Hacker News: happycube

New comment by happycube in "Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM"

happycube — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:44:39 +0000

What's sad is that, at least in some cases, Sonnet 3.5's writing was actually pretty good. Sometimes even good enough to read outloud verbatim.

New comment by happycube in "Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning"

happycube — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:25:18 +0000

Commoditize your compliments.

New comment by happycube in "Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port"

happycube — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:33:42 +0000

An interesting thing that came up is that MSVC uses 32-bit longs instead of 64, so a pure gcc/winelib build is another level of 64-bit porting.

Claude then suggested using mingw instead, which makes sense...

New comment by happycube in "SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost"

happycube — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:13:02 +0000

Sounds like a paperclip maximizer to me.

Seriously, why the duck aren't they running their own AI systems in house???

New comment by happycube in "Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386"

happycube — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 13:55:16 +0000

Agreed. It also needs roundrects.

I think someone vibecoded a bad System 7 replacement that had at least some QuickDraw in it.

In this case, actually doing those things would probably make it insufferably slow on a real PC though at least at vibe-coding quality.

The real implications here (also looking at the WinWord port to win64, which I suspect had some AI involvement as well) is that current agentic AI completely changes what a hobbiest can do over a weekend, as long as AI slop code is acceptable to meet one's project goals.

---

It's certainly affecting things I've worked on... there'll be a much better version of ld-decode soon using Claude Fable which is faster and has better filtering (and an audio noise-reduction post-processor that actually works) and I'm pretty sure you could get much of ELKS working from scratch in one weekend at this point. whispers something about doing a UNIX-like on a pi pico 2 (or two), since he can't do it because reasons...

New comment by happycube in "Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port"

happycube — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 13:38:39 +0000

I prompted Claude Opus 5 (I don't really have the Fable tokens to spare) to do just that (via winelib). It's gotten to the point where it opens, runs for three seconds, and abruptly exits.

edit: got it running but a ton of things are do-nothing, and the fonts are completely rubbish. Not really worth posting ATM, but I'll see if it can fix things further by running the UI tests and telling it some of the things that don't work...

(That it was able to build and run at all with just a few prompts is a HFS moment, though!)

New comment by happycube in "Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port"

happycube — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 11:57:18 +0000

Agreed... I suspect we're not too far off from being able to say "port this Win16 application to Win64" if we're not there already... and most of it will be harness improvements!

New comment by happycube in "Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork"

happycube — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 04:26:16 +0000

64-bit Windows was being worked on for 2003. x64 XP was in fact a build of 2003, and beta-wise, guess what Windows 2210 referenced in the readme is... ;) (haven't tried it yet)

New comment by happycube in "GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks"

happycube — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 23:00:08 +0000

Not weird at all, given the variance in Opus' quality over the last few months.

wild guess - I wouldn't be surprised if Opus 4.6 was run quantized for a while, and 4.7/4.8 have QAT for that nerfed size.

New comment by happycube in "PwC Report: AI Making Medical Bills Higher"

happycube — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:30:04 +0000

Gee. I wonder why that would be allowed to happen.

New comment by happycube in "AI is slowing down"

happycube — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:18:05 +0000

Lol... in this case, cheese imports from China are much cheaper, just not quite as good.

And for those who are all "but dur CCP get all ur data" you can use things like AWS Bedrock (at least for earlier versions of Deepseek and Qwen for now) and have more familiar people get all your data. Or buy (at obnoxiously inflated prices) your own HW and not send your data to anyone.

New comment by happycube in "A 10 year old Xeon is all you need"

happycube — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:44:32 +0000

It looks like Supermicro had some DDR3 Xeon v3/v4 boards, and the first thing that came to mind was a Shenzen workstation/gaming board using recycled parts... haven't searched on that but it's bound to exist.

New comment by happycube in "Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”"

happycube — Mon, 25 May 2026 15:02:11 +0000

There are repos on github. Which, technically, means you can download Windows source from Microsoft. Just not legally.

New comment by happycube in "Bug 1950764: Work Around Crash on Intel Raptor Lake CPU"

happycube — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:51:58 +0000

It's the Alder Lake MAX. Originally decent design just pushed too far.

New comment by happycube in "Smartmedia Card Spec Opened, available free (2000)"

happycube — Sun, 24 May 2026 21:49:07 +0000

Not offhand alas, but I figure someone's bound to have made one by now...

New comment by happycube in "Smartmedia Card Spec Opened, available free (2000)"

happycube — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:43:38 +0000

RP2350. 5v tolerant IO if set up correctly, enough GPIO's and the PIO's to trigger everything at once, and more than enough speed to emulate flash.

Smart(sic)Media is just a NAND flash interface really.

New comment by happycube in "Smartmedia Card Spec Opened, available free (2000)"

happycube — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:40:23 +0000

Ah, the 2000's, when CompactFlash cards weren't that compact, and SmartMedia wasn't at all smart.

New comment by happycube in "Show HN: Forge – Guardrails take an 8B model from 53% to 99% on agentic tasks"

happycube — Tue, 19 May 2026 22:19:10 +0000

If it's worth it to you, you could try running it on Deepseek v4 flash which is very cheap right now...

New comment by happycube in "Speed at the cost of quality: Study of use of Cursor AI in open source projects (2025)"

happycube — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:10:24 +0000

I actually finally got started with CC after 4.6. ;)

The output is certainly prodigious (I can do things for side projects that I'd be very unlikely to finish on my own), but it's not a coding prodigy so it hasn't dislodged me from the idea that it's outsourcing.

Overall, yes, quite remarkable.

New comment by happycube in "Honda is killing its EVs"

happycube — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:19:51 +0000

China also picked up (from A123) and ran with LFP batteries which are inherently safer.