Hacker News: alexisread

New comment by alexisread in "Ante: A new way to blend borrow checking and reference counting"

alexisread — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:26:22 +0000

OOI why did you go with RC at the lattice bottom rather than generational refs? Not sure how in touch you are with the author of Vale?

What would be good is if effects are used to discharge the ownership obligations, that should dovetail well in Ante. BTW I appreciate the clear effects handling in Ante, very nice!

New comment by alexisread in "Bringing Swift to the Apple ]["

alexisread — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 15:27:16 +0000

Yes that’s pretty much how I’ve used AI, though phase zero and one had to be hand-coded until there was enough code for the AI to iterate off. Hand debugging and then showing the AI helps to narrow the number of errors, and how to triage for the next run.

New comment by alexisread in "Cyberdecks, going analog, and convivial technology"

alexisread — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:43:46 +0000

Depends what you define as a cyberdeck. If you look low power/ non-linux there are many innovative decks: https://hackaday.com/2023/03/06/low-power-challenge-the-pota...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK0uAKkt0AE colorforth deck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn0MxHlima0 discrete deck built like the tandy 1000

If Cyberdeck builds get people building, then it's all good. Farming does encourage others to build so it's all heading in the right direction :)

New comment by alexisread in "ESP32-S31"

alexisread — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:59:34 +0000

New comment by alexisread in "Chuwi Minibook X"

alexisread — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:40:45 +0000

Not quite the same thing, but you can build a similar thing to run linux relatively easily, and the keyboards can be really good that way. You can swap out the SBC for one of your choice eg. https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-iota (why don't AMD do small SBCs?) and cut a space on the left/right hand side for a trackpoint/optical trackpad (operate from the side)

https://github.com/penk/penkesu

New comment by alexisread in "Mini Micro Fantasy Computer"

alexisread — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:10:06 +0000

There’s a wealth of retro machines out there that cater to this. A sample: https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/Neo6502/open...

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/AgonLight2/o...

Or with keyboards: https://wildbitscomputing.com/

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spectrumnext/zx-spectru...

Or you can go mobile: https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/picocalc

https://andywarburton.co.uk/post/gr3ml1n-a-compact-handheld-...

And if you want a real challenge, the one euro computer:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/RVPC/open-so...

New comment by alexisread in "Flipper One Tech Specs"

alexisread — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:06:53 +0000

There’s a definite overlap between this and the Cardputer Zero: https://youtu.be/lhS0trmBAAU?si=lLmCKdK3eHyMMAR0

M2 slot or a clipon addon? Nice to see more Swiss Army knives in this space

New comment by alexisread in "Consider the Sister"

alexisread — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:26:21 +0000

Consider the bulldog…

New comment by alexisread in "Modern Rendering Culling Techniques"

alexisread — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 11:45:40 +0000

Douglas little has a neat trick for dynamic voxels, see the ‘sparse voxel octree’ demo:

https://youtu.be/nHsgdZFk22M?si=Yt_m0W6OozSm4TkW

Allows Minecraft on a 16mhz Falcon

New comment by alexisread in "Do you even need a database?"

alexisread — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:03:06 +0000

I think that’s the beauty of PG here, you can find solutions to most of this:

Index creation https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23876479/will-postgresql...

JSON->DB schema https://jsonschema2db.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Pg shared disk failover is similar but RAC is quite unique, you’re not going to use though with a rented cluster?

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/different-replicatio...

Personally for me any technical advantages don’t outweigh the business side, YMMV :)

New comment by alexisread in "Do you even need a database?"

alexisread — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:38:55 +0000

Good points, but Postgres has all those, along with much better local testing story, easier and more reliable CDC, better UDFs (in Python, Go etc.), a huge ecosystem of extensions for eg. GIS data, no licencing issues ever, API compatability with DuckDB, Doris and other DBs, and (this is the big one) is not Oracle.

