Hacker News Reader

owynon The FORTH code for Chipwits is released in the game's 40th anniversary

That's awesome. I will! I was probably around 12-14? when I spent many hours with that game. After that it was DOS and Doom. But I think when I eventually drifted towards the path to being a software engineer I did grasp a lot of the basic concepts faster because I played games like this as a kid. The other path was being a musician of course.

owynon The FORTH code for Chipwits is released in the game's 40th anniversary

They mention that it's C# and that it's at least 10x the amount of code...

I loved this game! I actually had the Forth package for the C64 also but I never put 2+2 together that the game was made with it.

owynon Programming languages that blew my mind (2023)

the promise was "don't send a query, send code that the backend will run securely"

This is back now with WASM!

owynon Helping wikis move away from Fandom

Former Wikia engineer here too! I also thought there was a lot of potential there. We even invested in some RDF and structured data and NLP projects (second screen, sentiment analysis on comments for detecting flame wars, etc), but for various reasons they just didn't work out beyond hackathons and demos. I think there were a lot of well meaning engineers who wanted to make stuff like that work. Part of the problem is mediawiki itself. A page is literally just text using an awful hacked together xml parser and some regexes to emit HTML. It might look like a database sometimes when it is rendered (and there is Wikidata) but there is no actual structure to it, just a pile of templates made of other templates that people have to tediously wrangle by hand. That it eventually turns into some HTML that you can view is almost an accident.

owynon Helping wikis move away from Fandom

Yeah, Wikia in aggregate was in the top 50, maybe a top 20 site at various points. Wikia was built on caching. From my memory, about 99% of page views hit some kind of cache. If that dropped down to 97%, servers started to suffer. It's good to remember that the Fastly CDN company is a spinoff of Wikia, it was developed internally there first. Without that (varnish cache plus lots of memcache) Wikia would not have been able to handle the traffic. Mediawiki is horribly inefficient and one reason why Wikia was attractive as a host was that we had figured out a bunch of tricks to run it efficiently. The default configuration of mediawiki/wikipedia is real bad. Bigger independent wikis just couldn't handle the scale and many of the best independent wikis moved there for that reason. Just as one example, every link/url on a page hits a hook/callback that can call into an extension literally anywhere in the code base, which was several million lines of PHP code. I remember the "Batman" page on the DC wiki used to take several minutes to render a new copy if it fell out of the cache. That was one page I used for performance optimization tests. The muppet wiki and the lyrics wiki also had huge performance issues and fixing them was some of the most fun engineering work I've done. Every useful feature had some kind of horrible performance side effect, so it was always a fun puzzle. I also hate landing on a Fandom wiki now but thanks to the actual editors, it's still got some good content.

owynon In 1870, Lord Rayleigh used oil and water to calculate the size of molecules

I was looking at my parent's bookshelf and saw a book on Shakespeare and I recognized the author's name: Asimov!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov's_Guide_to_Shakespeare

It's like 800 pages, I haven't read it but I think I'll keep that one. Seems like it might be hard to find another physical copy. He was definitely prolific on a number of topics.

owynon Deterministic Replay of QEMU Emulation

It is very cool, but I think some version of this feature has been around for years? This commit is from 7 years ago, and it looks like the code originates back to 2010.

https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/v2.9.0/docs/replay.txt

That said, I was not aware of it until I saw this post, and I definitely want to play around with it.

owynon GitHub was down

Once in the past I did actually have an incident where the site went down so hard that the tool that we used to update the status page didn't work. We did move it to a totally external and independent service after that. The first service we used was more flaky than our actual site was, so it kept showing the site down when it wasn't. So then we moved to another one, etc. Job security. :)

owynon Is "Rich Dad Poor Dad" a Fraud?

It can be even more insane than that. Not knowing what I was doing, I bought a house during the sub-prime boom thing (2004). I paid $10k in fees (zero down) for a $400k house with an interest only mortgage because I was able to "finance" the %20 down payment as a home equity loan. Fun times! I remember paying about $1700/mo total in interest payments ($20k/year). I checked Zillow all the time and the house was "making" 50k a year in appreciation just sitting there so it was essentially free. I sold it after 3 years (dec 2007, good timing) and after all the fees I walked away with $130k in cash right before the housing market crash (tax free!). I didn't know what I was doing then either.

