>You know you need to service mechanical watches regularly, right?
Mostly, yeah, but I have some nicer pieces that have been in my rotation for decades with only the barest minimum of services. Like, I think my Omega (ca. 1998) has been serviced maybe once, and it keeps great time.
I loved the Model M, but my first real THIS IS MY FAVORITE I WILL CUT YOU keyboard was a Northgate. Dang, I loved that one.
For most of the last 20 years I've been on Kinesis boards. First a regular Ergo, and then starting about 6 months ago their new Advantage 360, which is a definite improvement.
I read a mess of books about Mitnick's escapades including Hafer's and Shimomura's, and definitely came away with the impression that while Mitnick was a criminal, Shimomura was a bit of an asshole.
I haven't lived in an apartment in nearly 30 years, but the last one I moved into, in 1996, was brand new and relatively fancy. I'd been renting a house with friends, but it was Houston and I wanted access to a pool and onsite fitness center, so I signed up at a new complex in a convenient area.
I split a two bedroom two bath place with a friend, and we moved in.
The place was made of tissuepaper. The brand new carpet was threadbare within 6 or 8 months. The walls were insanely thin (I still feel bad for traumatic breakup my neighbor apparently suffered, but it was rough to be woken up by sobs for weeks on end).
I moved out when the lease was up and rented a house again. And then, a shockingly low number of years later, the whole building was razed. I'd be surprised if it was more than 6 or 7 years old.
The complex is still there, but they build a high-rise on that part of the property.
It was the NEWEST building I'd ever lived in, and it ended up also being the very first building I lived in to be demolished. My ex-roomie and I are still pals, and when still laugh about how insanely shabby that place was.
All of this is a long way of saying: Yeah, I get it.
There's a concept in history whose name escapes me, but which was evoked often when Harrison Tyler died in 2025. Tyler was a private citizen, but he was of note because he was the grandson of the US's 10th president John Tyler -- who died in 1862.
The gist is how surprising bridges to the past are closer than you realize -- as is the past itself.
At my first corporate job in 1994, we had a machine room. Those weren't uncommon back then. What WAS uncommon was that, over in a corner, sandwiched between racks of shiny new DEC Alphas, was a PDP-11 that was still running production code.
My employer then was TeleCheck, which did point of sale risk analysis for checks. The business had originally been run as independent state-by-state franchises, and back then someone had the bright idea to create an IT company that provided services to these franchisees -- and, occasionally, to other companies, too. By the time I was hired, the franchises AND the IT company had all been brought under one ownership, and all the IT company's external clients had gone elsewhere EXCEPT ONE.
That holdout was perfectly happy with what they got from that ancient computer.
I assume it eventually died, but TeleCheck had a DEEP bench of DEC talent, so it could've kept running a long, long time.
It's one of my favorites. But I prefer to reread with two bookmarks, just as I did when I first encountered it (and just as I did with Infinite Jest years later).
Fun fact for me personally: because I am lucky enough to know a zookeeper who was in charge of the ambassador animal program at a major zoo, I have direct personal experience that cheetahs purr when you pet them.
You're right. They're smaller than you probably imagine (about the weight of an average Labrador). That's still definitely big enough to be a problem if they felt threatened, I'm sure, but the animals my friend was in charge of were raised to be around people for outreach purposes. That particular cheetah, for example, had once been on the Today show.
West is plenty notable on her own, but in THIS particular crowd here at HN, it's probably fun to note that her dad was first-wave computer engineer Tom West, who was a big part of Tracy Kidder's SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE.
There are lots of data manipulation tasks I've run into at client or customer sites where, if I had my druthers, I'd use perl or python -- but there's no way to get those in the environment. But Excel is there, and Excel has VBA and a strong API.
If you internalize how Excel works (which is to say: you use the native concepts and don't just leap to how you might do it in perl), there's great power available there. I've written things in Excel with abstractions and class structures I'd be proud to have implemented in "better" languages.
I've also seen "normal" end users discover this power, and find it a tremendous boon to their day to day working life. (This was also true 35 years ago with Lotus macros.) People who would never think of themselves as programmers still have muscle memory for Alt-F11.
It was... weird. I had a friend who was working there, and I needed a gig. At the time, in the city I was in, this constituted a pretty big advantage.
The role would've been customer facing but technical, which is where I've spent my career. I answered some reasonable panel questions, and then they had me give a preso on any technical topic I liked. I'm good at that, so I aced it.
Then we got to other questions: specifically, questions from me.
"Are you currently profitable?"
They were not. This, in and of itself, isn't a problem, but it leads to the next question.
"At your current burn rate, how many months of operating cash do you have on hand?"
(murmuring) "Two, but our founder funds us as we need it."
"Are there specific milestones that are tied to additional capital infusions, or any formal agreement, or is it all just at his discretion?"
"It's discretionary but he's very committed to the company."
Having already had negative experiences with one-rich-dude companies, I thanked them for their time and left. I was VERY surprised when they called me a couple weeks later to MAKE A SERIOUSLY LOWBALL OFFER, which I literally laughed at. At least the dude who made the call seemed to understand the company was insane.
My friend jumped ship shortly after. He had more tolerance for Weird Startup Shit because of family money, but it got too weird even for a guy who didn't need the income, if that tells you anything.