AndrewStephens

7 ms·

31.
by AndrewStephens 9mo ago
Great question, I could answer with many stories but here are two: The (deliberately) very limited analytics software I wrote for my personal website[0] could have used database but I didn't want to add a dependency to what was a very
32.
by AndrewStephens 9mo ago
https://sheep.horse/
33.
by AndrewStephens 9mo ago
The world needs more idiosyncratic and opinionated hand crafted websites like this.
34.
by AndrewStephens 9mo ago
Great essay! I have never played WH40k but have been quite into Magic the Gathering at times. Before I started playing I asked a friend what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards (even in the 90s this would have been possible)
35.
by AndrewStephens 9mo ago
He wasn’t in a coma, he was only 18 years old. He states up front that he has only been reporting for 40 years, so he started long after the CMC.
36.
by AndrewStephens 9mo ago
I started by finding my own blog and scrolling north, south, east, and west to see my neighbours. I’ve already found several interesting sites and a new person to follow on mastodon. It’s a shame there doesn’t seem to be any way to link to
37.
by AndrewStephens 10mo ago
Cassettes were never the best for audio fidelity but I always really liked the physicality of pushing the play button to move the heads into position. In some ways the inability to easily skip around a recording made listening a different e
38.
by AndrewStephens 10mo ago
Wikipedia tells me that Merced shipped in May 2001, which matches my recollection of not actually seeing a manufacturer’s sample until about then. That box was the largest computer I had ever seen and had so many fans it sounded like an eng
39.
by AndrewStephens 10mo ago
By the time IA-64 actually got close to shipping Intel was certainly talking about JIT being a factor in its success. At least that was mentioned in the marketing guff they were putting out.
40.
by AndrewStephens 10mo ago
I remember when IA-64 was going to be the next big thing and being utterly baffled when the instruction set was made public. Even if you could somehow ship code that efficiently used the weird instruction bundles, there was no indication th
41.
by AndrewStephens 10mo ago
This is the only "advantage" I can see with space-based datacenters. Crypto will remain a joke but putting devices beyond the reach of ground-based jurisdictions is a libertarian dream. It will probably fail - you still need plent
42.
by AndrewStephens 10mo ago
If there is one thing I have learned in my years in the internet it’s that there is no minimum reward below which people won’t bother to be dicks. Farming karma on HN to boost stories seems the most likeliest reason for this - an enterprise
43.
by AndrewStephens 10mo ago
I strongly agree. The actual plots of Space1999 were pretty laughable but I don’t think the production design has ever been beaten, even it today’s shows. The sets and vehicles look fully functional, even the clothes look perfectly wearable
44.
by AndrewStephens 11mo ago
Thank you for your lengthy reply but I still disagree. Both the technical problems and non-technical problems seem intractable to me. If cryptocurrency was going to fix this it would have done so by now. > I think you mention in your blo
45.
by AndrewStephens 11mo ago
> If you could integrate payment channels on top of private cryptocurrencies that would be enough. That “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. But my point is that even if a magical technical solution existed tomorrow then the same
46.
by AndrewStephens 11mo ago
I wrote about this exact problem last year. To anyone who disagrees, would you pay me 5 cents to click on the following link? https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html
47.
by AndrewStephens 11mo ago
Sadly, I think you are wrong. Micropayments seem attractive but the idea falls apart quickly - there are just too many intractable non-technical problems. It has been tried more than once and each effort has failed. I wrote a longer post on
48.
by AndrewStephens 11mo ago
I haven’t noticed a huge upswing in traffic on my personal blog but efforts like mastodon have led to some nice interactions. I think there is more sense of community and people realizing that blogs need to be encouraged than there was a fe
49.
by AndrewStephens 11mo ago
I am in the same boat, although I never managed 3k a day. At some point Google just stopped indexing most of my old posts. I also love getting real feedback from readers and make a point of emailing owners of blogs I enjoy.
50.
by AndrewStephens 11mo ago
This was invaluable when I was tasked with writing a stay-resident boot loader just after the turn of the century. Even then, such information was considered arcane and Ralf Browns Interrupt List was much better than any official documentat
51.
by AndrewStephens 11mo ago
This is still not that common but I used to work on a commercial web proxy that did exactly this. The only way it works is if the company pushes out a new root certificate via group policy (or something similar) so that the proxy can re-enc
52.
by AndrewStephens 11mo ago
That’s cool.
53.
by AndrewStephens 11mo ago
It is surprisingly difficult to get really crisp dithering on modern displays, you have to do it on the client to match 1-1 the user’s display. Notice that the pre-rendered examples on this page actually look a little blurry if you magnify
54.
by AndrewStephens 11mo ago
Well it’s not demineralised anymore since someone fell into it. I wonder if they have to replace the water now.
55.
by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I completed my degree in computer science at age 22 - at that time Shor had just published his famous algorithm and the industry press was filled with articles on how quantum computing was just a few years away with just a few technical hur
56.
by AndrewStephens 1y ago
> "These results ... indicate a viable path to practical quantum advantage" I'll add this to my list of useful phrases. Q: Hey AndrewStephens, you promised that task would be completed two days ago. Can you finish it today
57.
by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I love how everyone seems to agree that the BBC is horribly biased but there is fierce debate as to whether it is run by the ghost of Joseph Goebbels or if the staff start each day singing The Red Flag. Perhaps the real bias was inside us t
58.
by AndrewStephens 1y ago
As a site owner, the best thing you can do for your users is to serve all your resources from a server you control. Serving javascript (or any resource) from a CDN was never a great idea and is pointless these days with browser domain isola
59.
by AndrewStephens 1y ago
> The new promise of crypto is helping organized crime or sanctioned individuals/countries with payments, and it's delivering! It's not even new - Bitcoin right from the start was explicitly created to replace a centralize
60.
by AndrewStephens 1y ago
Hey, I only read EmbarrassingFetish.com for the recipes section (I recommend their carrot cake.) I'm not into the rest of the stuff there and you can't prove it thanks to HTTPS. More seriously, you are not wrong. Site Authenticati

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