Hacker News Reader

jamal-kumaron A list of fun destinations for telnet

My favourite way back in the day (late 90s/early 00s or so) was telling people to go start->run->telnet www.boston.ru and it would be a little asciimation of a penis getting erect and then spurting with a pc speaker noise...

People would sometimes flip out like they had gotten a virus or whatever

jamal-kumaron Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

Thanks, I was wondering who made the decks that bop was using!

jamal-kumaron Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

Been following people who have been making electronic music mixes between two cassette decks and a mixer which are worth a listen. The thing that's interesting is that you can pitch up and down in ways that sound nice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzsa1M7s1sk

Anyways, here's the mixes:

Trippy Ambient Cassette-Only Mix by Bop | Rewind Ritual 01

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHvyc69xe4

Cassette-Only Drum & Bass Set by BOP | Live at SK1 Records

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHmBcBPV-3U

DnB mix with cassette tapes (DJ Ponkachonka)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8jp5TcherI

Cassette mix drum & bass (2005 - 2010) (DJ Ponkachonka)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpqui0lo-v4

What's crazy is that at least the portable cassette decks aren't cheap anymore. Look on eBay at prices and be amazed

jamal-kumaron The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video]

Her ARM assembly tutorial series is really excellent

jamal-kumaron Perl's decline was cultural

oh yeah you're right and this is coming from someone who still likes/uses perl once in a while for text manipulation stuff that awk/sed won't cut it for. try going into your terminal and typing in

  man 3pm Errno

And you get this code snippet:

           my $fh;
           unless (open($fh, "<", "/fangorn/spouse")) {
               if ($!{ENOENT}) {
                   warn "Get a wife!\n";
               } else {
                   warn "This path is barred: $!";
               }
           }

man is that ever from a different time... but let me tell you if you can pull off some of those awk/sed or perl one liners you can do some pretty useful things with less resource allocation than you would be spending if you had written that in python, which becomes important if you're running it over and over on terabytes of data or on limited hardware

jamal-kumaron Theft of 'The Weeping Woman' from the National Gallery of Victoria

I think the irony today is that in 2025 the password to the security system for the Louvre's security cameras was "Louvre"

https://abcnews.go.com/International/password-louvres-video-...

jamal-kumaron Digital ID, a new way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet

Showing a QR code that belonged to someone else, like you know, the thing you said you did

Eventually in a system like that they may refine their procedures and then you get dinged essentially...

jamal-kumaron Digital ID, a new way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet

I know a guy who went to jail for that. He was in the news and everything. Banned from this country for life. Warned him that what he was doing was a stupid idea, he was even doing it for others who also got arrested...

jamal-kumaron Anxiety disorders tied to low levels of choline in the brain

I prefer to turn that into patê personally. Always the goal is getting people to actually eat the stuff

jamal-kumaron Anxiety disorders tied to low levels of choline in the brain

Liver can be pretty good if you spice it up Jamaican style. I regularly make this for people who tell me they don't like liver and they just love it. Pretty easy - Fresh and whole tumeric, ginger, garlic, onions, thyme, oregano, and as much scotch bonnet as you can handle. Soak the liver in brined water or milk for a few hrs and it will draw out a lot of the strong taste as well (French technique). Stew in some water after sautéing the onions to your liking. Same recipe works for stewing heart meat if that's something more to your liking, and it also contains a lot of the same nutrients that a lot of people are lacking in modern westernized diets. Consider what other predators do when they get to their prey: They go straight for the liver and heart.

However if you don't like the idea of trying new things, and just want something in pill form, honestly lecithin or even better citicoline is the way to go in my opinion

jamal-kumaron What Hallucinogens Will Make You See (2023)

Yeah Bresseloff is the man. Def check his work out, Ralph Abrams passed away recently (RIP) but he definitely had some words to say about all this stuff too, used to talk a lot with Mckenna and the unfortunate crank Sheldrake in trialogues which are fun reading if you got a mind open to that kind of thing

https://bressloff.github.io/index.html

Some other links - not only how the cortex got its stripes but how the leopard got its spots. You see alot of this math in psychedelic visuals now (Reaction-diffusion networks etc)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5056826/

https://plus.maths.org/content/how-leopard-got-its-spots

jamal-kumaron What Hallucinogens Will Make You See (2023)

I enjoyed it, people like to complain. If you wanna go further back on sources there's some pretty good stuff in like, math magazines hahaha

https://plus.maths.org/content/uncoiling-spiral-maths-and-ha...

jamal-kumaron Marko – A declarative, HTML‑based language

I think the grand takeaway is that people like to complain

jamal-kumaron Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/scalc/guide/d...

