simmons

However, as a developer of commercial products in those days, I can say that our hands were tied in some ways. For example, showing the electronic program guide as a grid was problematic due to patents owned by TV Guide. I suspect the grassroots projects were able to play a bit more fast and loose with these things, thus leading to the UI differences you observed.

I've had solid returns from investments in industry segments I've worked in. The strategy outlined above by wegs2 reflects my thoughts almost exactly, including not investing more than 25% into these "personal experience" investments, since it inevitably means putting many eggs in few baskets. Most of your investments should be in lower-risk, highly diversified things like index funds.

I'd add a couple of additional things:

1. I'm pretty confident about predicting the success of an industry, but not individual companies. There's just too many factors in play to predict individual winners and losers. So within the "personal experience" investments, I hedge across several competitors who I think have good prospects. (Happily, all such companies have done well, so I guess I've avoided winner-takes-all outcomes.)

2. Even in industry segments I'm very familiar with, I avoid companies that are prominent household names. I think there's just too much investor psychology wrapped up in this, and overvaluations are more likely. So I avoid investing in companies like Google and Apple. (Granted, if I had invested in Apple it would have done well! But it being a household name gives me cold feet.) One way to avoid this is to consider upstream suppliers the general public may not be familiar with, but nonetheless produce great value and have good prospects.

> This is only a piece of the 8086's complex instruction handling. Other latches hold pieces of the instruction indicating register usage and the ALU operation, while a separate circuit controls the microcode engine...

I've always been amazed at how complex the 8086 instruction encoding is, especially compared to, say, the 6502 (which admittedly is a much less sophisticated microprocessor). I especially think this whenever I play around with a toy 8086 emulator I've written. :) It's never struck me as being greatly elegant from a software perspective, but I assume there are some good electrical engineering reasons. (And I'm intrigued about the mention of microcode... I always assumed that came later in the x86 series.)

I sometimes wonder if I worked for a company that was fixated on cost-of-living-based salaries, and I decided to move up to Aspen (high CoL, but low demand for software engineers) if I would get a commensurate increase in pay. I'm guessing probably not. ;)

There are probably business considerations I don't understand since I'm not in the industry, but I've often been perplexed that indie films seem to spend years making the rounds in the film festivals, when they could be making money for the filmmaker from people like me who are eager to stream them.

I was thrilled to see a rigorous reverse engineering article. It's exactly the sort of thing I always hope to find when I browse HN. But I have to admit, it was a special delight to get to the end and find that the author was a fellow MSU alum. :)

So far, I've had a better experience with Amazon Fresh than with Instacart (King Soopers/Kroger) due to 1) the ability to "call dibs" on items instead of waiting for the shopper to see there's no stock and struggle to find a replacement, and 2) the quick 1-2 day delivery (but maybe I've just gotten lucky). On the other hand, lots of stuff is out of stock which makes shopping challenging.

We also put in an Amazon Pantry order yesterday. Expected delivery: April 26! :O

I wonder if they ever offer tours. It would be neat to see some of this history the next time I'm passing through the Cincinnati area. On a related note, it looks like there's a "National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting" just down the street from the WLW site.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who hand-assembled like this! :) Only for me, it was several years later, on a C64 with 6502 assembly, and I had the extra step of converting the hex values to decimal for DATA statements. Assemblers cost money. And my friends were more into playing games, so none of them had an assembler I could "borrow".

When you bill by the hour, it's natural to start thinking of everything in terms of lost time and money. And I actually think it's reasonable to think about the cost of taking time off, but if this is keeping you from taking vacation and spending time with your family, then you are severely undervaluing your time off. You can think of time off as a sort of cost, but it's a very small cost compared to the value it provides.

I don't have experience with working for customers in different cultures and across international borders, so I'm afraid I don't have any insight there. If I was in that situation, I think it would still come down to negotiating the vacation that I need.

I also don't have much experience with juggling several (>2) projects at once. In my experience, people seldom need just a little software engineering. If someone wants some software engineering, they usually want a LOT of it and don't want to compete for your time with other projects. So I tend to work on one project at a time, take vacations, and when the gig comes to an end, I look forward to taking a few months off to study.

So I suppose if I was in your shoes, I would insist on vacation, and not worry too much if I lost a customer that wanted to burn me out. (I acknowledge that working in the software industry puts me in a rather privileged position where I can be picky.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_coun...

