nmdeadhead
Joined 8 years ago
Karma
119
Submissions
30
Member since
Nov 22
[email protected] https://ctm.github.io/docs/yld/life/too-public.html
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 14 days ago
Interesting. I've been working on a poker site, too. https://friends.craftpoker.com has a shabby interface, but there's a lot supported under the hood.
Comment · 5 months ago
For Triumph of the Nerds, Bob spent hours interviewing a few of us at ARDI, my Macintosh emulation company. Mat's is the only voice that made the cut. Our fridge got more air time than I did, but I'm juggling and riding a unicycle for a few seconds. "Those were fun days."
Nice to see Bob back, especially after the gut punch of Cleve Moler's death.
Comment · 5 months ago
Cleve was chairman of the C.S. department at the University of New Mexico from 1980 to 1984. I got my MSCS there in 1985, in a large part thanks to Cleve. I never took any of his courses, but I did speak to him off and on, because he was friendly, approachable and was an advocate of me being allowed into their Masters program.
On a couple of occasions Cleve mentioned that he had fairly significant troubles sleeping and I was impressed by how well he performed with so little good sleep. Turns out, I had undiagnosed sleep apnea myself that only got worse over the years (until I had three surgeries to significantly reduce it). During my bad apnea days there were times where I pulled myself together and rallied by remembering Cleve. I'll never be able to repay Cleve for what he did indirectly for me, much less what was direct and deliberate, but I do try to help others and will remain inspired by him until my brain no longer processes.
Comment · 1 year ago
D'oh! I didn't think to mention that I do serious rucking, because I tend to think of that as running, because I actually run when I ruck. Most ruckers don't.
As for injuries, I have some trouble in my right foot that was due to competing in a 12-hour ruck race on a hilly trail, where we did loops in the same direction. That was May 3rd and it's still giving me a little trouble. I had a different injury in my right foot that was giving me trouble for about two years that I think was due to an aged (about ten years old) orthotic causing hard to diagnose problems that were easy to misdiagnose. I think that trouble is behind me.
One day on little sleep, when I was new to bicycling, I went over my handlebars at over twenty miles an hour, landing on my face. That flat out broke a few teeth and chipped / damaged some others. Last month I had to have six of my front teeth removed, probably due in part to the damage they took on that bike accident, although to be fair, when I was in grad school I drank a lot of sugared coke right out of the bottle and ate away much of the enamel on my upper front teeth, so some of my teeth problems are due to simple negligence.
Oh, and I had an inguinal hernia that was probably due to my rucking. I had mesh put in on one side in 2012. I have continued to ruck competively since. I came in third overall at the Bataan Memorial Death March this year in the male civilian heavy (meaning carrying a 35 pound pack or more) division[0].
[0] https://bataanmemorialdeathmarch.itsyourrace.com/Results/657...
Comment · 1 year ago
Funny you should ask. I do my core exercises on Tuesdays and Thursdays and read Hacker News while I'm doing my unweighted squats. "Normally", I run Monday through Saturday and ride my bike on Sundays, with the aforementioned core work done in addition to my Tuesday and Thursday runs.
I'm about to start my "Bataan Memorial Death Run" training block and I've put that training plan on GitHub[0]. I also started an mdbook about some of the stuff I've done, but my (then 92 year old) mom had a stroke and it's less than half-baked[1].
[0] https://github.com/ctm/Bataan-Memorial-Death-March/blob/mast... [1] https://ctm.github.io/docs/yld/life/too-public.html
Comment · 1 year ago
Assuming no lying or cheating, the plural of anecdote is existence proofs.
Comment · 1 year ago
I started programming professionally at 16. I ran my first mile at 46. I'm 62 now and have run quite a bit. There's a very good (IMO) podcast that is mostly interviews of runners over 60[0]. At least one of his early interviews was with a woman who also finishes Ironmans. Disclosure, I'll be interviewed a week from today, although I don't know when it'll be published.
Comment · 1 year ago
In compatibility, it's MUCH worse than all the others, but there's also Executor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software) which you can use to run a Macintosh version of solitaire in your browser by having the browser emulate MS-DOS which then runs Executor/DOS: https://archive.org/details/executor
In addition to Executor/DOS, a non-released version ran on the Sun 3 workstations (they too had 680x0 processors) and Executor/NEXTSTEP ran on NeXT machines, both the 680x0 based ones and the x86 powered PCs that could run NEXTSTEP.
Executor was the least compatible because it used no intellectual property from Apple. The ROMs and system software substitutes were all written in a clean room--no disassembly of the Apple ROMs or System file.
