marttt

Similar thing in Estonia: https://news.err.ee/1610183296/hackers-raised-freezer-temper...

I remember a quote by Pandoc creator slash professor of philosophy John MacFarlane: "I would like to think that the time I’ve spent developing tools to make writing more efficient has been repaid by the time I’ve saved using these tools, but I’m pretty sure it hasn’t."

Reference: https://usesthis.com/interviews/john.macfarlane/

I think 9front (Plan 9 fork) dev, cartoonist and fiction writer Stanley Lieber also formats a good part of his stuff with troff, e.g: https://massivefictions.com/2024/06/24/0/

"This book was typeset (troff -ms|lp -dstdout|ps2pdf) in URW Garamond No. 8 by the author, using an MNT Reform laptop running the 9front operating system."

Have you ever considered using any of the tiny clones of Emacs instead? So you'd get the lisp-y experience without the "kitchen sink".

Our son was about 3yo when I read it, and I couldn't put it down. To me, it is a story of the father standing by his son no matter what. A really immersive reading experience. A father-son exchange that touched me:

  What is it?
  Nothing. I had a bad dream. 
  What did you dream about?
  Nothing.
  Are you okay?
  No.
  He put his arms around him and held him. It's okay, he said.
  I was crying. But you didnt wake up.
  I'm sorry. I was just so tired.
  I meant in the dream.

I do think McCarthy's own family life felt, well, "controversial" in the light of all this. But, at least he didn't seem to justify himself about it. IIRC, on not paying child support after divorce, he has said "with what?" in one of his rare interviews.

I'm not a native English speaker, and I've had writerly ambitions myself, and his style feels like magic to me (hey, an accidental cormac-y polysyndeton here!). But... yeah. Thinking about the way many poets "manage" to put art before family life (obviously, they can't help it) is a good reflection of me myself being just a layperson.

But he is a true master, obviously. Could be that I liked "All The Pretty Horses" even more than "The Road". Unfortunately "Suttree" isn't translated to my language yet.

> If I do think about a feature, I tried to build a package instead

I suppose this is actually the way of keeping a "lean" Emacs.

Is anybody here consciously trying to keep their Emacs configs/setup "lean", minimalist, as small as possible?

I'm not a coder, but I did use Emacs daily around 2010-2012, with brief returns later. I always gave up eventually because the complexity of addons, the org-mode-can-do-everything-so-I-should-do-everything-with-it etc just grew over my head. I've discovered that I like Plan9 Sam, Acme and, in general, the one-thing-well camp better. Each their own, I guess.

That said, I did often like how "immersive" using Emacs can actually be at times. I'm a trained journalist, and it made managing bits of information, including PDFs etc, really streamlined, almost like a wonder. And, I had my own little OS on a USB stick that way (though the minimalist in me always whined that "an editor" should not weigh 100+ megabytes).

Incredible that it has been around for 50 years, with no signs whatsoever of being a "paradigm of the past".

I've become stuck in a strange metaphor regarding this: Gopher, Gemini etc are like an indicator of "biodiversity". Like a species living happily inside a small, even tiny ecological niche, having discovered that they don't really need much more.

Small protocols don't (?) disturb the mainstream internet in any meaningful way, but they simply deserve an opportunity to "be". They'll never be "big" these days (or, maybe in the scifi-scenario of complete societal collapse?). The content might, indeed, be a from-geek-to-geek thing these days, but they're a lovely sign of cultural richness, different thinking patterns etc.

The paths of those two groups are crossing all the time probably, though.

This is interesting. Do you consider Yandex absolutely safe to use (wrt their possible connections with the Russian government, and current war in Ukraine)?

Asking this as a geeky end-user from Estonia -- I wonder if I would be considered "suspicios" by local internet service providers, our govt/police etc if I did a lot of searching via Yandex instead of e.g. Google these days.

(For us in Estonia, I suppose "everything with possible Russian ties" seems suspicious these days, unfortunately with a reason. As a side effect, this also creates a hesitation to look into interesting projects like ReactOS, the old-dos.ru repository, etc. Russia, obviously, inhabits lots of extremely talented coders who still have the skills and mindset to push older hardware to its limits, actually still write stuff in assembly for that, use the reviving DOS distros, etc -- lots of very interesting, creative coding done there, I guess. But, I hesitate visiting their webpages due to Putin's aggression in Ukraine, them being pro-Putin, and possible spying related to all this. It's a sad state of things actually. Sort of like a loss of computer-cultural ties.)

