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jonjackyon Emacs appearances in pop culture

In Elif Batuman's 2017 novel The Idiot, about a naive Harvard student, her not-really-a-boyfriend Ivan, a math student, enthuses to her about Emacs. The book is set in 1995.

I enjoyed the book. It got good reviews and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

jonjackyon Ask HN: Favorite text heavy blogs the are a joy to read

https://sites.gatech.edu/alexburgin/on-self-respect-by-joan-...

Dramatic sepia photograph contrasts with understated gray text on light gray background with lots of empty space.

jonjackyon Ask HN: Favorite text heavy blogs the are a joy to read

https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_sudoku.htm

Explanation of Sudoku in APL. Lots of information, absolutely no clutter. Entire page is nothing but text in a single precise sans-serif typewriter font, the same size and strength for everything: headings, explanation, code, and tables. Typewriter font includes mathematical symbols.

jonjackyon Ask HN: Favorite text heavy blogs that are a joy to read?

https://www.datagubbe.se/short/

Header, body, trailer panels with three complementary background shades that soften the large black sans-serif typography.

jonjackyon Ask HN: What would justify writing a kernel in 2026?

What project was that?

via this discussion in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22729461 (2020) I found:

Writing an OS in Rust: Async/Await (2020) https://os.phil-opp.com/async-await/

Blogging about Midori: Asynchronous Everything (2015) https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/19/asynchronous-everything/

jonjackyon Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics

Particles accelerating in a cyclotron at sufficiently high energy reach relativistic speeds. You have to account for their relativistic mass increase to get the cyclotron to work. Figuring this out was a big issue in cyclotron design in the 1930s. The remedy is to strengthen the magnetic field near the outer edge of the cyclotron where particles move fastest, by adding coils there to carry more current. I don't recall what the energy is where this becomes necessary - it is certainly needed at tens of MeV.

Plutonium was first synthesized in a cyclotron by Lawrence's group at Berkeley. I don't know what energy they used so I don't know if they needed the extra coils, but they did know of the effect and must have considered it.

Also, U235 was separated at Oak Ridge using machines called Calutrons invented by Lawrence that might have encountered the same problem -- at least they must have considered it.

jonjackyon Peter Neumann has died

I haven't seen it mentioned here or in the obituaries, but Peter started the RISKS Digest in 1985 partly in response to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, "Star Wars") which proposed a space-based anti-ballistic missile system run autonomously by computers [1]. Another response was the formation of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibilty (CPSR) [2]. Peter was an early member, and many early RISKS submissions were by CPSR members.

Peter's letter to readers about the creation of RISKS in Issue #1.01 [3] mentions SDI and CPSR (it's long, scroll down)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Professionals_for_Soc...

3. https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/1.01.html

jonjackyon Two Thousand Line educational operating system released by Cornell University

Previously, 2023, 19 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35982037

There are updates in the last several months, so it looks like the project is still active.

jonjackyon A Manifesto for the Intentional Internet

Nice page design, so I will try to read the content.

jonjackyon The Vatican's Website in Latin

Also pertinent and well-written, from the Vatican itself, including some quotes from Pope Francis:

https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. "Francis ... on 14 January 2025 ... approved this Note and ordered its publication."

via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750835, comment by jimmcslim on Pope Francis has died.

jonjackyon It's cool to care (2025)

"Keep cool, but care" - McClintic Sphere, ca 1959 (fictional jazz musician in V, the 1963 novel by Thomas Pynchon)

jonjackyon KukuOS: A self-hosting, ELF-emitting x86 stack in Kuku Yalanji

This is a remarkable, very unusual project. It looks well thought out and is surprisingly complete -- it even includes an end-to-end ML training and sampling program as an example!

Is there a writeup somewhere that explains more about the motivation and history for this project?

jonjackyon PyUnixOS – A Unix-Like OS in MicroPython for ESP32

I'm getting a 404 on the repo.

Possible alternatives:

smolOS: https://smol.p1x.in/os/ https://github.com/w84death/smolOS/

upyOS: https://github.com/rbenrax/upyOS

MicroPythonOS: https://micropythonos.com/ https://github.com/MicroPythonOS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45525804

jonjackyon The end of Star Trek is now official

Starfleet Academy is some woke fever dream ...

This is entirely in keeping with the Star Trek tradition. It had a multiracial cast and female officers in 1966, when that was quite unusual in a TV show.

jonjackyon Writing an OS in Haskell

Very interesting!

