Hacker News: aag

New comment by aag in "NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating"

aag — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 04:17:55 +0000

I second your recommendation. I watched it last night, and loved it. It was beautiful to see the level of competence and devotion of the tiny group running the spacecraft.

New comment by aag in "Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)"

aag — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 04:14:58 +0000

Andy gave a nice talk on the implementation of Chez Scheme, an optimizing compiler, at the Scheme Workshop in Berlin in 2019:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_-enNCZxaU

New comment by aag in "The Agent-Native Editor Was Invented in 1976"

aag — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:08:00 +0000

Absolutely. I do all my LLM-assisted work inside Emacs using Agent Shell and Emacs skills:

https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell

https://github.com/xenodium/emacs-skills

New comment by aag in "Ruckus: Racket for iOS"

aag — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:21:27 +0000

Here's Pixie Scheme, which is an interesting implementation for the iPad:

https://jayreynoldsfreeman.com/My/Wraith_Scheme_(64-bit_vers...

New comment by aag in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

aag — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:40:46 +0000

This makes me nostalgic for my 4K TRS-80 Model I with cassette tape. There was something beautiful about having control over everything, and even the tight constraints were sometimes fun.

New comment by aag in "Waymo Safety Impact"

aag — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 05:08:26 +0000

I love Waymo. Using the word "impact" is unfortunate.

New comment by aag in "Functional programming and reliability: ADTs, safety, critical infrastructure"

aag — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:38:25 +0000

Thank you for saying that. I regularly attend the International Conference on Functional Programming, which grew out of the LISP and Functional Programming conference. Except for the Scheme Workshop, which is the reason I attend, it might as well be called the International Conference on Static Types. Almost all of the benefits of functional programming come from functional programming itself, not from static types, but one would never get that impression from the papers presented there. The types are all that anyone talks about.

New comment by aag in "Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams"

aag — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 03:26:40 +0000

Yes, especially in a city like San Francisco where so many cultures come together: the Prius culture, the BMW culture, the Subaru culture, etc.

New comment by aag in "Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams"

aag — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 03:24:40 +0000

There are situations where it is allowed:

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-25251/

New comment by aag in "CSS Grid Lanes"

aag — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:14:12 +0000

Me, too. I like masonry layout too much to wait for CSS to solve the problem, so I've been waiting to remove the last 1.3KB of Javascript from my home page since 2019.

Thank you to everyone who is making this happen.

New comment by aag in "No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter"

aag — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 01:24:50 +0000

Does anyone have more information on this sentence from the second paragraph?:

> Alphabet themselves reportedly see the writing on the wall, developing what appears to be a new browser separate from Chrome.

New comment by aag in "Useful patterns for building HTML tools"

aag — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 06:53:12 +0000

I can't get that page to respond. Did you mean <https://remotestorage.io/>?

New comment by aag in "Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence"

aag — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:45:27 +0000

I've never had confidence in MacOS or Apple software in general, and especially not in Apple Photos. Photos beachballs constantly, even when I do simple things like creating a new folder or naming a photo. It loses keystrokes almost every time I type a folder or photo name. No other program does this on the same Mac, which is an M4 Pro with 64GB RAM and terabytes of SSD. I know that it's not a problem with the hardware because the previous Mac Mini, which was well equipped, had the same problem for years. Reconstructing the Photos database didn't help.

Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups.

Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich.

I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere.

How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me.

Not recommended.

New comment by aag in "Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward"

aag — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 04:48:08 +0000

I have owned at least one of every Pebble watch since the beginning, have written watch faces for myself (but never posted them on the store), have received my Pebble 2 Duo, and am looking forward to receiving my Pebble Time 2. I am thrilled that Eric Migicovsky and his team are bringing the Pebble back to life. It was amazing that the Rebble team kept the watches alive all this time. But it's all open source, and doing that shouldn't give Rebble any kind of special say. There's no reason that "there has to be a future for Rebble in there" or that Rebble has to be "the core of the community." That sounds like nothing more than bruised egos.

New comment by aag in "At the end you use `git bisect`"

aag — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 04:25:20 +0000

Make sure you know about exit code 125 to your test script. You can use it in those terrible cases where the test can't tell, one way or another, whether the failure you seek happened, for example when there is an unrelated build problem.

I wrote a short post on this:

https://speechcode.com/blog/git-bisect

New comment by aag in "Doctorow: American tech cartels use apps to break the law"

aag — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 17:23:49 +0000

I like the modern social contract and hotels, but to be fair, AirBNB is inverting what had already been inverted. In some sense, AirBNB is returning to the old model before hotels were everywhere. A traveler would reach a new town and ask for lodging in someone's home. In many countries, providing lodging to strangers is still the norm.

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

aag — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:17:47 +0000

It's there, but the documentation is weak.

The release notes from long ago when that back end was released are here, and give some detail:

https://share.google/xmUnDhC7lndujD7TI

New comment by aag in "Show HN: FocusStream – Focused, distraction-free YouTube for learners"

aag — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 15:10:07 +0000

This isn't a perfect solution, but you can bookmark your YouTube subscriptions page.

New comment by aag in "WASM 3.0 Completed"

aag — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 19:25:33 +0000

The blog post explains that it's more than that. Bounds checking, in particular, costs more for reasons having to do with browser implementations, for example, rather than for architectural reasons.

New comment by aag in "WASM 3.0 Completed"

aag — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 19:19:26 +0000

Writing a GC that performs well often involves making decisions that are tightly coupled to the processor architecture and operating system as well as the language implementation's memory representations for objects. Using a GC that is already present can solve that problem.