Hacker News: jdougan

New comment by jdougan in "To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system"

jdougan — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 03:26:53 +0000

I wonder if this could be practical for controlled environment devices like game consoles.

New comment by jdougan in "Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)"

jdougan — Sun, 31 May 2026 06:53:08 +0000

I'm curious as to how time efficient that actually was.

New comment by jdougan in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

jdougan — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:30:07 +0000

Humber encoding?

New comment by jdougan in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

jdougan — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:27:52 +0000

Reminds me of the Xanadu Humber encoding.

New comment by jdougan in "Can we have the day off?"

jdougan — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:08:57 +0000

I was always partial to the “make Wednesday a second weekend” plan. No more hump day and 2 “Fridays”. Of course that is also 2 “Mondays”

New comment by jdougan in "The foundations of a provably secure operating system (PSOS) (1979) [pdf]"

jdougan — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:40:57 +0000

alternate futures where the 33bit versions of the i960 became the processor family of choice.

New comment by jdougan in "The foundations of a provably secure operating system (PSOS) (1979) [pdf]"

jdougan — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:57:13 +0000

If you go through old CS OS texts on the matter, they really didn't have the same understanding of capabilities then as the later object-capabilities (ocap) model would introduce. Typically they would show an access control matrix, note that acls were rows and capabilities columns and note that they are duals of one another. They're the same, acls are easier to manage, done.

OP is arguably the first paper that introduces ocaps. Some of the issues are discussed in "Capability Myths Demolished" https://papers.agoric.com/assets/pdf/papers/capability-myths...

New comment by jdougan in "The foundations of a provably secure operating system (PSOS) (1979) [pdf]"

jdougan — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:53:27 +0000

I'm seeing about 9 comments, all flagged dead. Do you have showdead on?

New comment by jdougan in "The foundations of a provably secure operating system (PSOS) (1979) [pdf]"

jdougan — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:39:20 +0000

At a guess, looking at his history, it's AI slop. Basic facts appear correct though.

New comment by jdougan in "dBase: 1979-2026"

jdougan — Wed, 13 May 2026 10:16:48 +0000

In some of the draft versions of ASCII the positions currently taken by underscore and caret were left arrow and up arrow respectively. As late as 1985 I used terminals (LanparScope) the supported the older draft.

New comment by jdougan in "Up in Smoke"

jdougan — Wed, 13 May 2026 09:59:19 +0000

Being a full-time writer has always been a tough gig unless it is attached to an institution (but that can corrupt the writing). I'm not sure why anyone would think it wasn't tough. The author/poet/painter starving in a garret was a well known stereotype. Just like most of the arts there is a supply and demand imbalance; lots (claim to) want to write, only a few will actually write to completion, and only a few of those will have written something someone else wants to read. And that's before the traditional publishing funnel.

On the other hand, I've known writers who make it work. Larry Correia has a lot of useful thoughts about it, he used to be an accountant before he got into writing and brings those skills to his analysis.

eg. "Analyzing My Royalties" https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02/08/analyzing-my-roya... he breaks down how the system works. Claims to be making Doctor/Lawyer level money as of 2022.

I would like to see an analysis including "non-traditional" publishing options, and how different kinds of writing sell. I suspect genre fiction is different from "literary" from non-fiction, etc.

New comment by jdougan in "Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era"

jdougan — Wed, 13 May 2026 08:25:32 +0000

Nothing new under the sun. "Put that there" demo, 1982.

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/put-that-there-voice-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo

New comment by jdougan in "Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics"

jdougan — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:30:57 +0000

Or for that matter, the magic that was a Tektronix storage scope terminal (and compatibles. At school there was a vt10x that had been modified to act like a Tek 4014 by some third party).

New comment by jdougan in "Boriel BASIC"

jdougan — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:05:21 +0000

Exactly. Most microcomputer BASICs were a live environment IDE, except done with a CLI.

New comment by jdougan in "Integrated by Design"

jdougan — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:55:23 +0000

Hemingway's style had a lot of influence. It would not surprise me if text influenced by it is widespread in the LLM training corpus.

New comment by jdougan in "The dangers of California's legislation to censor 3D printing"

jdougan — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 05:39:16 +0000

Look up the WW2 FP-45 Liberator. A bad gun you could use to get a better gun. Theoretically you only need to use it once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator

New comment by jdougan in "Prefer do notation over Applicative operators when assembling records (2024)"

jdougan — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:50:32 +0000

Smalltalk keyword message syntax seems to be in a middle ground

New comment by jdougan in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

jdougan — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:30:21 +0000

Culturally they're not really the same organization. JPL has a different culture than Goddard, which is different than Marshall, etc.

New comment by jdougan in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

jdougan — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:50:44 +0000

I'm still of the opinion that the right direction is something architectEd more like NeWS with better underlying language support. If you're going to break stuff make it a real improvement.

New comment by jdougan in "Centuries of selective breeding turned wild cabbage into different vegetables"

jdougan — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:31:38 +0000

Did they get the sulfurous compounds out as well?