teh_klev

> To fix a quarter-century-old monitor that was nothing special when it was new.

> Why? I mean, I wouldn't bother fixing the thing anyway, but hiring somebody is going to cost you more than a much better brand new monitor.

There are folks out there who spend their time fixing unexceptional cars such as old Ford Orions, Austin Metros, VW Golf Mk 3's (poverty spec) and so on. In their day these were the most boring of the mundane mass market motors you could buy.

But it's about capturing and snapshotting a point in time. Sure this particular monitor was probably crap, but combined with a same period Mac it's a time capsule.

You might think it's a waste of time, for others it's a hobby/past time. And it's one less thing in the landfill.

If you enjoy this style of writing with its pithy observations then I can recommend J.P. Donleavy's "The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival & Manners":

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unexpurgated-Code-Complete-Survival...

I read this on a train and the tears were dripping off my face whilst trying to control my laughter. I got plenty of funny looks.

Donleavy's "The Ginger Man" is also well worth a read.

You might want to read the site guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

Me too :), my one is the "College FX-100". I got it circa 1983 for my last year or so in high school. It's still a daily driver and the batteries last forever.

> One of the newer John Wick movies showed what a pissed off horse can do in memorable style.

Yep, that's quite a smack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5l3ncEcRKs

Ah, apologies, I didn't further enough up the comment tree.

How did you arrive at "women in tech" as a niche from the parent comment? It doesn't mention this. And I agree, women in tech hasn't been a niche political cause for at least 10-15 years, possibly longer.

What do you mean by this non-sequitur?

> I thought the UK courts can't override Acts of Parliament, because the courts are subordinate to it

The UK Courts aren't subordinate to Parliament and can tell the UK government to "go back and think again". For example, the move to export immigrants to Rwanda.

https://ukandeu.ac.uk/rwanda-policy-unlawful-unpacking-the-c...

> That last sentence was not meant to be passive aggressive at all.

I certainly didn't read it that way. It just stood out because British English is my native language.

"Mainly US" though which explains a lot ;)

I see as well that the US English spelling for "trawl" (as in fishing) is troll. Again, mainly US.

> But it was still faster than trolling the internet.

I'm guessing you mean trawling the internet rather than trying to upset and annoy the internet:)

I don't think you read the first line of that comment where there's a "lol". It's just a bit of fun.

It's humour, run with it :)

Clipper, BLINKER and the Brief editor FTW!

Very early in my career I wrote a ton of code in Clipper (a dBase clone and compiler).

In some ways I kinda miss doing @SAY, @GET, the TBrowse class etc and their TUI.

> Big surprise now I program for a living.

Oddly, me too :)

Seeing as we're sharing our fun and games...

When I was at college back in the 80's we had access as students to the college's VAX 11/750 (an 8750 Systime clone) to work on our coding projects. The student terminals were on one half of a large divided room, the other half being used by the college IT folks. Often, if there wasn't a spare terminal on the IT admin half of the room, one or two of the IT folks would use two of the nearest terminals just over the divider.

One day, bored out of my mind waiting for my COBOL project to compile, I wondered if I could capture the sys admin's username and password. I wrote a script using the CLI to perfectly simulate the login prompt complete with beeps, messages and all. All it did was clear the screen, sit there waiting for user to enter their username and password, when they did the script would mail me said username and password, display a username/password error then logout to the real login process.

After trying the script out on a couple of unsuspecting classmates and having a bit of anonymous tomfoolery I decided it was time to try this out for real with the sysadmins. I logged into both terminals the IT folks normally used and left the script running. A few hours later I returned and to my surprise and mild anxiety I found out that I'd captured the SYSTEM login password :o. For about a month or so I'd full control of that machine, and would re-run the script occasionally whenever the SYSTEM password changed. I told no-one and on my last day at college logged in and deleted the script, just in case (this was around the time the law in the UK was getting a bit heavy with regards to unauthorised computer access).

Combined with access to the huge set of manuals for that machine I spent a heap of time exploring and learning about VMS and no-one had a clue.

Perhaps you could provide an example or two?

There's a lot of mickey taking of Dan Brown's work but I found them (up until The Last Symbol) easy-osy reads in between more serious novels. They were something to relax with in the form of boy's own adventure stories from my youth.

