Hacker News Reader

helfon Gray386Linux – Linux for 386 Machines

snort

The RapidCAD is pretty amusing since it’s literally just a castrated 486 (no L1! Eek!)

The Cyril gray top FastMath FPU is the best bet for an upgrade and still being a real 386 (I’m hunting for one for mine ) - https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=65991

helfon Gray386Linux – Linux for 386 Machines

Boo! I was very excited for half a minute.

Guess my 386sx-40 will stay DOS5 + WFW 3.11 + CalmiraXP + Win32s etc lol

helfon Gray386Linux – Linux for 386 Machines

Oh sweet! I actually just pulled my childhood 386 out of storage :D

It’s just a SX 40 with 12mb of ram tho. I need to get a 387 for it and more memory.

This is great!

edit

Crap just saw the actual cpu compat list. Dammit.

edit again

Ok wait I was confused by someone else. This /will/ work on my 386. Yessss

helfon GeForce RTX 40 Series

Oooh quite the burn. Props.

helfon GeForce RTX 40 Series

The same thing people who say this always mean:

“In /my opinion/, this doesn’t add enough to the game experience to justify the performance penalty. Also, my hardware isn’t strong enough to use it. Therefor it’s a gimmick! Herpa derpa!”

That may actually be giving too much credit. It’s probably more like “I don’t like it so it’s a gimmick that no one else should enjoy”

helfon The internet is already over

Dear god. That was like trying to read a word salad stream of consciousness from a high grad student.

helfon 70% of all domains are parked

Yeeeah.. I finally let go of a handful of “haha this is great. How was this not already taken?” Domains at the behest of my wife lol.

helfon Happy 30th anniversary to ‘Sneakers,’ a cult classic that was ahead of its time

Well yes, of course lol

helfon Happy 30th anniversary to ‘Sneakers,’ a cult classic that was ahead of its time

insert Dwight Schrute Wrong GIF The pinnacle is clearly Scorpion. The most accurate portrayal of computering ever brought to TV.

helfon Android 13 requires devices to have more than 2GB RAM and 16GB storage

Android has been a mess for awhile and it isn’t getting better. A lot of bullshit is being done for “security” which will just end up recreating some of the sandboxed nightmares from iOS. The enforcement of Scoped Storage with Android 13 it going to essentially recreate the nightmare of file management that is iOS.

It’s really frustrating how Google has to slowly screw up damn near everything they create.

helfon Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Hacker News

No thank you.

HN is great because it /isn’t/ … that.

helfon Crypto Dev Enters Wrong Command, Destroys Entire Company

Key difference here is that a glitch cost Knight Capital money … not shuttering if the entire platform :P

helfon Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive

Amazes me the number of people who cry foul when something like this occurs. “Waaa censorship! This is evil! The internet is collapsing! Omg!”

1. Archive.org probably has just disallowed access. Not outright purged.

2. Shit drops off the internet literally every day

3. It’s a site full of edgelord incels who have a history of being complete pieces of shit

4. This isn’t a precursor to some horrible dystopian future of corporate control of thoughts!!111 that happened long ago ;)

Seriously though. All the panty twisting “oh noooo” wreaks of disingenuous bullshit under the guise of “but freedoms!”

You don’t have to leave the entirety of the content up to gauge it.

I mean, do you want TWBM to archive and leave up all childporn sites it accidentally crawls or similar? So individuals can gauge if it’s /actually/ bad or if it’s just a handful of twitter users squawking?

C’mon.

helfon Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

Um. HarmonyOS is literally just Android. It’s not even remotely new. There’s even. Android/Google copyright notices left in it.

helfon How and why I stopped buying new laptops

Chrome and Slack are both resource hogs from hell. No one is arguing that the specific innards haven't changed a lot. They are arguing that for a lot of people, depending on what you are doing and what you need, can get by just fine on a laptop that is few years to 15 years old and be perfectly happy.

You are also trying to compare a laptop an entirely different architecture that literally just came out to the other.

I mean, honestly, there were plenty of "arm laptops" the past 20 years and a lot of them ran cold to the touch and got 16+ hours of battery life. I know as I had several (Psion netbooks etc). The new Macs are latest evolution of H/PCs that have been around for decades. They just happen to be much faster ;)

helfon How and why I stopped buying new laptops

We have a bunch of Surface Laptops and Surface Books (looove the books) where I work (auto parts factory) that have survived better than they have any right to. I dunno wtf the previous IT was thinking getting them. They have 8 million magnets and are constantly covered in weld dust. But they keep right on working... shorting out power bricks and docks as they go though. In the process of retiring all of them but I have already cleaned up and let several people take their units home as they still get 5-10 hours of battery out of them and have no other issues. It is kind of wild how durable they have been.

helfon How and why I stopped buying new laptops

I used a laptop made in 2004 that I bought in 2005 as my daily portable driver till 2018 lol. I still have it. It's a Toshiba Portege 3110ct that I added a USB2.0 PCMCIA card to, IDE SSD, and bumped the ram to 192MB. Ran a customized stripped down debian based distribution with a lot of customizing on my part. A USB wifi adapter. Has a 300mhz pentium 2 CPU. Did literally everything I needed on a laptop perfectly fine (ssh sessions, IRC, pandora streaming, light web browsing, note taking etc).

