rickcarlino

They were very rare, but it is happening more now. “I was amazed by $PROJECT_I_SCRAPED_FROM_GITHUB and would love to find ways we can collaborate”

I had an “Office Hours” link on my blog to do Google Meets with HN users. It was fun to catch up with strangers.

I had to take it down this month. We have entered a new era of social interaction on the internet.

> AI is not inevitable

I have a hard time believing this. The businesses employing us and the businesses competing with them will view handwritten code as an evasion of financial responsibility. That does not mean inevitability is positive or worth welcoming with open arms. But it is so inevitable at this point.

If anyone else has an easier way to emulate RISC-V I’d like to hear it. /S

The past century of promised reductions in work fall under the assumption that competitors will mutually agree to not use the excess time to compete against each other.

Mildly offended that Forth didn’t get mentioned once in the article. /s

In the 2010s, there was a move away from files in the name of convenience (lock-in).

The 2020s are a war on hyperlinks. It is particularly unfortunate to see this masquerading as a concern for safety and security (“everything outside of our platform is scary and insecure”)

Gnutella and Gnutella2 used something like a single hash bloom filter to route p2p file queries across the mesh in a less wasteful manner. It was not perfect, but it worked enough to scale to very large user counts.

https://rickcarlino.com/notes/p2p/how-gnutella-scaled-to-han...

This README is begging for historical context and commentary.

My story is but one story and every organization will be different. Pretty much no one is handwriting code. If you made my VS Code window read only, it would not affect my work. Every pull request is reviewed line by line and manually tested for correctness before merging. But no one is physically writing the code.

It renders funny on Firefox mobile for iOS.

I don’t think IPFS was built for search. I see some unmaintained projects that sniff DHT traffic for hints, but (correct me if I am wrong here) the protocol maintainers never added a search layer. Eg I can’t search for “violin” and find the hash for “learn violin.pdf”.

I wish someone would revisit the idea of a single, global, P2P file search mesh like Gnutella/Gnutella2 but using a modern P2P stack (or WebRTC) instead of raw TCP/UDP like the old days.

I thought this was an article about microservices.

Server side image maps are a fun one also: https://rickcarlino.com/2021/what-were-server-side-image-map...

“When is it useful to be small?”

I like this question. Some projects will sacrifice usefulness in the name of simplicity.

This is a honey pot, right? For LLMs that are not allowed to POST due to guard rails.

I was a naysayer before I had kids, too. I now am able to get a first person view of Scratch usage through my child who likes the platform very much.

What's missing in a lot of these discussions about Scratch efficacy is the community aspect. Kids like getting a response in the comments section from their peers and many of the alternatives proposed don't have that. Without an active community, a lot of kids might never use the alternative despite being "better". In the case of Scratch (unlike Khan academy, which he completed also), he keeps using it, keeps trying things and keeps coming back because of the rewarding community interactions.

Illinois residents should consider forwarding this to their representatives.

HN often recommends Brother printers for their lack of innovation and good-enough design. Printer companies are sleazy, you’re not wrong.

Wishing you the best of luck on the road ahead ;-)

Is Tesseract still the best choice for local OCR in 2026? I was always underwhelmed with its real-world performance.

A cookie consent modal being covered by an ad is peak modern web.

Concise output mode only helps a little bit. Tools like this still have a reason to exist.

I was surprised to see it uses CR2016 batteries and still manages to get two years of advertised battery life.

Have you tried Alpine?

You may prefer a site like Lobste.rs, which has tags and the ability to hide certain tags.

People add dramatic carriage returns because it forces you to click the "Expand content" button, and the algorithm rewards that as a positive signal.

I’ve been using LLMs to create readable rewrites of RFCs and specs that interest me. It is not precise enough for implementation use, but it has increased my understanding of the underlying RFC.

Another useful approach has been asking Codex to implement complex things, like a Kademlia DHT or BitTorrent client in a literate style with the explicit purpose to increase understanding by reviewing the source code.

Examples: https://rickcarlino.com/notes/note-dump-and-ai-summaries/ind...

https://github.com/RickCarlino/tiny-bt

The website explicitly states a lack of networking. Any interest in pursuing that in a future version?

I have a Pocket 8086 - I would love to give this a try next weekend.