Now even if his books aren't anywhere near high culture in a literary sense I do think that if they get non-readers to start reading books then that's a good thing. They can be gateway novels to much better writing. See also JK Rowling, Joseph Finder and Lee Child. Apropos Lee Child, my dad hadn't read much in the way of fiction for many years and then in his 70's somehow bumped into the Jack Reacher novels and he ploughed through them all on his iPad in his spare moments. That's no bad thing.

I agree. This is another acronym I struggle to recognise when I see it despite being reasonably familiar with the first three volumes since my high school and college days back in the 80's.

This is a rather short sighted and somewhat gate keeping mentality. Acronyms are often contrived and separate from the common vernacular and idioms related to a subject matter.

As a software developer with a forty year career behind me I'm quite familiar with the "SICP" book. But for some reason my brain won't persist the connection between the full title and the SICP acronym when I bump into it. Yet somehow I can recall what each and every assembly language mnemonic means across a fairly broad range of micro and mini computer processors.

> maybe that's a sign that particular thread isn't for you, and that you likely have little of value to add.

Sure I may not have much to add, but the reason to read a thread, article or essay is to become familiar with the subject matter because it sounds interesting. Don't assume your reader is an expert in decoding your special and often made up acronyms.

In good writing you should ideally use the full name of the thing you're going to abbreviate with the acronym in parenthesis after the initial "expanded" version. e.g.

"My article is about How to Design Programs (HtDP)..."

Then later the article: "In the HtDP book it mentions...."

This makes life easier for those less familiar with the subject matter.

And also one of the filming locations for the TV series "Severence".

This might be helpful when creating lists of things on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

"Blank lines separate paragraphs."

You could dip into sections of these books and pick and choose what you needed to learn. I don't think I ever read most of the three or four hundred books I bought in the period from 1985 to 2006 in a linear fashion. By 2006 I'd mostly switched to learning new stuff from online sources.

> Mid-80s was more or less Peak Horrible Death-Based Public Safety Ad, wasn't it?

And also the 1970's. I remember we were treated to a steak and mince horror safety show designed to discourage us tearaways from playing on the new bypass being built around our village circa 1977. It was a proper video nasty, especially for 10-11 year olds.

"Scarred for Life" is a great book exploring these themes, many of which continued into the early 80's:

https://www.lulu.com/shop/stephen-brotherstone-dave-lawrence...

There's a second volume covering 1980's TV:

https://www.lulu.com/shop/dave-lawrence-and-stephen-brothers...

> how C# programs (desktop programs) could have their source recovered under certain build conditions.

Yes, using a tool such as .NET Reflector, but the source was never embedded in the compiled binaries, or anywhere else if you were competent with the toolchain.

This was likely ASP.NET code. In the early days many folks just FTP'd their whole ASP.NET project folder to IIS, including the source code (e.g. .aspx.cs code behind etc) when you didn't need to. There was a lot of misunderstanding about how to deploy ASP.NET applications, many folks were still working with a Classic ASP mindset. I speak from experience as my company's .NET go to engineer and developer for a shared hosting company back in the day and having to explain to customers how to deploy their apps sans the source code.

> It was included for debug builds.

I've worked with .NET since the pre-1.0 betas back in ~2001 (I know...appeal to authority). The source code was never included in .NET debug or production builds. You could however use tools such as .NET Reflector (now owned by RedGate) to decompile the IL and reconstruct code as C#, VB etc. If you had the PDB files then you also had the symbols and could decompile to a close representation (variable names) to the original source.

This was a very useful feature because the .NET Framework managed code DLL's were and still are shipped obfuscated. This meant you could in the early days use ILDASM, and then .NET Reflector to find out what was going on inside the .NET Framework code.

Of course this created a market for obfuscators so that commercial and paid for shipping code was more difficult to reconstruct (especially since you wouldn't have the PDB files available).

You could do pretty much the same thing with Java.

Now if your binaries were NGEN'd [0], your chances of reverse engineering were reduced considerably because the IL is now gone and you're working with pre-compiled machine code rather than pre-JIT'd IL.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/tools/nge...