New comment by alexisread in "Palestinian boy, 12, describes how Israeli forces killed his family in car"

alexisread — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:38:22 +0000

This is the same Israel that has attacked Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Quatar and Sudan (https://youtu.be/pRxKltphg6c?si=bDSB_jA-KPM4Efzu) and globally trafficked children?

(https://youtu.be/RJhqGDZbqBI?si=MQFuah6er7TvHcaD)

Or is it the Israel that deliberately destroys crops (https://youtu.be/Lyp9Xfess3Q?si=1_4usvB1yjgYhKSb)?

Maybe it’s the Israel that ignores ceasefires (http://youtube.com/post/Ugkxn4SkyNfKESV6nPO_ZzgOhdaH8lb_FAkx...) or fills in wells (http://youtube.com/post/UgkxaPo3ERDtr5fQKPAHnFgxwYkMaEeMgdlo...)

Or it could be the Israel that shoots and kills 234 peaceful protestors (https://www.972mag.com/gaza-return-march-idf/)

Restraint is not really in Israeli vocabulary, and the story being sold is a lie.

New comment by alexisread in "Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about"

alexisread — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:13:58 +0000

Thanks! One last question is whether it can boot from external EEPROM? This is mainly with reference to Ken Thompson’s Reflections on Trusting Trust paper (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2324/R209/Reflections-Trus...).

What would be good is to be able to program the eeprom with hardware, boot the bao with the eeprom and then bootstrap the rest of the OS.

Lastly I was thinking on the inclusion of 4 bidirectional (transputer) links so to speak. I’m guessing you’ve thought about clusters of these chips?

Thanks

New comment by alexisread in "Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about"

alexisread — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 14:39:52 +0000

Great work on the chip, I’m really onboard with the trusted computing aim!

Is there a way to bootstrap binary code into the reram? I’m thinking being able to ‘hand-type’ in a few hundred byte kernel rather than use a flashing tool

New comment by alexisread in "The Om Programming Language"

alexisread — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:41:59 +0000

If you don't mind, could you drop some code? I'd be interested to see the result :)

New comment by alexisread in "LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop"

alexisread — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:52:49 +0000

Apart from transputers mentioned already, there’s https://greenarrays.com/home/documents/g144apps.php

Both the hardware and the forth software.

APIs in a B2B style would likely be much more prevalent, less advertising (yay!) and less money in the internet so more like the original internet I guess.

GUIs like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SymbOS

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_OS

Show that we could have had quality desktops and mobile devices

New comment by alexisread in "Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM"

alexisread — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 23:51:11 +0000

Very impressive demos! I did a quick look through the docs- it’s single threaded (in the cpu sense) and not multi process yes?

New comment by alexisread in "How Warhammer became one of Britain’s biggest companies"

alexisread — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 10:05:13 +0000

It was a massive shame the TV-toy project at Sinclair did not work out. It was a SOC/low cost computer based on the Inmos transputer (Called the T400, an M212 without dedicated link hardware) around 1983. That might have kept Inmos afloat- they were responsible for a lot of the RAM chip innovation, VGA standard, transputer etc. so the world would have looked very different. I do wonder what could have been with that chip paired with the Slipstream chip, oh well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer TV-toy

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/inmos-and-the-transputer TV-toy

https://www.transputer.net/tn/50/tn50.html M212 details

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/271372-flare-technology-an... 9.2mb/s bandwidth+sequencer_list

New comment by alexisread in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

alexisread — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:43:18 +0000

Tip of the hat there, it’s a very selfless thing to commit to caregiving. From a 50kft view, we have an aging demographic globally, and the bet seems to be robotics- hopefully they will get good enough to help meaningfully in this capacity. What happens to an economic system predicated around having more kids (GDP growth) is another concern.

New comment by alexisread in "The Tulip Creative Computer"

alexisread — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 19:23:11 +0000

I get the impression that the Atari AMY chip was an inspiration? Wonderful to see how the Alles speakers are implemented!