Hacker News: Vivtek

New comment by Vivtek in "Show HN: Craftplan – I built my wife a production management tool for her bakery"

Vivtek — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:25:55 +0000

Oh man. My wife's biscotti business will benefit from this. Nice work!

New comment by Vivtek in "Show HN: Kent Dybvig's Scheme Machine in 400 Lines of C (Heap-Memory Model)"

Vivtek — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 17:11:26 +0000

One of the funniest moments I remember from that class is he suddenly noticed the parens didn't match in the snippet he'd written on the board - so he counted through the trailing ))))) and inserted a close paren at the right place.

New comment by Vivtek in "Show HN: Kent Dybvig's Scheme Machine in 400 Lines of C (Heap-Memory Model)"

Vivtek — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 17:09:31 +0000

I took his Compilers class about 30 years ago. I really wish I still had those notes.

New comment by Vivtek in "Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor"

Vivtek — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 22:50:56 +0000

Gary McGraw was the first doctoral candidate to work on the Letter Spirit project:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220331021500/http://goosie.cog...

And John Rehling did a second portion in his doctoral work:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150320160815/https://www.cogsc...

(Thanks for this complaint - I hadn't realized that Rehling's thesis was linked from the Waybacked version of his personal page, and that finally completes my collection!)

You can also read Chapter 10 in Hofstadter's 1995 book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" for a pretty solid overview.

But yeah, seeing this project immediately reminded me of Letter Spirit, since it's basically a web editor for gridfonts.

New comment by Vivtek in "Trump announces 100% tariffs on movies ‘produced in foreign lands’"

Vivtek — Mon, 05 May 2025 21:19:59 +0000

Similarly, every European city turns out to be Budapest. Especially if there's an urban car chase of any kind.

New comment by Vivtek in "Trump reduces tariffs to 10% for 90 days on all countries but China"

Vivtek — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:28:14 +0000

Who would report it?

New comment by Vivtek in "Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries"

Vivtek — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:27:23 +0000

Threaten people with a 49% national sales tax, and suddenly they celebrate when it's only 10%.

New comment by Vivtek in "Foreign visits into the U.S. fell off a cliff in March"

Vivtek — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 13:37:19 +0000

There's a shocker.

Why would anyone fly to a country that's proud of shackling them and keeping them in detention without notifying their families? With the added bonus that next week they might be rendered to a slave gulag in El Salvador?

New comment by Vivtek in "Where are all the self-directed learners?"

Vivtek — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 11:42:45 +0000

Lord knows there are ample opportunities to learn this lesson in the industry today.

New comment by Vivtek in "Ask HN: Do your eyes bug you even though your prescription is "correct"?"

Vivtek — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 22:54:01 +0000

Same - the funny thing is that right now my 3-foot prescription is zero (plus a bunch of astigmatic correction). Apparently my mortal frame has accepted its purpose.

New comment by Vivtek in "ARPA is funding cheap community-owned gigabit fiber to neglected neighborhoods"

Vivtek — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 17:59:33 +0000

I think they might be rolling out here in rural Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, which to be absolutely honest I would not have expected in a million years.

Certainly a guy came by this week measuring for, he said, laying fiber optic cable. Just to put this into perspective, our barrio is the least populous in Adjuntas, which is the least populous municipio on the island. For my own perception, as a displaced rural Hoosier, it's still really densely populated, which means it's probably a reasonable cable investment, all else equal, but still. Astonishing to see it.

New comment by Vivtek in "Apple iPhone sales dip despite AI rollout"

Vivtek — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 04:20:07 +0000

Astonishing.

New comment by Vivtek in "My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback"

Vivtek — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 01:26:00 +0000

This is so cool!

I wish there was a way to know when an attack was charged up, or maybe show its progress in charging.

New comment by Vivtek in "Advent of Code 2024"

Vivtek — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 21:22:13 +0000

Stay out of my head!

New comment by Vivtek in "Ibis: Federated Wikipedia alternative"

Vivtek — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 19:37:19 +0000

There are one or two.

https://github.com/shleeable/Big-List-of-ActivityPub

New comment by Vivtek in "DNA study confirms Christopher Columbus’s remains are entombed in Seville"

Vivtek — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:12:59 +0000

"Today, traveling to the same Caribbean islands can be tricky, as anyone caught with contraband can face serious repercussions."

That is a very odd take on the Caribbean, and it's the third paragraph in the article. I've seen text spinners, but this feels AI-driven. Surely a human couldn't be this inane.

New comment by Vivtek in "Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison"

Vivtek — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 02:16:35 +0000

Why don't we start with some in his house and office?

New comment by Vivtek in "Scrapscript: A functional, content-addressable programming language"

Vivtek — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 23:04:40 +0000

Because when I think of content-addressability, I mean you can find things intensionally and not just extensionally, that is, you can know the shape of what you're after and find something that matches that shape. More or less what vector databases are doing these days. But in this context, it seems to mean that all the transactions (? maybe?) are stored and indexed by a unique key - but that still means I need that key to get something, right?

New comment by Vivtek in "Scrapscript: A functional, content-addressable programming language"

Vivtek — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 21:37:47 +0000

This might be a stupid question, but by "content-addressable" do you mean that namespaces are eliminated? This thing where you store each individual version of a function indexed by hash, that's content addressability?

New comment by Vivtek in "Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?"

Vivtek — Wed, 29 May 2024 03:08:25 +0000

Over enough years, they will be forgotten, just like the names of the people you went to school with, unless you've got a way to rehearse them.