Hacker News: ghewgill

New comment by ghewgill in "HP re-releases classic computer science calculator: The HP-16C"

ghewgill — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:52:48 +0000

HP calculators were an important part of my formative years. I have a 12C, 15C, and 16C (all original models). I also have an HP-35 (red LED digits) within reach right now. That was the calculator I used for high school exams, because we weren't allowed "programmable" calculators so I had to go a bit retro for the time.

The 16C was an interesting model. It had a lot of potential capability with the different word sizes and bitwise operations, but I think it fell short in practice because the operations it could do just weren't that useful.

My favourite model is the 15C, it got me through four years of math, physics, and computer science university classes. The integration and matrix functions were super useful because it was hard to do some of that stuff in your head.

SilverBullet introduces desktop app in beta

ghewgill — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:44:48 +0000

Article URL: https://silverbullet.plus/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768777

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by ghewgill in "What Is Copilot Exactly?"

ghewgill — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:54:43 +0000

Maybe I should have complained more loudly about them using the same name as that thing I wrote that I called Copilot. https://hewgill.com/pilot/copilot/index-old.html

New comment by ghewgill in "French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?"

ghewgill — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:38:32 +0000

I had that "a-ha" moment not at first by learning that "fenêtre" means "window", but later when I learned the German word is "Fenster".

New comment by ghewgill in "Warranty Void If Regenerated"

ghewgill — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:45:21 +0000

The story didn't mention what had happened to inflation in the meantime. A dozen eggs costs $32.

New comment by ghewgill in "How people woke up before alarm clocks"

ghewgill — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 04:12:19 +0000

Electricity costs money too? I don't know how the cost of power compared to the cost of a candle in the beginning of the 20th century though.

New comment by ghewgill in "An old photo of a large BBS (2022)"

ghewgill — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:13:31 +0000

MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own, but you had to handle ALL of the lines with one box. That meant a serial port interface like DigiBoard which provided some number (8 or 16 or more) of serial ports that you would connect to modems.

New comment by ghewgill in "I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services"

ghewgill — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:16:21 +0000

Sheesh, trigger warning please! I remember the how.

New comment by ghewgill in "Advent of Code 2025"

ghewgill — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 03:36:49 +0000

I've done AoC on what I call "hard mode", where I do the solutions in a language I designed and implemented myself. It's not because the language is particularly suited to AoC in any particular way, but it gives me confidence that my language can be used to solve real problems.

Neon Language: https://neon-lang.dev/ Some previous AoC solutions: https://github.com/ghewgill/adventofcode

New comment by ghewgill in "Fstrings.wtf"

ghewgill — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 04:29:27 +0000

The walrus operator allows you to use `elif` there to avoid cascading indentation.

    if m := re.match(pattern1, line):
        do_stuff(m.group(1))
    elif m := re.match(pattern2, line):
        do_other_stuff(m.group(2))
    elif m := re.match(pattern3, line):
        do_things(m.groups())
    else:
        ...

New comment by ghewgill in "Information has been permanently deleted, for small values of permanently"

ghewgill — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 18:55:28 +0000

Raymond Chen happens to have worked for Microsoft for a long time, but he is an institution unto himself.

New comment by ghewgill in "I built a native Windows Todo app in pure C (278 KB, no frameworks)"

ghewgill — Sun, 11 May 2025 23:01:14 +0000

If text files are your world, then http://todotxt.org/ might be for you. I'm currently using "pter".

New comment by ghewgill in "I built a native Windows Todo app in pure C (278 KB, no frameworks)"

ghewgill — Sun, 11 May 2025 22:26:28 +0000

The colons there don't represent C++. That's just a way of referring to a windows API function that exists in a specific DLL (in this case "user32"). Because the functions used here do not exist in older versions of Windows, the linked code dynamically loads user32.dll and tries to get the address of those functions so they can be called. That's why you need to know which Windows DLL they exist in.

New comment by ghewgill in "I built a native Windows Todo app in pure C (278 KB, no frameworks)"

ghewgill — Sun, 11 May 2025 19:59:03 +0000

I think the hard limit of 100 todos is the best feature of this. Why don't other todo apps have this feature?

New comment by ghewgill in "QModem 4.51 Source Code"

ghewgill — Sun, 04 May 2025 02:57:37 +0000

SLMR and OLX were by the same author, but OLX was a complete rewrite and didn't look anything like SLMR.

New comment by ghewgill in "QModem 4.51 Source Code"

ghewgill — Sun, 04 May 2025 02:56:27 +0000

OLX (and SLMR) author here. It gives me warm fuzzies to hear about your positive experiences with OLX, after all these years. To this day I maintain that Turbo Vision was peak computer UI, it's been downhill since. :)

New comment by ghewgill in "A new form of verification on Bluesky"

ghewgill — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 02:24:49 +0000

You're thinking of the Thawte Web of Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thawte which was run by Mark Shuttleworth (now of Canonical). The certificates were used for email, not for SSL. I lost track of what happened to it after CACert took over.

First confirmed footage of a colossal squid captured

ghewgill — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 03:16:33 +0000

Article URL: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/558338/scientists-capture-first-confirmed-footage-of-a-colossal-squid-in-the-deep

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43701076

Points: 37

# Comments: 0

New comment by ghewgill in "Mandelbrot Set Explorer"

ghewgill — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 08:23:22 +0000

Increase the iterations on the sidebar. You will then see more detail until you zoom in even further.

New comment by ghewgill in "The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is"

ghewgill — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 05:32:21 +0000

Do you believe that the Library of Congress is immune from the current administration's information purge?