Hacker News: eggy

New comment by eggy in "Embedded Rust or C firmware? Lessons from an industrial microcontroller use case"

eggy — Sun, 03 May 2026 15:56:30 +0000

Yes, and AdaCore's tooling is formally verified and produces reports already familiar to aerospace, railway, and auto auditors for verifying certifications making it attractive to this industry segment of high-integrity apps. Memory safety is taken care of mainly through the features Ada/SPARK2014 offer in creating safe, high-integrity programs, correct.

New comment by eggy in "Embedded Rust or C firmware? Lessons from an industrial microcontroller use case"

eggy — Sun, 03 May 2026 15:11:22 +0000

We passed on Rust for Ada/SPARK2014 to write to bare metal on Cortex-M processor for real-time, high-integrity, and verifiable mission-critical software. Rust is making strides to be a future competitor, but it's new to the formal verification tooling and lacks any real world legacy in our domain. Ada's latest spec. is 2022. Other than AdaCore's verified Rust compiler, Rust still does not have a stable language specification like C/C++, Lisp, or Ada, SPARK 2014. I have no doubt that it will start rising to tick all the boxes that Ada/SPARK do right now with their decades of legacy in high-intetrity, mission-critical applications. The mandate to use memory-safe software put into effect this past Jan 1 2026 puts some wind in Rust's sails, but it's more than memory-safety in this domain. Plus, I do not enjoy Rust, but Cargo is nice. We're looking at Lean for further assistance in verifying our work. I think there was and is lot of Rust evangelism that will also carry it forward and boost even more Rust popularity,

New comment by eggy in "Sauna effect on heart rate"

eggy — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:23:26 +0000

Everytime I start jumping rope after a long break like Winter. It immediately starts trending lower a few points in 3 to 4 days, and plateaus after 6 weeks or so. I've averages as low as 54 bpm, but not as consistent as 58 to 60 bpm over a six month period. Granted, I tend to sleep better, have lower stress anecdotally and quantifiably by my Garmin watch's data. It has to be said that I usually add more exercise, because the rope jumping greases the skids so to speak. Good begets good.

New comment by eggy in "OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS"

eggy — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:16:00 +0000

For sure, and that makes MINIX the most widely used consumer OS!

New comment by eggy in "OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS"

eggy — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:29:05 +0000

From my comment below, we used Betamax back in 1982 for film class and would go back to editing it on a tape-to-tape deck, so starting with Betamax vs. VHS meant you had less degradation in the final edited product, since you started with higher quality. Sort of like editing RAW vs. JPEG photos nowadays to start with more resolution/information. For me streaming vs. my Blu-ray stuff was about cost. A $39 Blu-ray disc vs. a $12 movie or free movie with subscription. Amazon Music took away a purchase I had from 2014. I could no longer download it, since something changed with their licensing agreement. I have digitized my DVD/Blu-ray discs, since the discs don't last forever. I keep a streaming rez and a hi-rez copy of my faves.

New comment by eggy in "OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS"

eggy — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:22:07 +0000

Yes, but you're forgetting editing wasn't digital/digitized. You would copy from one tape to another, so a degradation issue. It's not the TV's capabilities, but if you started with higher quality you would get less overall degradation. I took film classes in TSOA at NYT back in 1982, and one class was film production and the other was lugging around a huge deck and camera in Betamax and then going back to a tape-to-tape transfer editing deck.

New comment by eggy in "Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp"

eggy — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 03:33:57 +0000

I'm going to download and check out Mine and Coalton. Right now, I use Neovide and Lem interchangeably. However, I am in deep with Shen. I bought a hardcopy of The Book of Shen, 5th Edition, and I still have Peter Kogge's 1991 text, "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers". I suspect the Hindley-Milner type system in Coalton will be more familiar to the Haskellers out there, but it is not as strong as Shen's Sequent calculus type system. In Shen, computation is allowed in side-conditions (if, let, and, etc.), so you can compute over terms inside types. Shen wins for raw expressive power and programmable types. Shen is very portable, but being a DSL, Coalton must integrate nicely with Common Lisp. And you get native exe's. Glad to see a simple way for people to program in CL or Coalton without having to go through the decades I have done with Vim and Emacs. VS Code bores me, but it is practical, even if it seems like junkyard truck with everything bolted on or hanging off of it.