My current laptop is a ~10 year old Dell. Has a 4TB SATA SSD in it, 1TB secondary SATA SSD in the media bay using an adapter. I have two mediabay batteries as well as a BDRW drive I can hotswap whenever. Extended primary battery. 16GB ram, i5-3360 CPU. Express Card slot that I use with several adapters, USB3 ports, onboard gige, WWAN card, Wifi, BT, backlit keyboard..

If you aren't /needing/ the extra grunt of newer chips for gaming, video work, low latency realtime audio work, CAD, etc, or want the absolute best size to battery life possible, then there is no reason to not use an older system.

Oh, it has an NVidia 5200M 1GB discrete GPU as well as the Intel IGP and the NVS has taken a massive overclock without blinking when I do want to game and runs stuff like Minecraft and older AAA and even new independent games at playable frame rates without any issues.

Now, for /work/ I have a newer MS Surface Book that I absolutely adore. The battery life and display and portability are fantastic.

But it is my work laptop. Not personal. I refuse to buy a brand new laptop for home use lol.

helfon SmartDry’s useful laundry sensor to be cloud-bricked next month

This is why anything remotely “smart” that I own and use can be self managed. Relying on the “cloud” and longevity of companies is asking for years. I hate that crap.

helfon California asks people not to charge EVs during heatwave

You know why? Because of fearmongering, redtape, and utter bullshit detractors every step of the way.

Nuclear power could be cheap and pervasive and safe and clean.

But noooooo. We have had decades of bullshit from people who barely got through 5th grade science making policies or voting in people making policies.

People piss themselves when you mention "nuclear" and other energy companies played it up.

helfon California asks people not to charge EVs during heatwave

I hate this sort of reporting/commentating.

"Hur hur they wanna ban new gas vehicles but now asking people to not charge their EVs!! hahah what morons"

ok, what? That plan is years out. And it is specifically because of issues like these heatwaves that they are attempting to push through new rules.

And there is the obvious plan on massive infrastructure upgrading between now and the mandate.

I mean, really, wtf? I am so tired of the braindead low hanging fruit "reporting" you see everywhere.

helfon Common tech jobs described as cabals of Mesoamerican wizards

Hugged to death :(

helfon Soviet Computer Software and Applications in the 1980's [pdf]

Anyone have the companion papers?

Soviet Computers in the 1980s: A Review of the Hardware

Is one. I can’t find a copy not behind a pay wall.

helfon Religion as an Ego-modulator

The amount of seemingly pro-religious chatter in here is really surprising to me.

I grew up in essentially a cultish variation of southern Baptist and have extensive experience with other denominations of “Christianity” and there is no way in fucking hell I would ever say a damn positive thing about the social clubs that are 99% of churches. Religion is almost entirely about control.

The current state of this country is due to the evangelical movement and all the bullshit that has come with it.

American “religion” and its followers can rot.

helfon Tesla Virtual Power Plant

That’s not the point (disclaimer: I love nuclear power), the point is this let’s them Supplement rapid energy demand /spikes/ over the span of literally seconds vs ramping up generation from other sources which are all slower as well as generally being further from where it needs to be at that moment. This allows them to readily absorb spikes happening randomly around the grid in an easier manner

helfon Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

Wow that is batshit. This article made me read up more in castes and. . . Wtf?

helfon Electric vehicles are way more energy-efficient than internal combustion

Which is great. Some really nice ones coming out. I might be up for giving up my Volt in 15 years lol.

I refuse to even consider a Tesla for a host of reasons but I'm keeping an eye on the other options.

helfon Post-Apocalyptic Programming

I still have my wiki reader. I love it :)

Being eink would definitely have been nicer tho.

helfon What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

I’m sure the other 60 million of you feel the same way.

Sarcasm aside, I take your point on gross generalizations and I’ll refrain from it in the future in my comments ;)

helfon NetBSD 9.3 Released

I love netBSD change logs. They always list stuff like bug fixes or new support for old stuff like Amigas or the Dreamcast lol

helfon What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

What is Up With Dilbert is Scott Adams is a Boomer and the older he gets the more obvious it becomes. I used to love a lot of the older Dilbert but lately it's just ... irritating.