Hacker News: bittwiddle

New comment by bittwiddle in "HyperCard Changed Everything [video]"

bittwiddle — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:17:56 +0000

Nice video. There have been some modern hypercard attempts, has anyone used any of those? They seemed pretty promising during the wave of "no-code" just before LLMs entered the scene. But hypercard still grants users the joy of creation, which is mostly lost when interacting with an LLM.

New comment by bittwiddle in "Show HN: I made an esoteric programming language that's read like a spellbook"

bittwiddle — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:39:28 +0000

A while back I built a magic-themed game to solve the problem of getting younger kids past visual block-coding tools(scratch etc) and into real programming. It's called Lambda Spellcrafting Academy. Kids craft spells using logic and function composition, learning core concepts like conditionals, functions, and recursion in a fun way. If you’re a technical parent and want your child to have a strong foundation, consider taking a look.

Free demo: https://www.bittwiddlegames.com/lambda-spellcrafting-academy...

New comment by bittwiddle in "How WhatsApp for business changed the world"

bittwiddle — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 17:10:24 +0000

While great for a personal Whatsapp, this kind of defeats the point of using it for a business.

New comment by bittwiddle in "Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unreal Tournament Forever"

bittwiddle — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 04:24:58 +0000

Did you know the soundtrack was composed in a module tracker? Someone recently recorded the full soundtrack playing back in Milkytracker. Pretty neat since you can see how the composers wrote the songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iONsjiiqeKg

New comment by bittwiddle in "Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?"

bittwiddle — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 13:47:49 +0000

Hey this is pretty cool! Have you thought about putting it online? I've occasionally used tools like Adobe's color scheme finder, where you upload an image and it suggests a fitting colorscheme derived from the photo. Though honestly theirs doesn't perform too well.

Yours looks like a nice improvement.

New comment by bittwiddle in "How ham radio endures"

bittwiddle — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 06:00:04 +0000

With packet radio you can transmit digitally, and basically have IRC via radio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio

New comment by bittwiddle in "Ryujinx (Nintendo Switch emulator) has been removed from GitHub"

bittwiddle — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:25:25 +0000

So I understand wanting to build emulators so that people can continue to play their old games after the hardware fails. But in building an emulator for a current generation console, it seems likely that much of the audience is just interested in pirating the games.

New comment by bittwiddle in "Quake runs in just 276 kB RAM on the Arduino Nano Matter board"

bittwiddle — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:18:11 +0000

Impressive memory optimizations. Streaming out converted pixel values was a neat way of pulling off the "framebuffer" without having enough memory for storing all the 16 bit values. Solid engineering.

New comment by bittwiddle in "How AlphaChip transformed computer chip design"

bittwiddle — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 22:14:03 +0000

Far more people / companies are designing PCBs than there are designing custom chips.

New comment by bittwiddle in "We need visual programming. No, not like that"

bittwiddle — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:39:05 +0000

I built a little game around the idea of a visual representation of s-expressions. It is meant to make it easier for newcomers to learn to program. The visualization not only allows you to edit programs more easily, but also to observe it as it runs.

Heavily inspired by MIT's Lisp-based SICP course.

The game uses Rust+SDL, and is playable in the browser thanks to WASM. https://www.bittwiddlegames.com/lambda-spellcrafting-academy...

New comment by bittwiddle in "ModRetro"

bittwiddle — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 19:03:33 +0000

Palmer Luckey founded Anduril which makes military drones.

New comment by bittwiddle in "84–24"

bittwiddle — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 02:57:29 +0000

I had the same thing. Tested on desktop for others in the game boat: its a story about repairing an old macintosh. Some pretty nice scrolling effects.

New comment by bittwiddle in "I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business"

bittwiddle — Wed, 29 May 2024 18:46:37 +0000

Thanks for sharing! I'm currently trying out a bootstrapped hw project myself, and have enjoyed following along with your progress.

You mentioned having trouble working with vendors, was this for ex: having boards assembled? I guess I've probably gotten "lucky" with relatively low scale so far, but been happy with the assorted online PCBA services.

New comment by bittwiddle in "The Myth of Loss: Bitboys"

bittwiddle — Mon, 13 May 2024 17:53:37 +0000

This is why most "semiconductor" companies are actually fabless, focusing on design while working with a partner(like TSMC) to have their designs manufactured.

New comment by bittwiddle in "Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years"

bittwiddle — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 21:40:58 +0000

I've found Rust very pleasant for building little games. I've mostly been using SDL + a my own little shim so I can target web through wasm & canvas.

I had professionally worked with C++ for a long time so getting comfortable with Rust wasn't too bad.

https://www.bittwiddlegames.com/ You can see a web build at https://www.bittwiddlegames.com/lambda-spellcrafting-academy...

New comment by bittwiddle in "Stanisław Lem's vision of artificial life"

bittwiddle — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 18:48:16 +0000

You might enjoy this paper : https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...

Its a bit long but I thought it was completely worth the read. It proceeds in a very gradual series of steps to make the point that societies could very well be conscious :)

New comment by bittwiddle in "Show HN: New visual language for teaching kids to code"

bittwiddle — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 18:04:22 +0000

I built a game you might find interesting. It's basically a visual Lisp wrapped up in the idea of arranging magical cards to build spells.

https://www.bittwiddlegames.com/lambda-spellcrafting-academy...

The demo is playable in the browser too thanks to Rust + WASM.