Hacker News: coldcode

New comment by coldcode in "Our Agreement with the Department of War"

coldcode — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 23:27:40 +0000

Both. He is a fool who thinks he knows better than anyone else.

New comment by coldcode in "The challenges of porting Shufflepuck Cafe to the 8 bits Apple II"

coldcode — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:48:57 +0000

While I enjoyed writing assembly on the 6502 Apple II back then, I would hate doing it today, 42 years later.

Good job, though! Hard to comprehend how limited the hardware was back then, and how much cleverness it took to get things to work.

New comment by coldcode in "Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court"

coldcode — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:05:53 +0000

The importers would get the refunds, and any of their customers they charged more for would simply keep the refund. If you paid it directly (like international product order) you probably won't ever get repaid, as they probably deleted the transaction or otherwise failed to record it. Refunds even for importers might be caught up in lawsuits which might never resolve. It's a mess, and SCOTUS did not address the mess.

New comment by coldcode in "I asked Claude Code to remove jQuery. It failed miserably"

coldcode — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:08:57 +0000

For any AI post, there seems like that one person for whom it worked great, and a whole lot where it didn't. Your mileage may vary...

Some things AI does well, many things it may be not worth the effort entailed, and some where it downright sucks and may even be harmful. The question is will it ever change the curve to where it is useful most of the time?

New comment by coldcode in "Amazon delivery drone strikes North Texas apartment, causing minor damage"

coldcode — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 21:34:56 +0000

Which is the argument against flying cars. Uncontrolled flying car crashes over populated areas could be catastrophic.

New comment by coldcode in "The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up"

coldcode — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:18:35 +0000

I thought all measurements in data centers were in US football fields.

New comment by coldcode in "You can now play Grand Theft Auto Vice City in the browser"

coldcode — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 22:11:51 +0000

Amazing it runs in a browser.

New comment by coldcode in "Affinity Studio now free"

coldcode — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 21:11:03 +0000

Did they remove any features in Photo? Or is it basically just glommed together?

New comment by coldcode in "Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division"

coldcode — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 13:15:25 +0000

My career as a programmer started this way. The division VP would eliminate jobs in the last quarter of the year to make his numbers look good, then desperately hire people at the start of the first quarter to avoid projects falling too far behind. I was one of those people.

New comment by coldcode in "IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)"

coldcode — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 13:20:48 +0000

I used Borland Turbo Pascal in 1984. It was amazing to work with something so fast on a PC that was really so slow. No IDE/Compiler since then matched the speed. Today's code is massively more sophisticated and complex, so there is no way to match that performance today despite the speed of computers today.

New comment by coldcode in "U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier"

coldcode — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 16:24:20 +0000

I remember a friend having a 17% mortgage, which he eventually walked away from.

New comment by coldcode in "The Storm Hits the Art Market"

coldcode — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 01:59:41 +0000

I make an unusual kind of art, but I haven't tried selling it, as you need a stable of interested people, and I can only post it in one place at the moment (a Facebook interest group on tiling, Instagram is overrun with AI, you can't start a new profile without lots of existing supporters). I've considered opening a gallery in my local area just to sell my art (5 million people in the metro, and barely a real commercial art gallery). My overhead would be just me and a location. The idea of selling art for tens or hundreds of thousands seems nuts.

I do see that there are too many galleries in places, selling too many artists, to too many people, with massive overhead (in the story, the gallery had $100k+ a month in expenses). Also, it's hard to make something new that is still saleable, almost every kind of art is basically something people did 50 or even 100 years ago; I look at art people are selling all the time, and most is not anything different. The best stuff is from people that hardly anyone knows, who like me just make something different because they want to.

I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit. I could sell it at https://www.saatchiart.com, but they don't really market most of what they have. You have to drag people there. Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries). Locally, in the right location, people see your art, and stop by. It's just the pain of setting it up, and then sitting there while you wait!

Mentioned it here before, https://andrewwulf.com if interested.

New comment by coldcode in "Age Simulation Suit"

coldcode — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 21:52:45 +0000

The site is slow so I can't see it. I'm 68, eat well, lost 20 pounds, work out twice a week. Everything is working fine. But I live in a place surrounded by people in walkers, wheelchairs, or using canes. Some of them have had strokes or accidents making improvement hard, but many simply chose to not do anything to avoid the aging. You don't ordinarily wind up with a walker at a single point; it often starts many years or even decades earlier when you failed to keep in decent physical shape. I almost started too late (last couple of years), I can see how easy it is to not notice your physical being slowly going down. But assuming no major injury or disease, you can improve your body at almost any age, a little at a time, and avoid or at least postpone physical aging for quite a while.

I also write code daily, read the same things I read when I worked, thus keep my brain going too. You can't ignore body or mind, you have to keep both in tune.

I am still getting older, but I am in better shape than I was before I retired. The last time I felt as fit was when I was still playing basketball 30+ years ago.

Don't wait, it's easier to do a little for decades than wait until it's almost too late.

New comment by coldcode in "Our Response to Mississippi's Age Assurance Law"

coldcode — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 23:34:33 +0000

Truth Social, X and Rumble are all backed by the very people who wrote the law, so will not be sued. Get Out Of Jail Free cards.

New comment by coldcode in "LabPlot: Free, open source and cross-platform Data Visualization and Analysis"

coldcode — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 16:15:14 +0000

It's so interesting to see how much of a commodity charting/graphing has become. When we started building Deltagraph in late 1988, what we made become a kind of standard since we targeted Postscript and Illustrator output, and included almost every kind of chart we could find with ridiculous options for everything, so people used it world wide, especially if targeting print. In the mid-90's, it was sold by the publisher (we just did the dev), and it spent the next 25 years at various owners before dying during the pandemic, all still based on the original source code (C) I started. I can't imagine how bad the code looked by then...

New comment by coldcode in "Vendors that treat single sign-on as a luxury feature"

coldcode — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 20:08:47 +0000

I once worked a contract at a public University, and the first thing I noticed was their SSO implementation. You logged into a single page, and then it called the other applications with a GET putting the username and password in the clear in the URL. Facepalm.

New comment by coldcode in "Imagen 4 is now generally available"

coldcode — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 20:37:25 +0000

>Image generation may not always trigger:

>The model may output text only. Try asking for image outputs explicitly (e.g. "generate an image", "provide images as you go along", "update the image").

>The model may stop generating partway through. Try again or try a different prompt.

Seriously?

New comment by coldcode in "So what's the difference between plotted and printed artwork?"

coldcode — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 12:45:35 +0000

I had a shirt from a piece made at Printful, but it's way too small (even at XXXL) for a normal person. It is cool to see though. I wish I could find a tailor who actually makes dress shirts, and have the fabic made at Spoonflower.

New comment by coldcode in "So what's the difference between plotted and printed artwork?"

coldcode — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 17:31:05 +0000

I only make art designed to be printed on 10-12 color large format inkjet printers. Making plotter art is not inherently better or worse that printing, it's just a different type of art. I love what people do with plotters, but I just prefer doing printed versions, since what I make is often not possible with a plotter, as I deal in pixels (up to 200+ megapixels), and plotters deal in vectors. It's like Photoshop vs Illustrator, the don't compete as much as specialize in different things. https://andrewwulf.com if interested.

New comment by coldcode in "So you want to parse a PDF?"

coldcode — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:02:49 +0000

I parsed the original Illustrator format in 1988 or 1989, which is a precursor to PDF. It was simpler than today's PDF, but of course I had zero documentation to guide me. I was mostly interested in writing Illustrator files, not importing them, so it was easier than this.