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vincon Domains I love

A long time ago, after Flickr got acquired by Yahoo, I decided to make my own web app to host my photos because I had found the perfect domain for it:

https://pi.ctu.re

I also needed to build another app to fetch and resize the images, and found it neat to use the following:

https://infra.stru.ctu.re

In term of users the service never went anywhere and it's quite dated now but it doesn't cost much to keep it online and it's open source.

vincon Kilo: A text editor in less than 1000 LOC with syntax highlight and search

Hey Akkartik! That's really interesting! At the moment you're still using a terminal to launch the individual apps or something else?

vincon How I Use Home Assistant in 2025

Indeed! I started with rules to turn on or off my individual heaters based on the temperature of the room but that's too many rules to setup and update. Then I found the generic thermostat helper and my appreciation for HA immediately went one lever higher!

vincon I will never need to buy a new computer again

I upgraded from 8 GB to 8+32 GB and will upgrade to 32+32 GB when the need arise but so far I can do web dev with that (16 GB is definitely not enough anymore sadly).

vincon I will never need to buy a new computer again

I have a T440p with 16 GB of RAM and a T480 with 40 GB of RAM (that can be extended again to 64 GB) and I'm also pretty happy with both and worried about the future of computing. I might stockpile a few of them!

vincon Stimulation Clicker

I feel drained, and sad that I forgot to feed the chicken.

vincon Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

I have code completion in vim and I try it every few years and sure it can save a few key strokes but the habit of using it never stays with me.

I think I just learn the code base and build a mental model of where everything is and it works for me. I spend more time thinking about how to organize my code well than to actually type it in my editor anyway. It probably helps that I'm working on Rails apps so there are strong conventions about how to do things that makes this easier.

vincon Map of GitHub

I can see many osdev Rust projects in "PlusPlus Nation" near other kernels, which mean that "X but in Rust" might be in "X" instead of "RustLand".

vincon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2024)

    Location: Brittany, France
    Remote: Yes since 2015
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Linux, AWS, JavaScript, Rust
    Résumé/CV: https://vinc.cc/cv.pdf
    Email: v@vinc.cc
    GitHub: https://github.com/vinc

vincon Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?

Sounds really cool! Do you have a page describing your project with some pictures? It's funny I checked your post history before asking and found that you made the same comment I'm doing today to someone doing something similar one year ago! Is it what got you started?

vincon Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?

I'm working on my hobby operating system written in Rust. It is completely text-based, but the console was lacking a scrollback buffer until this week. It's a simple feature, really, but having to redirect anything that outputs more than one screen to a file to read it was a pain. I'm happy to finally have it!

This weekend, I also made good progress on user-space memory and found a workaround for some issues I had. I still need to implement it the right way, though. After a few years on the project, the thing that is giving me the most trouble is grokking the concept of page tables.

https://moros.cc

https://github.com/vinc/moros

vincon Writing an OS in Rust

Thanks! If you try again and still have it don't hesitate to create an issue on GitHub and I'll look into it!

vincon Writing an OS in Rust

Thanks! Compared to xv6, you will find some important pieces missing. For example, there's no multiprocessor support and no scheduler, only one process can run at any time.

I should also note that user space programs can do memory allocation via syscall, but I currently have an issue with the kernel memory that I probably need to remap higher in memory. So, most commands inside the OS are still executed from kernel space, although they use syscalls and everything as if they were user space programs. I'm having a lot of fun creating device files inspired by Plan9 to communicate with the kernel.

There's a lot of work yet to arrive at something that feels truly complete as an educational OS, but I'm hoping to get there eventually. I really like this project because I'm learning along the way all the time!

Your first point is one of my main goals: I want the whole OS, including user space programs, to fit inside one brain. I'm always trying to find ways to keep complexity low without compromising too much on performance.

vincon Writing an OS in Rust

Good question, there's no TLS support inside MOROS so its website must be available over HTTP, especially when I self-host it. That's not the case currently so I could also have HTTPS but I'm using Dokku and last time I tried the Let's Encrypt plugin would redirect HTTP to HTTPS automatically, which is annoying.

Edit: I set up CloudFlare in front of the server and there's now a working HTTPS version along with the HTTP version accessible from inside MOROS. This should also work when I'll use again the web server inside the OS. Thanks for prompting me to look into it!

vincon Writing an OS in Rust

I started working on MOROS[1][2] after completing the tutorial 5 years ago, and I cannot recommend it enough for anyone interested in Rust and osdev. Phil put a lot of work into it, and it shows! The project covers a lot, and after that there's the osdev wiki[3] to keep going.

[1]: http://moros.cc

[2]: https://github.com/vinc/moros

[3]: https://wiki.osdev.org

vincon Ask HN: What have you built with LLMs?

Not much yet except a little email wrapper around the top LLMs. Now I can send an email to claude@goodbot.club or gemini@goodbot.club and get an answer in a few seconds.

I found in a recent project that it was interesting to compare the answers between GPT, Gemini, Claude, and Mistral. I have better results by combining the parts I like in each answer. It's also easier to ask follow up questions directly from my email client regardless of which device I'm currently using.