The people who bought it from me tried to flip it but walked right into the chainsaw of 2008 and had to sell it at a loss. I could have bought it back for even less than I paid for it the first time a year later! Whoever did buy it got a great deal because now 15 years later it's worth $1.3 million and I feel like I should have just kept it. I definitely haven't managed to save $1m in the last 20 years.

owynon 7-Eleven is reinventing its food business to be more Japanese [video]

I just want those ham and cucumber sandwiches in the US. That's the first thing I get whenever I land in Japan.

owynon Is the largest root of a random real polynomial more likely real than complex?

Yep that was my answer too. I didn't get the job so I'm just guessing but I'm pretty sure that's it.

owynon Is the largest root of a random real polynomial more likely real than complex?

Yes, I'm sure that's what they were looking for. I hadn't heard of it before but I improvised my way in that direction until the interview was over. :)

owynon The First Nuclear Microreactor Company Listed in the USA

Two in one week? What are the odds? First I've heard of it but Oklo is a fission company with zero revenue and their stock is already down %54. That seems promising. /s

owynon Is the largest root of a random real polynomial more likely real than complex?

> You can't uniformly sample an unbounded set.

I was asked to do this as an interview question at google! It was about log file processing not math (sample an infinite log file), and I thought my answer was ok? But that's why I don't work there so I am really enjoying this whole thread.

owynon Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

I know this is a joke but this OS was first released in 1987... I forgot all about it, but it's pretty cool that you can still run it on hardware.

owynon Prostate cancer cases worldwide likely to double by 2040, analysis finds

increased rate of diagnosis. it's always been there.

owynon The return of never-ending job interviews: 'It can go beyond the pale'

Exactly. I consider myself to be one of those last 10% developers who enjoys the work it takes to get good, valuable projects from mostly done to actually done (software is never done but you know what I mean). The geniuses have already moved on to the next project. You need a mix of both at any company.

owynon A disk so full, it couldn't be restored

I was just joking about how Macbook drives are not replaceable but some replies on this thread have potential real solutions, which is awesome. I forgot you could attach two Macs during the boot process, which is usually used when you are setting up the new computer and copying files but could be used to fix the broken one too. That's another possible fix, buy a new one with twice the disk space and transfer files on setup?

owynon A disk so full, it couldn't be restored

Oh! What I would do is take the disk out, mount it on another machine and delete files then put it back........ /s

I think the whole stack of operating systems and tools that assume that this is possible get in trouble when it's not possible. I don't want my computer to become a locked down sandbox but it seems like this is where we are headed.

owynon Botswana threatens to deport 20k elephants to Germany

Hannibal invaded Italy with 37 elephants and got a pretty good result. /s

But it does seem kind of ugly of us as a species to preserve them as a species for hunting.

owynon Show HN: Lapdev, a new open-source remote dev environment management software

Well, developers seem to love writing "configuration" rather than "code" these days. But basically a container + the necessary tools IS a devcontainer. It's just a way of automating the "putting in the necessary tools" part especially if you need things that might need to be added to a base container, or services that need to be configured differently based on the external environment that you don't want to bake in for some reason.

If you've ever had to cut and paste a 50 line docker run command snippet but you forgot that one volume mount or port or ENV var that someone added a dependency on last week then you pretty quickly realize just doing complex docker things by hand is a pain. Another example, if you have a script that you want to run to fetch the latest authentication token from a vault after the container launches because you don't want to store it inside the container. Sure, you could write a bash script to run all these steps inside the container after you launch it but it's nice to have a config file to share with another dev and just say: use this.

And the secondary benefit is that having a config file for the editor (like VSCode) so that plugins can manage all of that stuff better. Generally a dev container runs the VSCode Server, and they know how to talk to each other which can make remote development easier. For example, now I can launch the same dev environment locally or on the 56 core xeon 1TB ram server at the office and it's exactly the same as far as the editor is concerned.

It looks like this project is an alternative to the VSCode Server. My team generally uses docker-compose for this since not everyone uses VSCode.

owynon 01 Light: a voice interface for your home computer

The idea is to use a voice interface to actually perform "skills", like Alexa. Check out the prompt and you can get an idea of how they've set it up. So the LLM generates code that can then be executed to perform actions.

https://github.com/OpenInterpreter/01/blob/main/software/sou...

