DR-DOS was an MS-DOS compatible OS and did not run CP/M apps.

Yeah, I'm pretty ancient myself. If we look back ~30 years, we're still getting a good value at even these inflated prices for electronics. Food, housing, transportation has skyrocketed, but TVs and computers are comparatively cheap, even with RAM and storage being up 100+%.

Pretty insane. I built a Framework Desktop PC back in November. The motherboard (with 128G DDR5 RAM) was $1800. Now it's $2859. Almost 60% increase in 6 months.

Yes, I was around the same time and had a moderately popular local BBS. Reddit (and arguably HN) do feel like the closest thing we have to BBSes today.

This is very helpful to those of us who never experienced BBSes.

I'm the downvoted poster above, and I used to run a BBS. Mostly hosting info files and CP/M software (Thanks U.S. Robotics, couldn't have done it without HST). I am genuinely interested in know where (and if) such a network of people could ever exist again. For those who may be too young to get the joke... Reddit is certainly not it.

One major thing missing with Reddit is the focus on geographic locality. BBSes had more of a community feel because 99% of the users were local, and this was enforced by financial reality. Few people in the 80's or 90's wanted to call long distance, unless they were distributing warez at someone else's expense (in which case they probably weren't reading and posting messages anyway!)

You can get "some" of this feel from the state / city focused subreddits... but... it's still not the same.

Right, but FidoNets didn't have this localization; that was part of their point.

Some FidoNet boards did, actually! The FidoNet boards near me all carried "regional" forums / echoes that were available only within the regional network itself. I was actually way more active on those forums than the global ones.

(By "active", I mainly mean participating in flame wars. If any of those sysops are reading, I do apologize for the behavior of my teenage self.)

Sure, in the same sense that there is an /r/chicago on Reddit. :)

The huge win to hooking your BBS up to a FidoNet (or the FidoNet) was that you'd immediately be having conversations with people all over the country.

>For those who may be too young to get the joke...

I'm going to continue to assume that GGP is sincere until its author says it was a joke.

I remember late 90's, early 2000's Google. Search result quality was still better than the competition (mainly Altavista...)

Was on a team that was trying to sell AltaVista a social media presence (before facebook/myspace/etc). Our people were mostly using Google, but we still wanted the client. One of the "moderation experts" on our side (i.e. - not tech or busniess) who evidently didn't understand what AltaVista was about asked them "Why don't you just use Google? It's better".

But that only would have lasted until the next search innovation and/or competitors copied Google's indexing.

There were many search engines around during that time. Yahoo, Excite, Microsoft Live Search, Lycos... I don't recall any of them improving enough to rival early 2000's Google.

None of those scaled as quickly as Google in terms of revenue (read: AdSense), and Microsoft lost interest.

AdSense wasn't a thing until 2003. Google didn't have much revenue before that. However, they still surpassed their competition in quality of search results long before...

Yes. My point is that Google had a temporary search quality advantage… then AdSense-fueled revenue allowed them to convert that to a durable moat by outspending their competitors.

That didn't happen because they were magically amazing at search forever.

It happened because Google had a good business plan and could afford to throw gobs of money at engineers and infrastructure, in quantities that even Microsoft was unwilling to match.

I loved that era. I was a BBSer from about 1988 through 1994 or so, on several systems with FidoNet and RelayNet / RIME. I also ran my own BBS for a while, eventually it had some Usenet newsgroups and Internet email through UUCP (anyone remember bang paths?)

What I miss most is the local community aspect. In my teens and early 20's I met several friends through BBSes.

Almost all of them.

I haven’t seen this in Go or Java?

Ok, so you are right, Go and Java (Maven, at least) doesn't have this issue.

Is this one of those places where it takes 6 to 12 weeks to get something new installed on your machine?

You mean directly on the machine? Not in a container? That would be a recklessly fast timeline. The configuration control board meets quarterly and it usually takes 4 or 5 meetings to clear a piece of software.

Interesting. How about in a container? What industry is this, just curious?

Defense. Containers on our normal network are the wild west, but anything that touches the secure network has to be signed off on by the clients.

There are a lot of people who are developing an unhealthy obsession with AI, both in their work and personal lives. It may not be a religion (yet?), but they are treating chat bots as nearly infallible, all knowing friends. The term "AI psychosis" is overused, but there is some sort of a mental illness going around. I'm not talking about teenagers, either. These are working adults in their 40's and 50's.

Could be loneliness. I've been programming alone for around ten years and I absolutely don't want to go back to that. Having a coding buddy to chat with and bounce ideas off of completely changed my life.

They are not infallible and certainly not all-knowing, but it's incredibly easy to look at AI models as friends. My projects have been posted on various sites including HN, reception is almost always positive. However, humans don't generally reach out to me and say "let's develop this together". The LLMs do. On a daily basis. It's not just words either, they deeply engage with my ideas and actually help me turn them into reality.

Many humans do the same thing. They write tests that mock so much of the actual code, the "test" is not testing much at all, except perhaps the developer's ability to basically turn the code inside out. It's often just a large volume of crap that has to be maintained (or eventually deleted.)

I agree integration tests are best, with some e2e testing for common scenarios.

I worked at a place that required unit tests for every new method or function. Arguments like "this other (integration) test already covers that. why do I have to add another test?" wouldn't fly. PR reviews would often degrade into arguments about testing and how all database access needed to be mocked...