rickcarlino

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.

“URLs are bad” sometimes does feel like an underhanded way to say “stay in our app at all times”.

I need to tell my IRC friends ASAP.

The only solution is to ban all open source models and create a certification process under the auspices of OpenAI. /s

Live demo has a lot of lag and redirects to a login page

Invitation-only is the future of online communities. Lobsters still has a pulse because you need to know someone to get in and it’s a bad look if you invite annoying people.

Social media companies became so obsessed about maximizing ROI on short form video content that they stopped being a platform to share with friends and turned into Temu Youtube. You won’t see your friends stuff on any of them because it’s designed to work that way. Group chats are the only way to have a meaningful conversation if you a casual non-technical Internet dweller.

It will work for documents and the most simple TODO apps. It actually will not work for anything useful. There are a number of security policies in place explicitly to prevent things in file:// from accessing features available over real HTTPS. You will not have access to anything that requires a network connection, local storage, location services, WebRTC, etc. This is why things like Electron exist and why experiments like Active Desktop, HTA, the thing linked to in this article, that other project that had the same name as this one, and Adobe AIR were tried.

You have clearly never actually tried that.

I was going to mention Microsoft Active Desktop in the original comment, but I didn’t want HN to know how old I am.

Desktop operating systems should be able to run zipped web apps the way Electron apps run today. It ought to just be part of the OS.

I wish someone would build something like hiring.cafe but for DRM free digital content. One search query => uniform search results with direct link to purchase page on relevant marketplace. Basically just scrape and index every DRM free content marketplace and put it behind a single search interface.

Some will never know the thrill of downloading a mislabeled MP3 that introduces you to a new genre or thinking that Daft Punk actually released a track called “Vietnam”.

We have entered the GoFundMe era of vibe coding.