Hacker News: fernirello

New comment by fernirello in "My lobster lost $450k this weekend"

fernirello — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:23:20 +0000

There's a very good Brazilian series "Desejos S.A."—literally "Wishes Ltd" but translated into English as "Whatever, whenever". People call a mysterious phone number, voicemail prompt tells them "At the tone, speak your wish clearly", then they get no further feedback and hang up. Shortly after, their wish comes true... and they have to do one task (always incomprehensible to them, often reprehensible) so that someone else gets their wish.

New comment by fernirello in "Boris Becker:'Whoever says a prison life is easy is lying–it's real punishment'"

fernirello — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 02:41:57 +0000

Transparent attempt at whitewashing Boris's image to sell some books. When he got caught hiding millions in assets to avoid paying his creditors, first he tried to bamboozle the judge. Then, he bought a worthless diplomatic passport for the Central African Republic from some guy around the Shepherd's Bush market to claim diplomatic immunity. Then, he strutted haughtily into the courtroom and declined to make any expression of contrition even after having been found guilty.

Judge sentenced him to 3 yr and change in prison; then, just 10 mo later, some tennis-loving Crown servant decided that the way to solve overcrowding in British prisons begun with freeing Boris Becker. A policy for people who'd been in jail for a minimum of 12 mo was inexplicably applied to Boris. He flew to Germany on a private plane, landed and walked, no longer subject to any legal confinement or release conditions.

One can't make this stuff up. Life imitates, and surpasses, art.

New comment by fernirello in "Altman: Graduates will get 'some new well-paid' job in space"

fernirello — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 20:59:29 +0000

When asked for his opinion about space travel, J. L. Borges replied “Is there any other kind?”

New comment by fernirello in "Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering"

fernirello — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 07:46:07 +0000

Has anyone seen publicly accessible content from the startup-ish MS&E courses? I think Coursera had a MOOCified version of “Startup engineering”, but that was over a decade ago and it didn’t last long anyway. It was great back then.

New comment by fernirello in "How the Final Cartridge III Freezer Works"

fernirello — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 07:14:46 +0000

Thank you!

New comment by fernirello in "How the Final Cartridge III Freezer Works"

fernirello — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:09:22 +0000

Clarification question, having read OP yet having missed some fine details: I presume you mean that software could set some CIA-II register to keep the NMI line to the CPU down indefinitely. Since what triggers the handling of an NMI is the transition from high to low, that means no other handler (in particular the Freeze Frame's) would get executed. And one'd also need to redirect the NMI vector, which normally is in Kernel ROM, to a dummy handler consisting of an RTI or little more. Correct?

New comment by fernirello in "Stack Overflow is almost dead"

fernirello — Fri, 16 May 2025 05:39:44 +0000

I've got valuable advice from SO over the years. There's overlap with LLMs, sure, but it's frequent to have questions that have no answers published anywhere on the web; SO brings people who know out of the woodwork, who create an explanation that didn't exist before. A couple days ago, someone in retrocomputing got to bank-switch a 1983 Radio Shack box... that kind of stuff wasn't published anywhere, until a guy who used to write games for that box answered that question on SO.

New comment by fernirello in "Why Clojure?"

fernirello — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 23:02:25 +0000

Arne has written, as usual, an excellent piece. Not only it argues its intended points, but it can also be followed by everybody-it brings readers up to speed without assuming any significant background knowledge.

New comment by fernirello in "An Accident in Space (1972)"

fernirello — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 18:51:06 +0000

A vast majority of the last names in this article are German. Seems like Project Paperclip all over again.

New comment by fernirello in "Intel 8080 emulator. 19th IOCCC. Best of Show"

fernirello — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 03:32:49 +0000

Sadly, same here: following the instrs works for Tiny Basic (which is quite basic!), but CP/M segfaults. Any idea to get past this?

New comment by fernirello in "How I got an O-1 visa as a software engineer"

fernirello — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 09:20:39 +0000

That's a dangerous oversimplification. Say you are a US lawful permanent resident. CBP has the power to deem your LPR status as having been abandoned (e.g., if you've been spending too much of your time outside the US, or established sufficient ties==primary residence in another country) or revoked (e.g., if you've committed one of a variety of crimes, which include any conceivable threat to national security). That determination depends only on the CBP officer having reason to believe that's the case; there's no need for any judge to get involved. Incidentally, many [0] believe that refusing to give CBP full access to the data stored on your personal computing device(s) can constitute sufficient grounds.

