Hacker News: WoodenChair

New comment by WoodenChair in "OS9Map"

WoodenChair — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:01:01 +0000

Thanks, much appreciated.

New comment by WoodenChair in "OS9Map"

WoodenChair — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 02:26:26 +0000

> You can get a 1.67Ghz G4 Mac Mini on eBay with OS 9 preinstalled. It's wicked fast (especially with an IDE SSD adapter)

The fastest Mac mini G4 topped out at 1.5 GHz, not 1.67. I'm the guy selling many of those Mac mini G4s upgraded with SSDs on eBay... just a hobby business. Also sell on my website at https://os9.shop where there's a FAQ where you can read more about it and why it's a good model/upgrade to buy or build yourself.

New comment by WoodenChair in "OS9Map"

WoodenChair — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 02:24:19 +0000

Self promotion but relevant:

I have a hobby business doing something very similar, except I focus on a specific model—pretty much the most power efficient PowerPC desktop Mac you can get that can still run Mac OS 9, the Mac mini G4. It's at https://os9.shop

New comment by WoodenChair in "Oracle shed about 20k roles globally in the last year"

WoodenChair — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:03:04 +0000

> What's stopping anyone else from using AI and eat into Oracle's market?

Open source databases have already been doing this for decades. You can’t just clone its products and expect to eliminate it. Oracle is driven by a strong sales culture and ruthless business strategy.

New comment by WoodenChair in "Apple WWDC 2026"

WoodenChair — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:34:05 +0000

Apple very rarely admits mistakes. The fact they're rolling back some of the extremeness in Liquid Glass and actively mentioned in the keynote that they very seriously took the user feedback shows just how bad it was, at least initially.

New comment by WoodenChair in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"

WoodenChair — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:46:21 +0000

“ It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions…”

Sounds like a natural fit as a feature, not a product.

New comment by WoodenChair in "I built a Game Boy emulator in F#"

WoodenChair — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:55:05 +0000

Yes, CHIP-8 is kind of the standard "I want to get into emulators" first project. In my latest book Computer Science from Scratch we go CHIP-8 -> NES in chapters 5 to 6. GBA is quite a step up from CHIP-8. I would suggest doing NES or GameBoy next, but of course with today's LLM help GBA is very reasonable if you are going that route.

New comment by WoodenChair in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

WoodenChair — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 02:19:52 +0000

Syntax is not the focus of your testing, but it’s often a pre-requisite to be clearly and accurately speaking the same language. Think not of taking off points for missing a semicolon but instead understanding the difference between the syntax for a method call and a property access. The different syntax conveys different meaning and so we should expect some basic level of accuracy to the language in question. At least that’s how I see it.

New comment by WoodenChair in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

WoodenChair — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 02:16:31 +0000

I agree with your premise about why accurate evaluation matters, but your post comes across as pretty bitter. Unless you’re at the job with him, you really don’t know that it’s a “I just need to show up” job he has at Booz Allen. Perhaps he has other great traits like a high social or emotional intelligence that make him good at his job beyond whatever was being evaluated on those projects you helped him with.

New comment by WoodenChair in "An Interview with Pat Gelsinger"

WoodenChair — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:07:01 +0000

He definitely didn't have the book ghostwritten. It does have advice on issues that go beyond faith. But I think it's much more useful as a guide to the faithful than the non-faithful. We interviewed him last year about the book:

https://pnc.st/s/business-books/9720205c/the-juggling-act-wi...

He gets into many of the issues discussed in this thread: having faith while being a CEO and how to handle that.

New comment by WoodenChair in "HN is drowning in AI comments"

WoodenChair — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 23:43:04 +0000

I understand this if you’re not a native speaker. But if you are, I think this will generally make you sound wooden.

New comment by WoodenChair in "Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption"

WoodenChair — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 02:26:48 +0000

Their Mac UI is a thin layer of AppKit. Even there they're currently using Objective-C++ it looks like, not Swift:

https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/UI/A...