New comment by eggy in "OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS"

eggy — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:58:16 +0000

I ran Minix around 1991 on my Amiga computer. Minix had a smaller attack surface and isolation provided by its microkernel vs. Linux's monolithic kernel. I had the Minix textbook, and it was easier to think about it because of the split along modules. I personally think Minix vs. Linux was very similar to Betamax vs. VHS. Betamax was technically superior, but the market picked VHS. I may run Minix again on my old Lenovo T430u from 2012. I was amazed that some of the code to Minix was in the appendix of the book, sort of like the magazines with pages of code to hand type in games or toy programs. I guess I liked MS-DOS for the same reason: tinkering, from my PEEK and POKE back in my Commodore PET 2001 (1977) and Vic-20 days...

New comment by eggy in "New bill would let New Yorkers hang solar panels from windows"

eggy — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:35:51 +0000

Wow, 160 kWh/month! My family of four uses as much as 790 kWh/month in the high-heat or very cold season, with an annual average of 650 to 700 kWh/month. We pay around 0.13 USD/kWh, however, when you add the taxes and supply charges, it actually averages out to 0.28 USD/kWh...Granted I have two younger children at home, and my wife cooks fresh meals all the time - fresh-baked breads, etc., so we don't eat out much at all. We have an electric oven, electric washing machine and dryer, and electric cooling and heating (split unit HVAC).

New comment by eggy in "Sauna effect on heart rate"

eggy — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:24:15 +0000

A delta of 3 bpm on sauna days corresponds to around 4% delta if the baseline is 72 bpm. I've gone from a resting heart rate over a 7-day average of 64 bpm to 58 bpm by jumping 15 min. of rope a day, 4 times a week. I've lost weight, body fat, and I feel like my body is more efficient with corresponding lower heart rates throughout my active day. I like saunas for recovery and aches, they put me in a relaxed state after, and I believe the dilation is flushing my system. Like anything else, moderation. Perhaps I will add sauna to my weekly routine 1x per week or less.

New comment by eggy in "New bill would let New Yorkers hang solar panels from windows"

eggy — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:07:27 +0000

Since it's not a battery storage setup, the energy being sent into your home circuit alleviates demand by a small amount. Where did they come up with 10 to 25% savings? Factors such as an optimal view of the sun for as much as possible, south-facing or biased East or West, would be the max. payoff. Night would be a zero net gain. At a savings of $7 a month, the panel would pay for itself in maybe 10 years not factoring in government subsidies. You need to keep it clean as well for it to maintain its potential output.

New comment by eggy in "Caffeine, cocaine, and painkillers detected in sharks from The Bahamas"

eggy — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:28:01 +0000

Correct, not millions of Demodex mites, which are usually in the hundreds to thousands on a typical, non-infested human. The millions should be the general amount of mites and other symbiotic/parasitic on and in your body. Thanks!

New comment by eggy in "The APL programming language source code (2012)"

eggy — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:08:38 +0000

Yes, and I think it's important to highlight that Iverson would write APL on chalkboards and paper when working on math at times. I am sure some people here can hand write a program, but it seems so much more akin to writing math. I am in J daily, APL once in a while, Uiua more frequently, but J is the only one I actually write in my journal and then try it on my J phone app or when I open up my laptop. The intro books for J are great for working through math and learning J - Concrete Math for Computing in J; Easy J; Calculus; Arithmetic - https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Books

New comment by eggy in "A perfectable programming language"

eggy — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:45:54 +0000

Yes, a strong argument, and staying in a line of PLs: F# for high-level, and F* <-> Low* for theorem proving and low-level coding. I am evaluating F/Low for verified code on Cortex M processor that I am currently trying to write SPARK2014. The Cortex A processor is running seL4 for less safety-critical tasks. I did look at Lean4 as a scratch for my Idris2 itch use cases.

