Top all-time · #2294
Captain Napalm
Personal blog · boston.conman.org · on HN as spc476culturewriting
Captain Napalm writes The Boston Diaries, a personal blog at boston.conman.org about culture and writing. Since 2008, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 223 times, most often “A constructive look at the Atari 2600 BASIC cartridge (2015)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Trick-or-Treating seems to be dead, at least in our neighborhood
Most-linked posts?
- A constructive look at the Atari 2600 BASIC cartridge (2015)4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-06-26
- But, what about languages that have support for "write-only memory"?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-02-01
- Roko's Dancing Basilisk3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-12-03
- Notes from a Gibsonian Novel2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-08-26
- Unit Test This2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-12-22
- Using the same blogging software for 20 years2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-12-05
- The Case of the Missing Core Files (2014)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-03-08
- A world of message-oriented programming languages (2018)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-03-17
- A breakdown of the triple-star pointer2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-02-24
- /2004/01/21.12 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-11-07
What Hacker News says?
I've found books that had ads inserted into them [1]. It seemed to be a thing from maybe the 1960/1970s. The ad page was a different type of paper, and no text from the book was on it (that is---the ad wasn't on one side and book text on the other). [1] One example: https://boston.conman.org/2002/12/31.1
Comment linking /2002/12/31.1
on “Nobody cares”Submitted Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me as a story · 599 points
HN discussionQuite possibly a third or fourth OS as well ... http://boston.conman.org/2013/01/22.2
Comment linking /2013/01/22.2
on “The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone”Submitted Four lines of code it was four lines of code as a story · 170 points
HN discussionMS-DOS wasn't that great. Oh, don't get me wrong, it's great at being a singer user, non-reentrant interrupt handler on a painful to program architecture [1]. A lot of applications skipped using device drivers entirely for things like the keyboard, video and serial I/O (using such made the program run more slowly). Do you know how much work it was to redirect the input/output of an MS-DOS application? It can get pre…
Comment linking /2015/12/13.1
on “An Experimental Course on Operating Systems”Submitted Why isn't memset() async-signal-safe? as a story · 161 points
HN discussionHmm ... it seems like it's a replay of the web circa the late 90s. http://boston.conman.org/2013/02/07.1
Comment linking /2013/02/07.1
on “I'd like to use the web my way, thank you very much Quora”Submitted When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?” as a story · 157 points
HN discussionLast year I made some minor changes to my blogging engine [1] to support gopher, so now my blog [2] is also available via gopher [3]. The source code to the gopher server is online [4]. [1] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog [2] http://boston.conman.org/ [3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/ [4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/1Gopher:Src:
Comment linking /
on “Does anyone remember websites?”Submitted Implementing DOES> in Forth, the entire reason I started this mess as a story · 123 points
HN discussionHere's a bit of detail about an internal attack I was involved with: http://boston.conman.org/2004/09/19.1 It wasn't a disgruntled employee---it was an employee who was hired by another party to get hired by the target, spend six months there, and did his thing on a particular date.
Comment linking /2004/09/19.1
on “80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again”Submitted There was a time when search engines were a thing, and it seems they still are as a story · 100 points
HN discussionI've done something similar (but not exact) for Lua [1]. I was testing code to trace Lua execution and found some code that was executed more than I expected [2]. Adding a trace like you described should be easy as well in Lua. [1] http://boston.conman.org/2015/02/12.1 [2] http://boston.conman.org/2015/02/13.1
Comment linking /2015/02/13.1
on “PySnooper: Never use print for debugging again”Submitted Using the same blogging software for 20 years as a story · 94 points
HN discussionNYC to Chicago probably has a decent customer base to support that price point. For amusement, try Miami/Seattle via Amtrak. It's possible, since I looked up the route [1]. One week transit time one way, at $2,000 (I don't recall if the price was round trip or just one way). And trying to work on the train was fun (too "swishy" to use the computer: http://boston.conman.org/2015/08/05.2 ). Totally not worth it for me…
Comment linking /2015/08/05.4
on “I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app”Submitted A constructive look at the Atari 2600 BASIC cartridge (2015) as a story · 88 points
HN discussionHave you tried pricing train tickets? I have, and it's always more expensive than flying. Just now, I decided to price a ticket from Delray Beach, Florida (where the closest Amtrak station is to my house) to Deland, Florida (a distance of 220 miles). By car (and my car, I mean, my car, which gets 30mpg), it's a total of six hours (three there, three back) and will cost me $45 in gas (assuming $3.00/gallon, which is…
Comment linking /2015/08/05
on “New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior”Submitted A world of message-oriented programming languages (2018) as a story · 74 points
HN discussionMy blog has the URL http://boston.conman.org/ (leaving http://www.conman.org/ for other stuff on my website). I had to add a redirect for http://www.boston.conman.org/ because I had a non-zero number of requests.
Comment linking /
on “Why use www?”Submitted A constructive look at the Atari 2600 BASIC cartridge as a story · 61 points
HN discussionSo my blog [1] generates an RSS feed (early 2000s), an Atom feed (2009), a JSON feed (2017) and a Gopher [2] feed (2018). None of these formats were hard to add, and of all four formats, the JSON feed has the least use. Yes, the Gopher feed gets more use than JSON. If I go by "same client picks up feed at least one per day" then the results are: RSS: ~20 [3] Atom: ~25 [3] JSON: 1 gopher: 7 I don't think using JSON i…
Comment linking /
on “RSS Is Better Than Twitter”Submitted A benchmark of three different floating point packages for the 6809 as a story · 40 points
HN discussionI checked the logs for May for one website I run---65% of failed requests were for PHP scripts (mostly Wordpress). I don't run PHP so I don't worry. The rest of the requests were bots that can't parse HTML [1] and other weird requests. I've been running a webserver, SMTP, SSH and DNS for over 25 years and only once had an issue due to an inside job [2] twenty years ago (hard to protect against those). [1] https://bo…
Comment linking /2004/09/19.1
on “What You Get After Running an SSH Honeypot for 30 Days”Submitted How to run Valgrind on a CGI program in C as a story · 32 points
HN discussionWonderful article showing the uselessness of this technology, IMO. > I just realised the situation is even worse. If I have 35 sentences of circumstance leading up to a single sentence of conclusion, the LLM mechanism will — simply because of how the attention mechanism works with the volume of those 35 — find the ’35’ less relevant sentences more important than the single key one. So, in a case like that it will ac…
Comment linking /2025/12/02.1
on “No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter”Submitted The fix wasn't easy, or C precedence bites as a story · 31 points
HN discussionAnd sometimes the horrendous code really is written by someone else. I recently came across some horrendous code [1] that needlessly wrapped syslog(), and separated the format string from the point of use (the format string was a #define). The thing is---I know the developer (he left our company over a year ago) and is a great guy (former jazz musician), but let's just say he had some questionable coding practices.…
Comment linking /2022/01/04.1
on “Who wrote this shit?”Submitted Notes from a Gibsonian Novel as a story · 27 points
HN discussionI got to ride a private car for a few hours [1] thanks to a friend who rented one for a family vacation/birthday gift. The car went from Jacksonville, FL (where the private car resides), to Miami, then to Chicago via Washington, D.C. (or New York, I don't recall) then back to Jacksonville, FL. Even though he got a good price (he knows the owner), and he never mentioned the price, it wouldn't surprise me if the week…
Comment linking /2015/08/05.4
on “Privately-Owned Rail Cars”Submitted Writing assembly language subroutines for Extended Color BASIC as a story · 20 points
HN discussion
