Hacker News: birdgoose

New comment by birdgoose in "Emacs internals: Deconstructing Lisp_Object in C (Part 2)"

birdgoose — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:03:50 +0000

The sibling comment explains why we prefer to use the lower bits as a tag (these are guaranteed to be zero if the value is a pointer on a 64-bit system).

Another reason why we wouldn’t want to use the top bit is that, as the parent comment suggested, the tagged pointer representation of a fixnum integer isn’t a pointer at all but is instead twice the number it represents. Generally speaking, we represent integers in twos-complement representation which uses that top bit to determine if the value is positive or negative.

New comment by birdgoose in "I program on the subway"

birdgoose — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 08:57:27 +0000

Sadly, only the text editor is on public source control at the moment (https://github.com/jpsheehan/ocaml-edit). The game project and operating system are ongoing until I get bored of them and move on to something else. Most of my obsessions over the last few years have been bus projects. My Tetris clone is another example (C, SDL): https://github.com/jpsheehan/tetris

New comment by birdgoose in "I program on the subway"

birdgoose — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:38:59 +0000

This is essentially how I work on hobby projects these days. My bus commute is about 45 minutes each way and I find this to be just enough time to get work done. I also try not to work on these projects outside of my commuting hours; this gives me time to mull problems over rather than jumping headlong into writing code.

The lack of internet on the bus has not really been a problem since I plan ahead and make sure any dependencies I need are already downloaded.

I use an old (2010 era) Toshiba netbook which is small enough that I'm not causing problems for my seat neighbours. It's also only got a dual-core 1GHz processor which kind of forces me to find performant solutions to problems.

Much like the author I've also been thinking about how I can make my setup more portable. I've been considering purchasing AR glasses and using my Charachorder2 so I don't even need to get the netbook out of my bag. At this stage I can't justify the cost of a pair of AR glasses though.

Some recent projects my commute has given me the time to work on:

- a text editor (OCaml, SDL)

- a 3D game (C, OpenGL)

- an x86 operating system (Zig)

New comment by birdgoose in "Pre-emptive Z80 multitasking explainer"

birdgoose — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 01:01:30 +0000

Also curious about this

New comment by birdgoose in "Hyperview – Native mobile apps, as easy as creating a website"

birdgoose — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 10:16:28 +0000

I'm fairly certain the tone of the HTMX post (https://htmx.org/essays/future/) was positive about its future of becoming "stable" (as opposed to "stale").

New comment by birdgoose in "New Mac Mini with M4"

birdgoose — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 18:05:57 +0000

I agree with your sentiment but I feel like many people just don't like the idea of carrying around dongles/cables/hdds/etc with their laptops.

New comment by birdgoose in "1 bug, $50k in bounties, a Zendesk backdoor"

birdgoose — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 05:12:04 +0000

In the above example, the Company doesn't have anything to do with the Google account that the user created themselves.

I don't know if Google is the best example here. Apple might be a better one:

1. User's work email is user@company.com

2. User creates Apple ID using their work email. Their Apple ID is user@example.com

3. User gets fired and their company email is deleted

4. User can still sign in to the SaaS apps using SIWA and their "company" Apple ID

It's worth noting that OAuth providers - like Apple - include information such as if they are authoratitive or not over a particular account.

New comment by birdgoose in "Keep Out – WebGL Game"

birdgoose — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 21:26:19 +0000

That was a really good experience.

The "About" button in the menu leads to a webpage that 404s. As another commenter has pointed out the correct URL is https://www.littleworkshop.fr/projects/keepout/

New comment by birdgoose in "Beyond Linux from Scratch"

birdgoose — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 10:00:09 +0000

I think it would be useful to include a direct link to what has changed between now and the previous version of LFS.