Hahaha this woulda saved me some time. We considered porting the app to be a web app but after some time it was obvious that wouldn't have been as good

jamal-kumaron Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

There's a few tools out there, another one I tried in Common Lisp but it was a horrible pain in the ass to get working. Figured to search for perl scripts because it's pretty much fine with old as hell encodings (latin-1) as it was originally developed contemporary to those, and that came up. There's also this, but it was written for dBase III and idk how well it works with fox pro

https://linux.die.net/man/1/dbview

jamal-kumaron Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

I just like to hack shit

jamal-kumaron Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

Here's a photo for anyone curious:

https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/111839478303640635

It's also worth noting that the original mainframe hardware has likely been virtualized at this point. Used to work for a company that was doing a lot of that around 15 years ago

jamal-kumaron Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

Thanks for the link, afaik my clients are still stuck using their old DOS TUI in a windows 7 VM that has no network access

jamal-kumaron Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

Yeah I actually help out a friend's family business a lot and we recently had to fix the program for something. It's a foxpro application rewritten in '89 from an original dBase port from earlier in the 80s. I legit had to bust out radare2 and hexdump(analysis)/hex fiend(editing) in order to get the changes done because the original programmer passed away (RIP). Was quite the learning experience but I'm glad that things were simple enough back then to make it something like an easy introduction into the world of reverse engineering for money.

I've seen even older in use. There's an auto parts store in the capital city of Costa Rica which was still running dBase III for its inventory system on a green phosphor screen IBM PC. Not sure if that store is around post-pandemic but it certainly was running around 4 or 5 years ago. Wish I got a video but it's in a particularly sketchy area that I don't really have any reason to return to.

Also, if anyone else ever has to dump an old database to CSV or whatever, I found perl to be the best tool for the job as it handles old encodings just fine. You can go from ancient database to spreadsheet really easy this way. Here's the ticket:

https://www.burtonsys.com/download/dbf2csv.php

jamal-kumaron The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)

Oh it was really stupid actually:

Blankenship was hired by Steve Jackson Games in 1989.[3] He authored the cyberpunk role-playing sourcebook GURPS Cyberpunk, the manuscript of which was seized in a 1990 raid of Steve Jackson Games headquarters by the U.S. Secret Service.[4][5] The raid resulted in the subsequent legal case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service.[6]

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._U...

jamal-kumaron Grayskull: A tiny computer vision library in C for embedded systems, etc.

On this tip I always found opencv to work way way faster just dropping the color depth of whatever image as such

jamal-kumaron New study shows plants and animals emit a visible light that expires at death

Yeah he types weird and linked some generic YouTube search result that pops Joe Rogan up for some people, but there's some pretty interesting research along these lines that's becoming harder to dismiss as just Roger Penrose stepping way outta his field (I don't see people personally attacking Hameroff or Tuszynski for their roles in this research which always struck me as telling). I think it's more trying to zero in on how consciousness works from the perspective of trying to figure out how xenon administration in anesthesiology works to induce its effects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXElfzVgg6M

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157106452...

jamal-kumaron Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters

The videos where people try to do the 10,000+ drinks are pretty funny but the ones where people are just straight up frustrated their order isn't getting interpreted correctly are also telling [1]. I've also heard of employees intentionally breaking these kiosks or AI things in this way just to make their own job easier because these things messing up all the time are just getting in the way of their burger flipping and making things complicated. I thought they kept beta testing of new flavours to a few locations in Orange County, you think they'd do the same for large software rollouts

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bsTFEgFAAjY

jamal-kumaron Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

Not only that, they really dropped the ball on photolithography for making chips

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

jamal-kumaron Online Collection of Keygen Music

I think a good part of it is the tooling and how it looks a bit like reverse engineering. Ever play with a tracker? It's like editing MIDI triggers with a hex editor. Here's aphex twin making music in one

https://vimeo.com/223378825

jamal-kumaron M8.7 earthquake in Western Pacific, tsunami warning issued

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAFYVpX45xs

Here's a video of what it looks like from the 2011 event, from the POV of the coast guard approaching it. Waves don't typically look like a sheet has been flapped across one front of the entire horizon of what is visible on the ocean

jamal-kumaron Tea app leak worsens with second database exposing user chats

There is the AWDTSG social media groups that this app shamelessly took the idea from in an attempt to monetize it, and the thing is that these groups probably serve the exact same function just fine without egregious mistakes in the name of move fast and break things techbro profit like 'exposed s3 buckets a literal child could have found' regardless of anyone's opinion on whether they should exist or not

There's also the fact that the big story in the USA right now is how some app got hacked exposing everyones IDs and the big story in the UK right now is that they want everyone to enforce ID verification for literally everything and they want people to think this is somehow safe and not just a time bomb waiting to blow

jamal-kumaron Recovering from AI addiction

I distinctly remember english speakers being less annoying before this guy filled everyone full of relating absolutely everything to trauma. It just seems like a massively reductionist point of view in a world of people more complex than that

jamal-kumaron Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

Welcome to the USA. Psychedelics are just the tip of an iceberg here. There's shit like highly effective cough medicines or antidepressants available in other countries which show promise in saving lives but nope mired in patent stuff and corrupt regulation...

https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/european-cough-medicine-...

jamal-kumaron Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

It's kind of worse with alcohol because the psychosis associated with that as an exacerbating factor is more related to alcoholic encephalopathy, Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome etc... much of which can be brought on with self medicating with alcohol. Definitely a component but more like psychosis and mania drive you to drink because these experiences are awful more than a causative factor that's been proven

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459134/