Need to Know

I miss NTK and it'd be great if there was a modern version of it. http://www.ntk.net/

Carmack is definitely someone who was determined -- and quick. When Carmack was working (I think on Quake), you could follow his todo list, which he kept stored in a .plan file on his server. If you used the Unix shell command "finger [email protected]" command, it would send the text of that file. It was pretty amazing to watch him crank through his tasks in near real time. The texts are archived here: https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive He is also pretty good at poker, apparently: http://www.ntk.net/1998/02/13/?l=114#l

It was on the NTK email list (UK-based tech newsletter) in the late 90s / early 2000s - http://www.ntk.net/ - when people had limited bandwidth on their dial-up connections. Possibly more of a principle along the lines of "save the pennies and the pounds look after themselves" but I remember it clearly.

RIP http://ntk.net Has it really been 10 years?

The only reference point i have is that the millennium was very roughly around 1000000000. And that's only because of an agonising C/Prince pun in NTK [1]: "Tonight I'm gonna party like it's (time_t) 1E9" [1] http://www.ntk.net/2001/02/23/

> starring Salma Hayek as Joan Charlie Brooker has come a long way since tvgohome[1]! > Hayek said that it gave her opportunity to [...] have "permission" to do "the most disgusting, grotesque things", though one such thing in the script made her question, "Do I really want to do this?" Maybe not that far, in some respects, then. 1: http://www.ntk.net/tvgohome/

And the infamous history of Ian Bell's website: http://www.ntk.net/1999/09/17/

Reminds me of the glory days of NTK. FALCO! [0][1] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_Know_(newsletter) [1] http://www.ntk.net/1998/02/13/

Extreme ironing used to be fun sport but when Rowenta started sponsoring the UK team in the championships it's now only "commercial sponsorship and exploitation" http://www.ntk.net/2002/09/13/?l=92#l

> “Developers, developers, developers!” was a cry from Steve Ballmer and one of the speeches that defined him as CEO of Microsoft. These infamous words were uttered back in 2006. The famous YouTube video of it was uploaded in 2006, but my sources say the event in question was from Microsoft's 25th Anniversary Event in September 2000. I could use a more authoritative source than knowyourmeme, though, so someone else is free to chime in there. There's a newsletter referencing it as early as 2001[0], so that seems to suggest well ahead of 2006. [0]http://www.ntk.net/2001/08/03/

Anecdotally, I think you got the wrong end of the stick regarding type safety. I used to work for a defence contractor who avidly programmed everything in ADA with verified compilers and mathematically proved algorithms. Stuff still broke because the algorithms and designs were wrong. That particular problem is far more problematic than type constraints. Regarding BBC BASIC, it is strongly typed but all casts and conversions are implicit so you need to know what it's going to do: REM win p%=4;q%=4;r%=p%/q%;PRINTr% REM fail p%=4;q=4.0;r%=p%/q;PRINTr% The earlier has no cast, the latter does. When it goes wrong, it's not usually the code that's gone phut: http://www.ntk.net/2000/07/14/dohtrain.jpg

Original request for test porn downloads: http://www.ntk.net/2002/07/26/ I believe this is the first mention of Bittorrent when still under development.

I was directly responding to a question from somebody who didn't know about ESR. Were you previously aware of the fact that Eric Raymond is a batshit crazy racist, or did you just learn something new from me that you didn't previously know? If so, then mission accomplished! I'm glad to have opened your eyes even a little bit. Do my political beliefs about racism being bad and obligatory to call out contradict your own beliefs, and annoy you so much that you're compelled to argue and continue to drag this out? Or do you know some actual facts you can prove about ESR that contradict the proof I posted with links and quotes? Then by all means share your proof I'm wrong, instead of stifling the discussion! Why are you so irritated and motivated to suppress those widely known facts from being mentioned on Hacker News? If simply stating the facts and quoting ESR's own words sounds to you like an ad hominem attack, then that's ESR's problem, and maybe he should have kept his mouth shut instead of publicly saying things like "The average IQ of the Haitian population is 67... Haiti is, quite literally, a country full of violent idiots", and he exercises enough personal responsibility that he doesn't need you to bravely step up and defend his racism. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7011 Or is your real issue with the valid criticism I raised about the book (and that you awkwardly ignored and haven't countered) about "In Unix Everything Is A File" being wrong, which is LITERALLY the…