I built the app in a weekend with Ruby on Rails and AWS SES. I'm now wondering if it could be useful to other people? It's already open source and I could probably make the hosted version free by allowing users to provide their own API keys.

https://github.com/vinc/goodbot.club

vincon Tell HN: Burnout is bad to your brain, take care

Keep your safety net but try to set clear boundaries and make room for side projects that could transition to a startup if one get enough traction. Don't jump on it until it's profitable if you can. Sometimes it's hard to find the time for everything, but just a little bit every week, week after week, is much better than nothing at all!

vincon Tell HN: Burnout is bad to your brain, take care

I spent two years as a digital nomad before that, working from some of the last wilderness areas of the planet so transitioning to a rural area in Western Europe wasn't too hard!

They key was finding my first remote job that allowed everything else, that wasn't easy years before covid. It's largely democratized now but there's also more competition.

vincon Tell HN: Burnout is bad to your brain, take care

Same thing here. I bought a little piece of land with an old farm to renovate 7 years ago. The house is right next to a large forest, it was built 175 years ago when this area was cleared, and now I'm letting the forest come back to the parts I'm not using. I watch the small trees grow up, it's peaceful. I charge my laptop with a solar panel and got just enough mobile connectivity to be able to work efficiently.

I still got burn out at my last job because I let the pressure got me. Now I'm recovering while coding small projects and I hope that I'll find a better balance in the next job, or maybe one of my projects will take off.

vincon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2024)

    Location: Brittany, France
    Remote: Yes since 2015
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Linux, AWS, JavaScript, Rust
    Résumé/CV: https://vinc.cc/cv.pdf
    Email: v@vinc.cc
    GitHub: https://github.com/vinc

vincon Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

The main pain point I remember from my biggest integration was getting all the webhook events right. There was also a thing about the order in which the events were received sometimes.

vincon Ruby's official documentation just got a new look

If I change the color hue of all the CSS variables from green to red, and make the text a bit darker and larger it's not so bad. With a light gray background on the sidebar to provide some contrast with the main content like the Rust doc does I quite like it.

I'll probably create custom CSS rules for the doc if this is the final version and be happy with it. I've been using a custom dark theme for HN for years and I'm happy with it. I'm glad we still have enough control over web pages to do that!

vincon Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

Working on a web app to check various metrics on cloud servers (or virtual machines on-prem) and suggest optimizations to reduce cloud waste (and costs). I'm basically automating a good part of the infrastructure maintenance I was doing as a full-stack dev in my previous job.

There are already a lot of services to right-size servers, but I want to focus on small teams that might not have a full-time devops yet and lack the time to check every server manually.

The app will be simple with an educational part, it should be like having access to continuous audits on our infrastructure, just like the CI/CD tools we use on our codebase.

It already helped me at home to reduce the load on my oldest Raspberry Pi by shifting some services to a newer one that was mostly idle and right-sizing some VMs in the Proxmox cluster of the rack in my homelab. Having a green check next to each server name is a good motivation!

Another thing that is scratching my own itch is server discovery (especially in a multi-cloud environment) and integrations because it's just so easy to forget some servers in a cloud when you do a lot of experiments and keep paying for them for months.

The MVP is getting ready to launch, I'm making the landing page right now, and then I hope to find some early adopters to iterate on the app and make it useful to other devs. I'm also thinking about open-sourcing it.

I'm interested in having conversations to discover the pain points of other people in that space, so feel free to reach out to me!

https://cloudcheck.cc

vincon Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

Interesting idea, getting Stripe to work perfectly in production for a global product is not as easy as it was, it really takes a while to fix all edge cases.

vincon Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

It's a very sad news.

I'm from Europe and I've never been to the States, but I loved the remote access to the Living Computers Museum. I'd often do `ssh menu@tty.livingcomputers.org` to see what was up. I'm glad to see that this will now be `ssh menu@tty.sdf.org`. Will it only be emulators or will there be some real computers?

vincon Beyond velocity and acceleration: jerk, snap and higher derivatives (2016)

A long time ago I wrote an engine for a newspaper that was helping journalists discover what was happening on social media. I was counting the number of times an URL was posted on Twitter and Facebook. I started with velocity and acceleration, but after I while I discovered that I could go one level higher and use jerk to understand when an URL was shared by an influencer.

I have a hard time imagining another level above that.

vincon Map of forest sounds from around the world

The blackbirds and the tawny owls that live around my house remind me bit of the tui and the ruru sometime. But the tui birds are really unique and amazing! It's almost magical :) I remember listening to them one last time before hoping into the bus to the airport because I knew I would miss them a lot.

I also spent half a year on Steward Island during my first winter where there's a lot of kiwi birds and I still catch myself waiting for their calls in the forest next to my home in Europe at night haha!

vincon Map of forest sounds from around the world

I'm from Western Europe but I lived a year and a half in New Zealand almost a decade ago, I miss the wilderness and the sound of the birds from this area of the world. This project is neat!

vincon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2024)

  Location: Brittany, France
  Remote: Yes since 2015
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Linux, AWS, JavaScript, Rust
  Résumé/CV: https://vinc.cc/cv.pdf
  Email: v@vinc.cc

I have 14 years of experience in developing and optimizing web apps in small teams. I have a passion for making things scalable. I like Rails and I've been focusing on it for the past 12 years but I'm exploring the idea of moving to something else.

The startup I worked for ran out of cash a few months ago and since then I've been playing with my open source hobby operating system written in Rust (http://moros.cc). It's a nice break after years of hard work and I'll probably spend the summer doing that but I'm also preparing for my next job.

If you have something interesting in Ruby or Rust and are a full-remote company I'd happy to hear about it!

vincon Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

It's not open source but it's really good looking, nice work!