AI Lab.

What a great place to work, and hanging out with the OS developers like Dan Murphy was just icing on the cake.

cpr··on How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)
Yes, helped start it (first or second employee back in 1980(?)).

Wild! I had forgotten the LispMs had Impress support; I think that came out of the time when we worked with Janet Walker, head of documentation at Symbolics.

cpr··on How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)
Nah, it'd come out too much as "almost famous".

I did manage to avoid being Microsoft employee #12 or so (my buddy Bob Greenberg was #8, I think?, and encouraged me to come join them), and Adobe employee #8 (I knew Chuck Geschke from some earlier work done as an undergrad extending his PhD thesis to Harvard's extensible language ECL), due to various life circumstances. I guess God didn't want be to be a spoiled rotten billionaire.

Another near miss was co-consulting with Len Bosack at HP setting up Lisp Machine networking, and wondering how the heck the then-nascent Cisco was ever going to sell more than a few hundred routers (based on the same Sun-1 boards developed by Andy Bechtolstein at Standford that we used at Imagen, the first typeset-quality laser printers, a spinoff from Don Knuth's research at Stanford) to universities and government labs.

As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.

cpr··on Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
And you know because...?
cpr··on Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/ivermectin-testim... -- see "New and improved Joe Tippens protocol".

Has worked for hundreds of people, and what has he got to lose? It's all natural medicines.

cpr··on How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)
That March 1977 map always brings back a flood of memories to this old-timer.

Happy nights spent hacking in the Harvard graduate computer center next to the PDP-1/PDP-10 (Harv-1, Harv-10), getting calls on the IMP phone in the middle of the night from the BBN network operations asking me to reboot it manually as it had gotten wedged...

And, next to me, Bill Gates writing his first assembler/linker/simulator for the Altair 8080... (I tried talking him out of this microcomputer distraction -- we have the whole world of mainframes at our fingertips! -- without success.)

(Edit:) We also would play the game of telnet-till-you-die, going from machine to machine around the world (no passwords on guest accounts in the early days), until the connection died somewhere along the way.

Plus, once the hackers came along, Geoff Steckel (systems guy on the PDP-10) wrote a little logger to record all incoming guests keystrokes on an old teletype, so we could watch them attempting to hack the system.

cpr··on [dead]
Because it was lab created. That's been well established.
cpr··on FBI Raids Home of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan
Are you joking?

The current US government is the most corrupt entity in the history of the world, if you multiple corruption times power.

And I love my country (USA), but just hate what the government has become over the past 60-80 years.

cpr··on End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit
The problem is that if you want to provide a full-featured file picker, and not rely on Google's limited browser-based version, your app will require the full "drive" scope. (We do, and we do, for our InDesign-to-Google Docs connector plugin.)

If you use some of the lower-tier CASA labs, it's not that expensive (4K/year), but it is definitely a nuisance for a pure desktop plugin like ours that has absolutely no cloud component (other than connecting to GDocs).

cpr··on Do programmers need touch typing?
There's nothing quite like the "flow" you get into when you're a fast, accurate typist and the code just pours of you like honey. (Well, that sounds slow. ;-)

Especially when using a fantastic mechanical (Hall effect) keyboard like (still) my favorite Apex Pro from SteelSeries.

Nothing matches or probably ever will match the old MIT AI Lab Tom Knight Hall effect keyboards (Microswitch), but these are mighty close. Something about the heft and the smoothness of those keys has never been replicated. I can still remember that feel quite distinctly 45 years later...

cpr··on The End of Finale
Wow, memory lane! Used it (only amateurishly) about 30 years ago...
cpr··on [dead]
Very censored. Pukes out the standard lies about vaxx dangers.
cpr··on DocuPanda – convert any PDF/image to a schema-driven, structured JSONs
Any examples anywhere?

Being prompted to log in/sign up is a show-stopper.

cpr··on You can now get SpaceX's Starlink Mini internet antenna that can fit in backpack
Even better, you can get a 15m Ethernet cable that brings the network to the point of power (with the standard 15m power cable).

I had my Mini set up outside and extended the power line as far as it would go, but then once inside, the Wifi signal was very weak, even just 30' away.

So I've ordered the Ethernet cable, and will attach it to a simple Wifi extender that's also at the point of power, so the inside signal is strong.

They really should have thought of this in the design -- going through walls is always a challenge.

The idea design would have the router combined with the power adaptor ("wall wart"), so the signal originates inside.

cpr··on Bootstrap post-collapse OOP technology (Part 1)
Post-collapse, will we even have power?
cpr··on Ask HN: Where are the old folks in tech?
I started my own software company 34 years ago after 10+ years in tech (operating systems & networking at a laser printer spinoff from Knuth's TeX project in SV and a mini-supercomputer spinoff from Josh Fisher's VLIW research at Yale (CT)).

So I effectively vanished into our own little world (the world of print publishing), building plugins for first QuarkXPress and now Adobe InDesign. We've been a 4-man company for some decades now, all working from home long before it was cool. ;-)

After all this time, I've lost almost all contacts with folks from SV. Don't really miss it.

cpr··on When the CIA turned writers into operatives
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird.

It's certainly going on today, especially in various three-letter agencies trying to control the narrative and keep the truth from public view -- see the Twitter Files by Taibbi and others.

cpr··on Ask HN: Midlife crisis, which direction to go with?
Can't vote this high enough.

Nothing in this life compares to helping young souls grow into their best self.

cpr··on Storing knowledge in a single long plain text file
I did this for decades (using Emacs) but finally gave up and am using Notes.
cpr··on A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
And, of course, the Asteroids Atari game sure looks like a version of the original Star Wars game on the PDP-1 from MIT I used to play in the Harvard grad computing center...
cpr··on The Lost Worlds of Telnet (2019)
I'm so old I remember in the early 70's when the ARPAnet had only a few dozen nodes, and there were free Telnet logins on most hosts -- we'd play a game (starting from HARV-10) where we'd make telnet chains to as many hosts as we could before something broke.

Could usually get 10-12 hosts going in a chain, sometimes more.

That was right before things got ugly and hosts had to shut down the well-known guest accounts due to malicious hackers.

Those were also the years that you'd send email by FTP'ing to a site and append-only writing to the tail of the user's mail file.

Ah, lost innocence...

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