Great example, thanks for sharing! We seem to have that same reflex (always calling moms in case of emergency) in our country. I guess it just takes time, probably a few decades, for societies to really start trusting dads as caregivers equally to moms. By trust in this regard I mean "pay no attention whatsoever to the sex of the caregiver because it doesn't matter".

> ... And be praised whenever a diaper is changed or I fetch the little one from school.

I may be calling names now, but maybe this is an unnecessary "oldschool" meme that should already be forgotten. In my country (Estonia), I don't see dads actually being praised for every small childcare chore they courageously complete. Nobody does that, really. It's more like a meme that e.g. feminists love to bring about and keep alive in Facebook or elsewehere, thus showing an ongoing conflict between men and women (or -- being a man vs being a woman, with women actually as the superior sex or side). Let it fade away finally, for god's sake, and let dads quietly do their thing.

Source: first-hand experience as a primary caregiver for our children for several years, while the mom was working full time. It was not really an optimal scenario in terms of sharing economical responsibility (it did raise conflicts at times), but I liked "doing stuff" with both children, and never expected any direct admiration from society, etc. Luckily, I also didn't get almost any of this. :) I just did my thing as a dad, got children to kindergarten and then back home, did all the kid-chores there as well, etc, and those were some beautiful times.

How big are the project files these days? In the .aup3 format all source material was rendered into one big pile, so with lots of "raw tape" (e.g. for a radio show) the session files became huge. It was annoying to transport an 1.5 GB session file between two machines even via network.

Reaper and Pro Tools (and many other DAWs), in contrast, had the source material in one folder and the session file essentially just documented the edits. These small session files could be exported even via email.

The .aup3 format was one of the reasons why I decided to ditch Audacity3 for radio editing back in the day. And, it used to lag heavily when I had a project with several hundred cuts done via "ripple editing". All this was years ago, though.

I concluded that Audacity v1.2.6 was the high point of this software and, indeed, tried to go back into using that one for a while (in 2019 or 2021 or so)! It was fast enough, very simple, young, raw, robust, but it still had its early 2000s open source enthusiasm charm. :)

As a blast from the past, here's a 2002 publication by the original authors of Audacity on the original file format: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/papers/RBD-papers%20renamed/A%20...

Insightful comment, got me thinking, thanks for sharing. I suppose, in the end, there isn't all that much logic in human relations, or there are always far too many "unknown unknowns".

Yeah, the group dynamics of, say, a family with two children:

   1. Kid A plays with Kid B
   2. Kid A plays alone and Kid B plays alone

As compared to a three-child household:

   1. Kids A, B and C play together
   2. Kid A plays with Kid B, Kid C plays alone
   3. Kid A plays with Kid C, Kid B plays alone
   4. Kid B plays with Kid C, Kid A plays alone
   5. Kid A, Kid B and Kid C all play alone

So, in a bigger family, many more communication patterns between children can arise, which, among other things, might develop the child's empathy etc.

Adding mom and dad as "players" would give us many more possible scenarios here (Kid A playing with mom, Kid B alone or with dad, etc).

I'm a father of two with a low income, and I would like to have a third child for precisely the above described reason. As a sociologist in my country put it -- somewhat harsh words maybe, but probably largely true: a single child might get spoiled, two children may start competing too heavily, but three children and above is company.

Yeah, wifi on DOS is doable, but very limited in speed and not exactly straightforward to set up (so much that I haven't seriously considered trying myself). Here's an overview and a writeup:

https://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/network/wifi.htm

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/wireless-networking-in-dos/

Re: distraction free writing machine -- another option would be a FreeDOS/SvarDOS-based system: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/04/26/build-your-o...

No kidding. Lots of fun to see a system actually boot in about 1 second.

That aside, I've installed all kinds of systems on my trusty 2009 Dell Mini 9, a fanless netbook. For years, this was a CLI-only Tiny Core Linux system, currently running SvarDOS. While on Linux, I even used it to live record 1,5-hour long radio shows via an old Mbox2 audio interface and some CLI recording software. Created a huge ramdisk just in case, but everything went well. Netbooks are weird and interesting machines.

