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superdisk

1,537 karma · joined June 7, 2018

https://nickfa.ro
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superdisk··on Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting
> I've built two multi-million dollar businesses this year.

Elaborate? Legitimately curious

superdisk··on Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
Are you getting any customers?
superdisk··on Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3
You can compile in only the used stuff with various build flags, not sure if they did that though. I've done that before to make a pared down SDL that only does audio playback.
superdisk··on My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress
It was "I need you to sit with:" that immediately made me close the article. I like LLM programming, but I really don't understand why so many people just post LLM-generated articles. What did the human even do at that point, press the start button?
superdisk··on Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming
I think Ginger Bill is kind of obnoxious but the first block quote from him is an utter truth nuke.
superdisk··on Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
And people called Stallman alarmist. Truth is, if you give them an inch they take a mile every time, so a hardline stance is strictly required.
superdisk··on Show HN: My Windows XP portfolio with working Game Boy and iPod
Not to criticize your work too harshly, but you specifically call out that this showcases attention to detail, and it's actually very inaccurate to the actual Windows XP, for anyone who's ever used it before. The UI elements are all haphazardly sized relative to each other, there are alpha-fade ins/outs, the loading bar in the boot screen animates smoothly when the real thing popped along block-by-block, fonts are antialiased when they shouldn't be, hover-over dropdown menus appear/disappear instantly when moused over, the fake scanlines are just a pixel grid overlay, the selection box on the desktop is filled but should be a dotted outline... these are just the few I saw and I haven't used XP in years.
superdisk··on XLibre XServer 25.2.0 Released
Fwiw this post seems to have gotten nuked off the front page (and all subsequent pages). Not sure why.
superdisk··on Epic Games announces Lore version control system
He uses SVN and specifically has stated that Git isn't suitable for the work he does due to big binaries in source control.
superdisk··on Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts
This one does. You can configure the noise injected into the signal and when it gets too much, it loses sync and the picture starts rolling. It's actually a software NTSC modulator/demodulator, not just an effect to simulate it.

https://github.com/LMP88959/NTSC-CRT

superdisk··on Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
I see you ran into Markus Triska. He's indeed a legend and his StackOverflow posts were super high effort and illuminating.
superdisk··on WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64
He's clearly doing a bit where he pretends to be confused and incompetent, and the punchline of the video is that he ends up with a working Windows CE port. He did a bit of soldering on the N64 board in the video so I think he probably does know what he's doing to a certain degree.

That said, LLMs have gotten extremely good at this kind of thing and you'd be shocked what you can do with this kind of low level work.

superdisk··on QBE – Compiler Back End
As the other commenter said, I don't think contributing it would be that useful, since QBE is a rather zen-garden project and I don't think the author would accept slop. Also he could just generate it with a prompt himself :P

It's certainly fun as a toy though!

superdisk··on QBE – Compiler Back End
The backend is only ~1300 lines. QBE is a super simple project which is why adding a backend to it worked so well. I just pointed Claude at the existing RISC-V backend for reference and it whipped up the MIPS one. It really does work, though there might be bugs I didn't run into. I compiled an Amiga MOD player, written in my language, to the N64 and it worked fine, if that gives you an idea of how stress tested it was. IIRC it runs about 5x slower than GCC-generated code.

https://gist.github.com/SuperDisk/1aa50263a773143c82a39d4771...

superdisk··on QBE – Compiler Back End
Cool project, and FWIW it's like one Claude prompt to add MIPS support to this. I did that and then was able to compile my little custom language to the N64.
superdisk··on Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE
Looks cool and does aim to address some of the annoying warts in Pascal. Especially the memory model.
superdisk··on Why Japan has such good railways
You can plug your ears and accept riding run-down trains full of shit, litter, puke, and threatening mentally ill people, in the name of not being "hateful," or as a society you can choose to have dignity and not put up with that.
superdisk··on GitHub's fake star economy
I maintain a niche-popular project that I didn't do any marketing for. My understanding is that even for popular projects, the usual dynamic is that there's just one guy doing all the work. So "getting off the ground" just means getting people to use it, and there shouldn't be any reason to artificially force that.
superdisk··on GitHub's fake star economy
An open source project really shouldn't be something you need to "get off the ground." If it provides value then people will naturally use it.
superdisk··on Why Japan has such good railways
I actually am speaking from experience, I saw both of those things my first week in New York. It's really not uncommon, I find it hard to believe that you've never run into shit/barf, usually when a car pulls up that has nobody in it, that's what's in there.

And this is all to say nothing about the decrepit state of the stations and cars themselves.

I've also been to Japan and experienced their trains. It's in such a different league that it's almost comedy.

superdisk··on Why Japan has such good railways
It's extremely common for there to be human shit in the train cars, and lunatics going nuts. It's absolutely nothing like Japan.
superdisk··on A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
It's just very poser behavior.
superdisk··on Ask HN: What weird or scrappy things did you do to get your first users?
I worked on a language learning site and in order to try to onboard tutors, I wrote a script that scraped the Preply tutor list, which gave first names, pictures, and a YouTube account link.

From there I made a spreadsheet and spent hours googling names and trying to match up pictures to faces, sending messages asking if they'd like to be a part of a pilot program on my platform.

Got quite a few people willing to try it out :) but sadly the startup didn't succeed. Fun times though.

superdisk··on Ask HN: DDD was a great debugger – what would a modern equivalent look like?
This is a legitimate question but this was clearly generated using an LLM.

To add something constructive, this demo represents an amazing ideal of what debugging could be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72y2EC5fkcE

superdisk··on 30 Years of ReactOS
I sometimes daydream about becoming a billionaire and bankrolling this project to completion. Would do the world so much good.
superdisk··on Claude's new constitution
America wrote the Japanese constitution.
superdisk··on Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
This is true. There are a few stock topics that will consistently get the fanboys out (Postgres, Ruby, Rust, SQLite) which is, IMO, usually just uninteresting fodder. And then interesting stuff which requires some intellectual engagement very often rots.

HN does have a much higher ratio of gems to dirt than any other place though, so I'm still here for the forseeable future :)

superdisk··on Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
If he made this I would buy it in a second. Right now my non-work daily driver is a Thinkpad X1 Carbon because I fell for the Thinkpad meme, but it's honestly pretty terrible all things considered. Battery life sucks, touchpad sucks, the shell is plasticky and weird. Mac-tier hardware that runs Linux would be extremely welcome.
superdisk··on Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
I'll actually answer your question, it's horrible. I have a X1 Carbon and get maybe 3-4 hours on Linux.
superdisk··on Cloudflare was down
Lol. The fact that the 4x one actually works and is correctly reporting that the 3x one is down actually makes this a lot funnier to me.
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