Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. Laya the open source version of Jev(convaiinnovations.com ↗)
    37comments
  2. AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible(john.hartnup.uk ↗)
    311comments
  3. Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds(stanford.edu ↗)
    150comments
  4. “The Secret Life of Circuits” is here(coredump.cx ↗)
    31comments
  5. Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP(grapheneos.social ↗)
    506comments
  6. GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher(prinzai.com ↗)
    109comments
  7. What Zig felt like, coming from Rust(besok.github.io ↗)
    discuss
  8. San Francisco Onion Futures Company(onionfutures.com ↗)
    89comments
  9. Tin: full-text search for Postgres(planetscale.com ↗)
    discuss
  10. Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar over 'Little Red Dots'(quantamagazine.org ↗)
    1comments
  11. If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it(terrytao.wordpress.com ↗)
    147comments
  12. Communication by means of modulated Johnson noise(pnas.org ↗)
    15comments
  13. From Stonemasons to Carpenters(thelastsoftwareengineer.substack.com ↗)
    4comments
  14. Cloudflare Quick Tunnels(cloudflare.com ↗)
    296comments
  15. How to Write with an LLM(sockpuppet.org ↗)
    354comments
  16. You can run Git on object storage if you re-make packfiles(tigrisdata.com ↗)
    22comments
  17. SDCC – Small Device C Compiler(sourceforge.net ↗)
    21comments
  18. Saving another 100TB of RAM(cloudflare.com ↗)
    86comments
  19. Science Is Open Software(jepedersen.dk ↗)
    46comments
  20. Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early(reproof.app ↗)
    4comments
  21. Why building a Rust LSP is hard(rust-glancer.github.io ↗)
    42comments
  22. NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation open-Source Geospatial AI Model(usra.edu ↗)
    5comments
  23. Ctenophores: Wonders of Biology(quantamagazine.org ↗)
    6comments
  24. How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip(ieee.org ↗)
    107comments
  25. The first new cat species discovered in 100 years(nationalgeographic.com ↗)
    114comments
  26. OpenJev(openjev.com ↗)
    274comments
  27. Goroutine Leak Profiles(go.dev ↗)
    6comments
  28. Show HN: Cactus Needle 3: 8-29MB automation models can match DeepSeek V4 Flash(cactuscompute.com ↗)
    89comments
  29. Photon-Emission-Guided Laser Fault Injection Enables RP2350 Secure Debug(ledger.com ↗)
    76comments
  30. Show HN: I wrote a custom assembler for CHIP-8 in C++(github.com/tackx ↗)
    4comments

A Peek at David Rockefeller’s Rolodex

85 pointsby 8y agowsj.com
22 comments
8y agoHN ↗

That outline reads at some point "page 1 of 18", but it seems too short to have been 18 pages. Is it the complete article?

8y agoHN ↗

It includes a slideshow with 18 images.

Here's a bookmarklet to bypass the WSJ paywall: javascript:window.location.href='http(s)://m.facebook.com/l.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);

8y agoHN ↗

You may not be in the news business, but this post is equivalent to posting cracks of software or exploits for gaining free access to SaaS offerings. Yes, it may be within your technical ability to do so, no it’s not what HN threads are for.

8y agoHN ↗

WSJ allows FB clicks to bypass the paywall. Is there really a difference if this user navigated to FB, typed the article name in the search box and clicked on the result?

8y agoHN ↗

...yes?

If there wasn't a difference then why bother with the bookmarklet?

8y agoHN ↗

It's not unintended or modified behavior, it's more akin to a coupon code which the WSJ intends for anyone with said code to be allowed to use.

8y agoHN ↗

Not really, but you can tell yourself that.

8y agoHN ↗

This does't seem to work I get: Cannot GET /articles/http(s)://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fa-tour-of-david-rockefellers-rolodex-contacts-for-the-worlds-rich-and-powerful-1512488919

Is there another workaround? I'm curious to see the slide show. I like index cards myself. Can anyone post just the slideshow?