New comment by eggy in "Show HN: FluidCAD – Parametric CAD with JavaScript"

eggy — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:33:19 +0000

Looks great! Nice work. I am steeped in CAD for my work flow, so I used to program AutoCAD in AutoLISP, Rhino in Rhinoscript, now F#, and FreeCAD in Python as well as Blender. They have the geometry engines built-in and tested over decades. I think this is good for the maker with a 3D printer to do parts that are relatively simple (not discounting parametric code to make complex shapes here). Industry needs integration of CAD, BIM, CAM, Viz, etc. Take a look at this now older (2014) project where Rhino and F# were used to design and manufacture complex geometry for a real world build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY-bvZZZZnE

New comment by eggy in "Caffeine, cocaine, and painkillers detected in sharks from The Bahamas"

eggy — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:16:06 +0000

Agreed. When you zoom in, even the normal life stuff can give you concern. I showed my kids what creatures live on their and others' bodies. You have millions of microscopic arachnids called Demodex mites living in your hair follicles and sebaceous glands, particularly on your face. My wife gave me an evil look as I showed my children this fact in online vids and pics. Granted these are symbiotic/parasitic relationships of life, but still, the closer you look, the more you see!

New comment by eggy in "Is math big or small?"

eggy — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:08:55 +0000

I have loved math since I was a child, and I think it depends on when you grew up and how steeped you are in reality vs. the virtual or the computer world, and how much of an abstract vs. concrete thinker you are. I was always making things in modeling clay, that greasy grey-green stuff, and so my scale was what I could make out of one brick of such stuff. I bought my first computer in 1977 (Commodore PET 2001), and the CBM ASCII set had some graphics, but nothing compared with today's graphics. My first encounter with visualization and scale was writing a program to let me know which of the four moons of Jupiter I was seeing in the sky that night. Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa's orbits are almost edge-on to our view from earth, so I made Jupiter a capital O, and the moons were lowercase letters. I printed this out on a thermal printer (like a wide receipt). Cosmos was the rage on TV and I had read Einstein's Universe by Nigel Calder. I had a telescope and a microscope, so the micro and macro were very real to me. I suspect if you grew up on tablets and only built things on a 3D printer scale, you don't have that unbridled sense of the small and large except on very abstract terms. However, not a donut, not a universe-scale torus, but rather a pool donut comes to mind when I first hear torus! I built an XYZ router table in the early 2000s out of old stepper motors. It was 8'x4', and I built stitch-and-glue wooden kayaks from the panels I cut on it. These would wind up being 16 to 22 foot long kayaks to go into the real world and have fun!

New comment by eggy in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"

eggy — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:19:00 +0000

Some related good books I have been studying the past few years or so. The Spark book is written by people who've worked on Cube sats:

  * Logical Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems

  * Building High Integrity Applications with SPARK 

  * Analysable Real-Time Systems: Programmed in Ada

  * Control Systems Safety Evaluation and Reliability (William M. Goble)

I am developing a high-integrity controls system for a prototype hoist to be certified for overhead hoisting with the highest safety standards and targeting aerospace, construction, entertainment, and defense.

Amazon ending support for older Kindles

eggy — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:51:05 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/08/amazon-to-end-support-for-older-kindle-devices-2012/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718173

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by eggy in "planckforth: Bootstrapping a Forth interpreter from hand-written tiny ELF binary"

eggy — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:37:05 +0000

I am teaching myself Arm assembly for the M-series of processors, M-4 for now. I have been playing and using J (jsoftware.com) since 2010, and I have to say that as much as the higher abstracted languages and programs become, I still love the atoms and terseness of array languages and writing close to the metal. I started with Factor, gforth, and retro years ago. Something magical happens when you immerse yourself in it. Right now, I am working with KlongPy, which using the PyTorch backend along with the Klong language is amazing. I used to write assembly code for my Vic-20 back in the day and then bought the VIC FORTH cartridge for like $30 in 1982. I programmed my 1977 PET 2001 in the Commodore Basic 1.0 it came with, but there was a sys instruction for machine code! I used to write my code on an index card before typing it in and saving to the cassette recorder. Magazines had code to hand type in, so my coding was learned with reading and writing it first. I accidentally bought a hardcover book on PDP-11 programming and read the whole book before I bought my PET in 1977. Machine language. I miss the early days of computing before the internet or Genie Online, but Echo in NYC was a blast - thanks, Stacy!!