I distinctly remember people being a bit unnerved when I'd call them back and say "Hey, I saw you called...". My girlfriend at the time was particularly disturbed that I'd know she called even when she didn't leave a message. People were used to treating unanswered calls as if they never happened, and felt a bit violated when you knew that they had been investing effort into contacting you instead of making a casual "what's up?" call.

It's very strange to think about such attitudes in the context of modern communication. :)

[1] https://archive.org/details/insideibmpc00nort

You can also punch holes in 3.5-inch double-density disks to attempt to turn them into high-density disks. :)

I say this with all due respect to the developer, who of course is free to distribute his software however he would like. It's a very cool project, and I often wish we could see a resurgence of such simplicity and distraction-free UX. :)

I agree with this. I don't think mail is particularly harder than other serious Linux and network system administration tasks. But it does require those sysadmin skills, and it's not something I would recommend to a typical software developer unless they were interested in broadening their sysadmin skills or had a particular need that could benefit from a self-hosted mail server.

I've been operating mail servers continuously since 1992, so I guess that's the buffalo I'm milking.

I'm guessing that the package ended up in Mississippi because FedEx's main hub is in Memphis, TN very close to the MS state line. There are several big warehouses just over the state line, and maybe FedEx uses such a facility for packages that are in limbo.

From a brief Googling leading to Winlink's web site, it sounds like Winlink isn't even encrypted at all [1]:

> Q260 While monitoring transmissions from WL2K stations, I notice that the content appears as “gibberish”. Isn’t this illegal?

> A260 The content looks that way because it is a compressed binary format called "B2F." This format is available to anyone, so the compressed data is not considered encryption or illegal for radio amateurs.

Is the concern that people are encrypting Winlink payloads anyway? And wouldn't this already be illegal under current rules?

[1] https://www.winlink.org/sites/default/files/wl2k_faq_2015031...

(Edit: formatting)

One of my WAN connections is 100Mbps down (25 up), and I don't have any problem saturating it. I'm only using whatever hardware offloading Linux supports out of the box, which from the parent article I guess is pretty minimal (e.g. stuff like checksum offloading, I suppose). I haven't noticed any bottlenecks when routing between two gigabit LANs (I just ran a quick dd|nc test that measures 940Mbps). However, my needs may be relatively simple and I'm sure there must be more complex scenarios that would benefit from the offloading described in the parent article.

I bought a 4-port Intel NIC because I wanted discrete network interfaces for 2 LANs and 2 WANs. I ended up having to saw off some of the PCI-e edge connector segments to make it fit in my motherboard, so I'm presumably not getting the benefit of all the lanes the NIC could otherwise take advantage of, but nonetheless it seems satisfactory for my needs.

The frustration comes with scenarios such as the one outlined in this blog post, where small mail server operators get bullied even though they are doing everything right. I can completely understand not wanting to operate a mail server due to this situation, or not having interest in leveling-up server administration skills.

For those of us who do have expertise in running mail servers, it's a shame we have to deal with these obstacles.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Adventure-Games-Susan-Lipscomb/...

[1] https://blog.checkpoint.com/2018/08/12/faxploit-hp-printer-f...

This was my thought upon reading the "Big computers and little computers are completely different beasts" quote, and it's also something I've been thinking about lately. Personal computers definitely represented a distinct development track from the multi-user/multitasking industrial/academic computing systems of the time. However, as PCs became more capable and merged key innovations from the higher-end computing branch (e.g. virtual memory, protected execution environments, and the operating systems that can leverage such features), we seem to have arrived at the same point -- a phone in my pocket that's more like a VAX 11/750 available in 1981 than an IBM PC from the same year. The "microcomputer" development track that included the Commodore PET and 8086-based PC systems was greatly useful for jumpstarting the PC industry, but was ultimately set aside.

So maybe it's not so much that small computers are completely different beasts than large computers, as their initial development required a unique approach to fit the constraints of that particular era.

As someone who has personally installed UNIX on a VAX 11/750, I do appreciate the attention to human factors that the microcomputer era has contributed to computing. :)

I assume it's because this quiz is only asking about how we pronounce words, and doesn't measure any other speech metrics like tempo/cadence. I guess I don't have the drawl, but still pronounce words with a Southern accent. Maybe this is why it confuses me so much when my wife pronounces Don and Dawn the same, which was question #2 on the quiz. ("Wait, which person are you talking about?!")

Maybe you have the drawl but not the Southern pronunciation?