Once that happens, CBP can initiate expedited removal proceedings: you are forced into some cell in the airport, without access to legal counsel or any possibility of communicating with the outside world, in some cases without access to the medications you need to take... until it's time for the next flight to the country that issued your passport. Since you've effectively been deported, you can get hit with a 5-yr ban on reentering the US. And you'll have a lot of explaining to do every time you apply for a visa for any country for the rest of your life, because the "Have you ever been deported?" little question is everywhere.

All this could happen, and has happened. (Not going into the side issues of what it takes for visas in various categories to be revoked, or why Trump's travel ban got watered down: which actually happened for a different reason)

[0] https://www.aclunc.org/our-work/know-your-rights/know-your-r...

New comment by fernirello in "How I got an O-1 visa as a software engineer"

fernirello — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 08:38:23 +0000

In the U.S. system, no visa (including a green card==permanent residency) constitutes permission to enter the country. A visa only enables the holder to travel to a port of entry and request permission to enter the country. That permission may be granted or denied regardless of the specific visa category. Even if you have a gold-plated, von-Neumann-league visa... if the employee at the bottom of the CIS/CBP/* org chart who takes your passport is having a bad day, you'll be on the next outbound flight.

Only U.S. citizenship implies a right to enter the country.

EDIT fix typo

New comment by fernirello in "How I got an O-1 visa as a software engineer"

fernirello — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 08:24:29 +0000

U.S. permanent residency is a visa. It's an immigrant visa, obviously, like several other categories; meaning that it's permissible to state that the applicant has immigrant intent.

New comment by fernirello in "Ask HN: Best UI design courses for hackers?"

fernirello — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 18:36:38 +0000

This has to be the best HN comment in a long time.

New comment by fernirello in "Generating random terrains with Enu – a Nim lang based interactive sandbox"

fernirello — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 20:20:55 +0000

This looks quite neat; it reminds me of TurtleSpaces, a great Logo-based environment. Question (and sorry if the answer's evident, but a cursory glance at the website didn't solve it): are there any examples with source code we can look at, written by enthusiasts and/or people familiar with Enu-big or small, to learn about idioms, "best way to do X", etc? I've found that understanding programs written by my betters is a pretty good way of becoming acquainted with something new.

New comment by fernirello in "What are Functions? Coding for Kids [video]"

fernirello — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 22:43:41 +0000

Much obliged for your help. Logo has the advantage of being immediately applicable to much younger learners (~7) than BJC (~16). There's a big mass of teaching resources (microworlds, etc) that are immediately usable at the beginning, with the possibility of progressing into more complex concepts (e.g., turtle geometry). Maybe, for small children, it'd be a matter of buckling down to port Logo examples to Snap!'s turtle graphics... I may try that.

New comment by fernirello in "What are Functions? Coding for Kids [video]"

fernirello — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 23:04:28 +0000

Hey, thanks for the pointers. Question: are you aware of any materials I can follow to teach kids how to program using Snap!? Snap! has indeed become quite powerful with time, but I struggle to come up with a lesson plan, examples, exercises... whatever will gradually bring kids up to a Scheme-like level of expressiveness and generality.

New comment by fernirello in "Ask HN: How do I train a custom LLM/ChatGPT on my own documents?"

fernirello — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 20:35:42 +0000

From a confidentiality viewpoint, isn't this equivalent to uploading my docs to ChatPDF? (Genuine question, I'm not well versed in LLMs.) Because I'm uploading the embeddings to OpenAI or a similar service provider-if their chatbot can then answer my questions about my docs, wouldn't the informational content also allow it to answer any question asked by anybody other than me? E.g., "what's the document about?", "what's the PII of principal X?", etc.

New comment by fernirello in "Ithkuil, the Most Complicated Language"

fernirello — Tue, 23 May 2023 22:15:20 +0000

That’s why a perfectly understandable Ithkuil course is right over there, a couple hexagons away

New comment by fernirello in "Vision BASIC"

fernirello — Sun, 14 May 2023 23:18:57 +0000

If I wanted to develop games on the C64 itself, I'd use White Lightning Forth--a great compromise between expressive power and running speed. Vision Basic, requiring a 256 KiB RAM expansion, just feels weird.

In any case, kudos to the author. It's a remarkable technical achievement. I'm just ambivalent about the gray area between developing on a stock C64 and using the plentiful FOSS available on my Linux laptop.