Comment by taubek

Open in a window
Comment

Comment by taubek

I’ve found this news only on Croatian news outlets. No English articles yet. Here is short summary by Claude:

Boris Sakač, the Croatian engineer who spent nearly three decades keeping the Olympic Games' IT systems running, has died in his native Zagreb at 82.

Sakač began his career at IBM, rising from systems engineer to head of IBM Croatia. His international sports career started at the 1979 Mediterranean Games in Split, where he was brought in by Stane Dolanc to run the Games' computerization despite having little sports background — he ended up training local high schoolers to help journalists use the new terminals, and the results system ended up setting speed records for publishing results.

That success led to work at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, where he helped salvage the IT system after IBM's withdrawal amid the Western boycott, and then to running IT for both the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Games and the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games. From there his systems were used at every Olympics from Sarajevo 1984 through Sochi 2014 — including Calgary, Seoul, Albertville, Barcelona, Lillehammer, Atlanta, Nagano, Sydney, Salt Lake City, Athens, Turin, Beijing, Vancouver and London.

From the early 1990s he served as an IT advisor to the IOC and led the ORIS project (Olympic Results and Information Services), which connected competition results to information services so results reached TV viewers within fractions of a second. He was reportedly trusted deeply by longtime IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch. A privately funded award in his name, the €5,000 Sakač Prize, has been given to top-performing computer science students.

Source: Dražen Brajdić, "Preminuo Boris Sakač, pionir razvoja informatičkih sustava Olimpijskih igara," Večernji list, 24 September 2026. https://www.vecernji.hr/sport/preminuo-boris-sakac-pionir-ra...

Replies taubek · 7d
Open on HN
Loading the discussion…

Domain filters

Stories from these domains are hidden from every list. Subdomains match too: blocking substack.com also hides danluu.substack.com. The list is kept in this browser only.

Help

Keyboard

j / k
Move down and up the story list. The arrow keys scroll whatever has focus.
Enter
Open the marked story in a window.
]
Open the next story in the list in place of the one in front. Back returns to it.
p
Pin or unpin the marked story, which keeps it in Pinned.
n / N
Move to the next or previous top-level comment in the window in front.
c
Collapse or expand that comment.
f
Hide or show the story list.
Esc
Close a menu or this help.
Access key m
Go to the menu bar. Most browsers take it with Alt on Windows and Linux, and Safari with Control and Option.
?
Show this help.

Windows

Each story opens in a window holding its article above its discussion; drag the bar between them to share the room differently. A window can be moved by its title bar, resized from any edge, snapped to a half or a corner by dragging it there, maximised, or minimised to the bar at the foot of the page. Open several stories to compare them, and switch between them from that bar. A window's Next story link reads on down the list in the same window.

A link in a comment or an article to another Hacker News or Lobsters thread opens that thread in a window too. A link to a single HN comment opens the comment above its replies.

While a story's window is in front, the Story and Discussion menus in the menu bar hold its commands: pinning, Next story, sorting, collapsing every thread, jumping to the first new comment. Each window also remembers where you were in its article and discussion, so a reload, or Back to a story that Next took you past, finds your place again. Closing a window forgets it.

The whole arrangement lives in the address, so a bookmark or a shared link brings it back, and Back undoes the last change. Moving between Hacker News, Lobsters, their lists, Pinned and Find changes only the list, and leaves the windows open.

The list

The pin at the start of a row keeps the story in Pinned, and the cross at its end hides it. Pinned can be narrowed by words in the title, site or author, by source, and to the stories you haven't opened yet, and ordered by when you pinned them, by points or by comments; the filters are part of the address, so a filtered view can be bookmarked. Scroll past the end of the list to load more. Domain filters, in the View menu, hide every story from a site.

Applets

The Applets menu in the menu bar holds three tools, each a window of its own. Replies to me takes your Hacker News user name and lists the replies to your last thirty comments and stories, checking again every three minutes while it is open, and marking what is new since you last marked them read. Look up a user opens a profile on Hacker News or Lobsters, with their submissions and recent comments, as a commenter's name in any discussion does; the bar at the top of a profile looks up someone else in the same window, and Back returns to the one before. Who is hiring? filters the posts of HN's monthly hiring threads by the words you type.

They read only what the sites publish to everyone, so none of them asks for a login, and your user name stays in this browser.

Find

Find takes any link and lists every time it was submitted to Hacker News and Lobsters, so you can read each discussion of it.

About

YAVCHN never sees your Hacker News or Lobsters login. The discussion is fetched from each site's public API; to vote or reply, follow the link above the discussion, or the arrow beside a comment, to the source's own site. Pins, hidden stories, filters and layout are kept in this browser only.

Open source: github.com/paulmooreparks/yavchn. Built with PUDL.