New comment by WoodenChair in "Faster Than Dijkstra?"

WoodenChair — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:32:52 +0000

No, I don't think you're missing anything. He never answered the title of the post ("Faster Than Dijkstra?"). Instead he went on a huge tangent about his experience writing software for routers and is dismissive of the algorithm because the router problem space he was working in did not deal with a node count high enough to warrant the need for a more complex algorithm. Dijkstra's algorithm is used for problem spaces with far higher number of nodes than he mentions... basically an article that talks about some kind of interesting things but doesn't say much about its central question.

New comment by WoodenChair in "The Little Learner: A Straight Line to Deep Learning (2023)"

WoodenChair — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 04:30:42 +0000

> (based on the table of contents)

So your opinion is based on just reading the table of contents? I always find it disconcerting when someone writes a multi-paragraph commentary on a work they didn't actually read or see.

I understand that you're commenting on the approach more than the contents, but you're pretty dismissive of it without actually reading the details of how they went about things.

You're not quite judging a book by its cover, but you're not that far beyond that.

New comment by WoodenChair in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

WoodenChair — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:51:49 +0000

Ironically this post comes across to me as written by an LLM. The em-dashes, the prepositions, the "not this, that" lines. As a college instructor, I can usually tell. I put it through GPTZero and it said it's 96% LLM written. GPTZero is not full-proof but I think it's likely right on this one and I find it very ironic.

New comment by WoodenChair in "LLMs as the new high level language"

WoodenChair — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 04:26:24 +0000

PureScript is a programming language. English is not. A better analogy would be what would you say about someone who uses a No Code solution that behind the scenes writes Java. I would say that's a much better analogy. NoCode -> Java is similar to LLM -> Java.

I'm not debating whether LLMs are amazing tools or whether they change programming. Clearly both are true. I'm debating whether people are using accurate analogies.

New comment by WoodenChair in "LLMs as the new high level language"

WoodenChair — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 04:10:35 +0000

The article starts with a philosophically bad analogy in my opinion. C-> Java != Java -> LLM because the intermediate product (the code) changed its form with previous transitions. LLMs still produce the same intermediate product. I expanded on this in a post a couple months back:

https://www.observationalhazard.com/2025/12/c-java-java-llm....

"The intermediate product is the source code itself. The intermediate goal of a software development project is to produce robust maintainable source code. The end product is to produce a binary. New programming languages changed the intermediate product. When a team changed from using assembly, to C, to Java, it drastically changed its intermediate product. That came with new tools built around different language ecosystems and different programming paradigms and philosophies. Which in turn came with new ways of refactoring, thinking about software architecture, and working together.

LLMs don’t do that in the same way. The intermediate product of LLMs is still the Java or C or Rust or Python that came before them. English is not the intermediate product, as much as some may say it is. You don’t go prompt->binary. You still go prompt->source code->changes to source code from hand editing or further prompts->binary. It’s a distinction that matters.

Until LLMs are fully autonomous with virtually no human guidance or oversight, source code in existing languages will continue to be the intermediate product. And that means many of the ways that we work together will continue to be the same (how we architect source code, store and review it, collaborate on it, refactor it, etc.) in a way that it wasn’t with prior transitions. These processes are just supercharged and easier because the LLM is supporting us or doing much of the work for us."

New comment by WoodenChair in "Amazon cuts 16k jobs"

WoodenChair — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:57:07 +0000

"Earlier this month, top executives at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two of them telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies planning to cut jobs anyway."

Tiny BASIC: An Early Free Software Project

WoodenChair — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 21:24:17 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FirGzw9nTTk

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747829

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Intel makes sharp reversal, is 'going big time into 14A,' says CEO Lip-Bu Tan

WoodenChair — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 01:59:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/intel-is-going-big-time-into-14a-says-ceo-lip-bu-tan-serve-the-customer-well-remark-hints-at-external-client

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46572024

Points: 31

# Comments: 6