FYI, other operating systems in Haskell:

House, 2005: https://programatica.cs.pdx.edu//House/

HalVM, 2008: https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM

also

HalNS network stack 2011: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2011-May/092...

jonjackyon Obituary for the greatest monument to logical AGI

Previously, 11 months ago, 282 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43625474

jonjackyon Unix philosophy is dead Long live something else?

Rob Pike, one of the Unix developers, observed people turning away from their philosophy back in 2001:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf

"What Unix does well isn’t what people want. ...

People prefer integrated environments and browsers. ...

Perhaps people don’t want to think about problem solving this way. Maybe Unix got it wrong. (Even within Unix, the tool approach is losing ground.)"

jonjackyon Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80

A newer book, from 2016, ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer by Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestly, and Crispin Rope

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262334433/eniac-in-action/

An interesting revelation here is that, although ENIAC was not originally conceived as a stored program computer, it was quite early converted to one. They repurposed a lookup table intended to calculate functions to store instructions instead. Many of the well-known ENIAC calculations, such as Monte Carlo simulations, were programmed in this mode.

jonjackyon Learning Creative Coding

Another book that might have some similarities, apparently from 2020:

https://aesthetic-programming.net/ Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31726334 (2022) but only one comment -- mine!

jonjackyon Tony Hoare has died

Mr. Hoare (yep not a Dr.)

Hoare's undergraduate degree from Oxford was in Literae Humaniores, nicknamed Greats - ancient Rome, ancient Greece, Latin, Ancient Greek, and philosophy. In the US, this course of study is usually called "Classics". According to Wikipedia, "It is an archetypal humanities course."

jonjackyon Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it

"There is an old saying: Once in your life you should build a house, plant a tree, and write an editor. I decided to start with the last one. ..."

from Vip - Vi-Style Editor in PicoLisp https://picolisp.com/wiki/?vip

jonjackyon How important was the Battle of Hastings?

Hastings affected the wider politics of Europe, not just England. For centuries before Hastings, England had been involved with Scandinavia, especially Denmark and Norway. After Hastings it was totally entangled with France, pretty much forever.

jonjackyon Impending kOS (2014)

"so, what happened with kOS since 2014?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251118 (2019)

see especially

https://gist.github.com/chrispsn/da00835bb122c42f429a084df83...

jonjackyon Show HN: RISCY-V02: A 16-bit 2-cycle RISC-V-ish CPU in the 6502 footprint

Thanks, I see. In your README you do briefly mention static vs dynamic, NMOS vs CMOS, and 6502 vs 65C02 but I didn't appreciate those could make a 3x difference in the transistor count.

I agree it's a nice CPU design, and the whole project is quite impressive. Will Tiny Tapeout make you an actual chip that you can run?

I'm curious about how you used Claude. Is the CPU design itself completely handmade, or did Claude fill in some details? Did you use Claude for both the Verilog code and the Python emulator and test code? Did you provide Claude with some of your own hand-written code to demonstrate the style you wanted and get it started?

jonjackyon Show HN: RISCY-V02: A 16-bit 2-cycle RISC-V-ish CPU in the 6502 footprint

Impressive project! But I have question:

The Highlights section near the top of the README says:

13,844 SRAM-adjusted transistors (vs 13,176 for 6502 on same process)

But the Wikipedia article on the 6502 says it only had 3,510 transistors, and says the Monster6502 was built with 3,218 discrete transistors.

Why the discrepancy?

jonjackyon Microgpt

I wonder if such a small GPT exhibits plagiarism. Are some of the generated names the same as names in the input data?

jonjackyon Python VM in Assembly (contributor is Claude)

Previously, six days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102764

jonjackyon Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

I'd be ok with it if it's possible to use all the insights and software from after that, we'd just be constrained by the hardware - the Amiga 4000, Apple Mac Quadra 840av 128 MB or a Pentium 66 MHz or the 486 DX2-66 with 64 MB ram.

Can't we achieve something like this now with microcontrollers like ESP32 or RP2040?

This project runs a ca. 1990 scientific workstation (not just a PC) on an RP2040:

https://github.com/rscott2049/DECstation2040

jonjackyon "apython": Accelerated asm Python 3.12

How did you use Claude? How much guidance did you give it? Did you just write CLAUDE.md and stand back, Claude did all the rest? Or did you write some assembly language samples - like object.inc etc. - to get it pointed in the direction you wanted it to go? Did you review and revise the code that Claude wrote?

How long did the project take? Hours? Months?