8y agoHN ↗

  In August 2015, Rockefeller staffers tossed the oversize Rolodex machine 
  ...
  custom-built Rolodex machine that stored about 200,000 3-by-5-inch cards
  ...
  They [cards] now nearly fill a wall of filing cabinet

Any photos of that monster Rolodex machine?

8y agoHN ↗

I would hope they took video of it in operation! That'd be some great material for YouTube/Reddit browsing.

8y agoHN ↗

100,000 people met in 50 years, that’s meeting 5 new people every day including week ends. That seems hardly believable. The article probably meant 100,000 encounters. Which is still massive.

8y agoHN ↗

He lived in a time were personal meetings were still very normal. And he was in a trade were meeting many people was normal and beneficial. I would say anyone in that business meets that amount of people and even more. But he was one of the rare people who also documentated it well, while being relevant enough, to make an article about it.

Meeting people doesn't neccessarly mean he know them all personaly, or had more then a handful encounters with them. Like if you have a big company-meeting with dozen on dozen relevant people, it's quite normal to go around and exchange contact-information, talk a bit, and never meet again or use the contact-info.

8y agoHN ↗

A lot of these encounters also seem to be at galas, fundraisers, etc where you'll be introduced to many many people through the night.

8y agoHN ↗

I would imagine that at least a portion of his life must have involved sitting in his office and meeting a long line of people waiting outside sequentially, each coming in to ask him for a favor, pitch an investment, or similar -- the image in my head being something like the opening scene of the Godfather.

I'd imagine doing that one could have substantive somewhat personal meetings with 25-50 people or more on an average working day. Not to mention larger gatherings, speaking to groups, a day spent in the halls of a legislature, or similar.

8y agoHN ↗

Maybe thirty years ago, John Dvorak wrote a jocular piece about what we'd all be reading if personal computers hadn't taken off. Among his possibilities were "advances in rolodexes", as I recall.

8y agoHN ↗

I recently made an effort to groom my addressbook better. This article shows me that I have still a lot room to the upside.

Are there any details what he recorded? It seems to be more than just the contact information:

One Kissinger card mentions the time when Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in June 1995. “He is not to be referenced as Sir Henry as he is an American,’’ the card said, with the word “not” underlined for emphasis.

8y agoHN ↗

Personally I think the original 13th amendment should have been passed.

D Rockefeller was a very immoral and amoral, borderline treasonous man.

8y agoHN ↗

For those curious on what the "original 13th amendment" was:

That "missing" proposal was called the “Titles of Nobility Amendment” (or TONA). It sought to ban any American citizen from receiving any foreign title of nobility or receiving foreign favors, such as a pension, without congressional approval. The penalty was loss of citizenship.

From: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-case-of-the-missing-...

8y agoHN ↗

A dear friend of mine was a lobbyist in Washington, DC for 40 years. When he retired I was tasked with helping him export his Outlook contacts. IIRC it came to around 40,000 contacts which to was astonishing. Senators, Diplomats, lobbyists, the works. It's amazing the contacts you can collect over a career.

8y agoHN ↗

My favorite part:

    [2001] Bill Gates note: see data base for add'l entries
    [2007] Gerald Ford note: See Rolodex Card

Maybe they tried using a CRM but Rockefeller wasn't it to it.

8y agoHN ↗

This is similar to Farley file [0], a file kept by politicians to record all the people they meet; and they meet a lot of people daily, dealing with a variety of issues, so it is good to write everything down. When it is time to meet them again, they now know enough details about the person to appear considerate and caring: their name, spouse's name, last topic discussed etc.

It gets its name from James Farley, Franklin Roosevelt's campaign manager:

> A bad memory is not a great asset in politics, so Jim Farley devised a clever remedy: he kept an index card of every person that Roosevelt met, and recorded the names of spouses, children, hobbies, education, place of employment—any personal information that you could reasonably expect a "good friend" to remember. If Roosevelt returned to the same area, Farley would hand him the index cards of everyone he might meet. << [1]

In Rome, they had slaves for this sort of thing, called Nomenclators [2]. Their duty was to remind their master of people he had met earlier.

[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farley_File

[1] : https://markmilliorn.blogspot.in/2015/05/who-are-you.html

[2] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenclator_(nomenclature)