Similar guy (though a more mysterious persona), and another noteworthy low-key web page: https://simplifier.neocities.org/

Thanks! I wasn't sure about this one, and guessed wrong. Considering pronunciation, it does feel that there should be a soft sign as well.

Sasha may also refer to Alexandra, which is a feminine first name. What's more, there's like a ton of diminutive short names for these -- my first ever instagram link on HN, but: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTUeNn7iAit/

(FWIW, it lists: Sasha, Sashka, Sashulya, Sashenka, Sanya, Sanechka, Sancho, San, Shurik, Sashunya, Sanyusha, Sanyok. I myself have heard native Russians use Sash - should be written as Сашь -, and e.g. Mish - Мишь -, which is a similar "lazy" conversational short form for Misha/Mikhail.

I've learned some Russian, and once you start sensing the endless magic they can do with verb prefixes and sufixes, you realize what a versatile language this is. Somewhat the same counts for first names, I guess.)

This whole story somehow reminds me of the Fosbury flop technique in high jump -- amazingly, Dick Fosbury started to develop it at the age of 16: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Fosbury#High_school_and_t...

From the Wikipedia article on Fosbury:

"The technique gained the name the "Fosbury Flop" when in 1964 the Medford Mail-Tribune ran a photo captioned "Fosbury Flops Over Bar," while in an accompanying article a reporter wrote that he looked like "a fish flopping in a boat." Others were even less kind, with one newspaper captioning Fosbury's photograph, "World's Laziest High Jumper""

Is there a current and pre-compiled Windows port for Dillo somewhere?

+1, same here, I've used line editors a fair bit (and enjoying line-oriented interface in general), so rlwrap has been an essential tool for me. Many thanks for your work!

See also -- The Screenless Office: http://screenl.es/

(On HN 2017, 138 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15960056)

Nils M. Holm's essays about highly intelligent people and IQ are worth a read here -- "Where Do The Failed 0.1% Go?" [1] and others [2].

1: https://t3x.org/files/vidya_324-325_NH_reprint.pdf (on HN 2015, 170 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13145853)

2: https://t3x.org/#essays

DOS is very much alive these days, though [0]. Text-mode internet is there (should you want online in the first place), and, thanks to some amazing devs, soundcard support has made a huge leap [1].

I use it every day lately (for text-related work and hobbyst-level assembly learning -- my intent is to write a small application to do paid work which involves chopping audio files). And -- I say a single-tasking system is a complete, true bliss in our days. Paired with a 4:3 Thinkpad screen, that DOS environment gives me instant focus for a long time -- which, to me, has been almost impossible to accomplish on a multi-tasking, contemporary-web-browser-equipped system recently.

Apparently, though, there seems to be AI for DOS, too [2]. :) I prefer my DOS machine to be completely offline, though. Peace and harmony for the soul!

0: https://freedos.org/ | http://svardos.org/ | https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/minidos-2026-relea... | https://bttr-software.de/forum/board.php

1: https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA

2: https://github.com/lanmeibuxie/AI-for-DOS

+1. I would add RJ The Bike Guy's youtube channel -- straightforward, down-to-earth, no-nonsense videos, may prove immensely useful if you have simple, traditional, cheaper-end bicycles at home, and only a basic set of tools. Excellent explainer; has similar "vibe" to Sheldon Brown's site IMO: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaAK2FaxQ2xiBbAUVZsvDYQ

Here's another, ultimate bike derailleur geekery -- Disraeli Gears: https://www.disraeligears.co.uk/site/home.html

Yeah. There's probably tens of thousands of internet users worldwide with that same story. Myself included: when I was fixing my Bianchi retro road bike's derailleur etc some 20 years ago as a univesity freshman, this site was a definite gold mine, immensely helpful, and taught me a ton. One of my favorite procrastination rabbit holes as well back then. :) And -- a prime example of 1990s era internet and information freedom and layman-level enthusiasm -- selfless sharing of knowledge (and, I wonder if he also used Notepad to write the HTML :). Thanks, Mr Brown, for everything, all the way from Estonia!

PS, interesting to note that Mr Brown seemed to be quite a fan of sci-fi books: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/org/books.html

Side note: looking at the screenshot gallery on the linked site, it is interesting to see how often audio software GUIs mimic real, physical devices in remarkable detail. Carefully crafted graphics for volume dials, sliders etc.