There don't seem to be many skills defined in this repo though, but I didn't look too hard. This software is the server, and then they have a small remote device that can talk to the server and it appears to use ngrok for that.

[replying to comment here]

I totallly agree that the term "OS" is used for a lot of projects that are not actually what I would call an OS. My own employer is guilty of this. :) Yes, this seems to be just like UFO, and Rabbit, and other similar projects.

owynon How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

It's a pretty great deal if you are a farmer. In California, you have unlimited rights to pump water from your own land, which extends to the ground underneath. So they just keep drilling deeper. Such a great system for the people who own land, I have no idea why anyone would complain about it...

owynon How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

I am too but the answer is zero, and nobody knows but probably a long time. The whole Central Valley is like 30 feet lower now. A bit of rain isn't going to fix that.

owynon Google lays off Bay Area workers, closes Mtn View child care center

Back in the day (early 80's), my dad spent 2 or 3? years staying at home with my sister and I. My mom was working while he was re-training and switching careers at 40. Training to be a programmer on payroll systems. All mainframe HP Cobol stuff. I think I was around 10. It was great, he was going to class during the day but was there when we came home from school and he taught me to play chess and D&D and we always had computers around so that's how I learned to code because he was learning too. I remember watching him coding a lunar lander program on the C64, which he gave me as a hand me down but it had a modem so I could connect to a local BBS (at 300 baud and typing AT commands by hand lol). Later in life he said that was one of the happiest times of his life. Maybe it's harder to pull off that kind of gap now because we are all so focused on overachievement and never being human but he didn't even start working as a programmer until he was in his 40's and had steady work until retirement.

Anyway, in my experience my dad took a few years to do that kid stuff and it really had a positive effect on our relationship.

owynon How a script doctor found his own voice

That's not how it works. It's literally in the article. For undivided attention on a script for a couple of weeks, for a movie that might have a budget of tens of millions of dollars, this is completely reasonable. The article also says he's worked on scripts for 60 movies in 20 years. So yeah, maybe 3 per year. How much is it worth to the studio to have Saving Private Ryan be a better movie?

For such assignments, which are generally uncredited, he commands a fee that he acknowledges is “insane”: three hundred thousand dollars a week. Most jobs last a few weeks.

owynon My doomed career as a North Korean novelist

I've heard stories, my dad went there in the early 60's as a physics major, dropped out and then got a PhD in asian history from a different school, then lived in Japan for a while, taught university history for a while, then came back to the US and became a computer programmer (Cobol mostly) until he retired. He told stories like that but I didn't really believe it until the movie "Real Genius (1985)" put it on film. From what I hear, the pranks in the movie are lame shadows of the real ones but it's a movie and it gets the vibe across for me. Trying to understand my dad a little, that movie helped. Anyway, Caltech sounds cool. And the guy living in the closet would be doing crypto or AI now. :)

His last project was trying to write a comprehensive history of Japan for wikipedia. I helped him upload it and it's buried in Wikibooks somewhere now and I like to think that some of his work is going to end up in the training material for some future AI like a ghost.

owynon 'It gets scary': Neighbors say these Bay Area ghost kitchens are out of control

One of the other things is that a lot of the food delivery people don't actually live in SF, so they drive from out of town and do Uber things and then go home. So that also makes it harder to support more sensible logistics.

owynon Sqids – Generate short unique IDs from numbers

Somewhere there's a database for every bad word and every bad typo in every language and that one just got added.

owynon The Curse of Docker

There are a lot of use cases for docker, I think this is complaining about a few specific things in more complex applications that probably shouldn't be deployed that way because you're not just exposing port 80, it's a whole tool deployed to end users, like an appliance. But that's not my primary use case for Docker.

For me, the best thing about Docker is that it's brought the average developer experience from "oh, I think I have an install.sh for that around somewhere" to mostly repeatable builds that are mostly self documenting. Any time a tool is self documenting it's a win. If you want the cake, you have to write down the recipe. That's huge. It's forcing lazy devs (which we all are) to just write it down. At this point the amount of "weird bearded guy tribal knowledge" that is now documented in a Dockerfile somewhere is a treasure trove.

Things still break all the time for a million dumb reasons but as a least common denominator it's a great place to start. It's not a solution for everything and it sounds like that's what this article is about. Docker+Compose is not great for everything, so don't use it for those situations. But it's so much better than what was before.