Although Executor ostensibly has a Linux port, it's probably hard to build (I haven't tried in a couple decades) in part because to squeeze the maximum performance out of a 80386 processor, the synthetic CPU relied on gcc-specific extensions.
I know a fair amount about Executor, because I wrote the initial version of it, although all the super impressive parts (e.g., the synthetic 68k emulator and the color subsystem) were written by better programmers than I am.
Comment · 2 years ago
Ultramarathoning is, IMO, often misunderstood. However, volunteering at an ultramarathon aid station is a great way to get exposed to the sport, since you'll get to see a wide variety of people participating, whereas if you only know one or two ultra runners you may assume everyone is like they are. UltraSignup [0] is one way to search out ultras for which you may want to volunteer.
Comment · 2 years ago
I haven't read "The Comfort Crisis", but but for the last dozen years, I've spent three and a half months training hard to compete in the Bataan Memorial Death March male civilian heavy division[0], meaning I race a tough marathon course wearing a 35 pound pack. I do well.
I'm pretty sure I'd be in the top 10% of LTPA in that study, at least for my most recent ten years. I haven't spent the money to have any of my longevity markers tested, per-se, but I did get a (free) arterial wall stiffness test[1] last year and my heart did very well for any age group, and yet I was sixty.
If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them, although I'm about to go for a morning walk and may be gone an hour or so.
[0] https://bataanmarch.com/register/civilian-individual/ [1] https://github.com/ctm/diet/blob/master/blood_work/20230623_...
Comment · 2 years ago
FWIW, although it's closed source and pre-alpha, I've written a poker server (and proof-of-concept client) in Rust. A few people gather together at 5:05pm Pacific and play a tournament a day at https://craftpoker.com The outdated Players' Manual is at https://ctm.github.io/docs/players_manual/friends.html
It's free, no ads, we don't sell (or even collect for the most part) your information, etc.
Back in the day I did some work on fast hand evaluators in C and wrote in Objective-C the first software to deal multi-table poker tournaments (on IRC) on the internet.
Comment · 3 years ago
I do not think that when it's explicitly stated it becomes intuitive for everyone and that adds a further wrinkle. Many people will still get it wrong, even when the problem is stated correctly.
However, if the rule is not explicitly stated, how can the player know that the rule exists? Perhaps "Monty" is evil and will not always open a door, "evil Monty" will only open a door when he knows you've chosen correctly.
IOW, without that rule explicitly stated, the answer "Switch" is simply incorrect. Without that rule, the answer is "I don't have enough information to know."
Comment · 3 years ago
I'm that old. I toggled the PDP-8 our high school had. I did it often enought that for over a decade after I stopped I had the RIM bootloader memorized. It's only a handful of instructions. You can see it on page 35 of http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp8/software/DEC...
I have a few old timey computer stories, including using a punch card to transport a chunk of nitrogen triiodide. Hijinks ensued.
Comment · 3 years ago
As a high school student, I stopped our PDP-8 while it was running BASIC, then toggled in a little machine loop that changed all the occurrences of the 12-bit value that represented "Clear the Accumulator" with the 12-bit value that represented "Load the Switch Register into the Accumulator". I then loaded the soft-restart address into the program counter, set the switch register to 0, then used the continue switch to soft restart BASIC.
Surprisingly, everything appeared to work fine, until the following day, when someone soft restarted BASIC, but left one of the toggles up (because the soft restart address was octal 0200).
I wrote this up in more detail at https://ctm.github.io/docs/yld/programming/pdp8/first-hack.h...
Comment · 4 years ago
I too am a runner (~100 mi/week when not tapering or recovering) and "normally" I limit my caffeine to a double espresso at 5:15am. I take that one to synchronize my sleeping and bowels. However, it's a little more complicated than that because I divide the year into three different major training blocks and what I do varies both by which major block I'm in as well as what I'm doing within that block.
As such, there are trainings where I use extra caffeine for a variety of different purposes, e.g. to get maximum speed to train my body to go faster, or for the mild analgesic effect to counter some discomfort from long distances. Depending on how much extra I take and when, I may have to take the attendant tiredness into account when planning the following day's activities, both physical (more training) and mental (programming).
I believe I benefit from my use of caffeine, but it's tricky. I log all the caffeine I take as well as all the calories, analgesics and alcohol in a text file (which I keep in a public repository in GitHub). I can then look back and try to figure out what's worked well in the past so I can do more of it as well as what has held me back.