Hacker News: jdswain

New comment by jdswain in "Claude Code May–August 2026 weekly limits promotion"

jdswain — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:11:40 +0000

A cautionary note. Your Claude account is tied to your email address, and it cannot be changed. If you lose access to your email address (I sold the domain), you cannot access your Claude account any more, you cannot change the email address, you can't cancel it, and the billing continues.

This happened to me, so far two months without any progress with Claude support trying to resolve it. Chatbot support got no response, email support got a single response after a month saying it had been passed on to another team to resolve. Mostly just silence.

New comment by jdswain in "Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months"

jdswain — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:54:10 +0000

I too have an M1 Pro and it does everything I need to do. I bought it in 2023, so it's 'only' 3.5 years old now.

Maybe this is the tipping point where hardware companies can't rely on the upgrade cycle for sales any more. I've always upgraded at least every three years, but with the combination of high RAM prices and good enough performance from an older machine, there is no need to.

New comment by jdswain in "Show HN: Follow London Trains in 3D"

jdswain — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:46:16 +0000

Looks like many (all?) branches are missing. Central line doesn't have the Ealing Broadway branch.

New comment by jdswain in "Linux on the Atari Jaguar"

jdswain — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:26:25 +0000

It should be possible to build a custom cartridge to use some of that 8MB address space for RAM.

New comment by jdswain in "Show HN: WebBase-III – dBASE III rebuilt in the browser with its own interpreter"

jdswain — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:57:18 +0000

While I'm sure this was built for fun, you have to wonder if maybe some of these tools could be useful again. With the increased power of modern computers, and some additions of modern technology like a web UI, HTTP support for data access, and the not-needed-in-the-past-but-essential-now security.

We could be entering a new age of building our own tools, llm assisted of course, but still a lot of fun.

New comment by jdswain in "15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test"

jdswain — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 10:29:35 +0000

I've been through similar, don't give up trying to find a solution. I've recently found what mine is, and am doing much better now. Everyone is different, be careful with advice on the internet, but at the least it gives you ideas for further investigation. For me it was elevated homocysteine, with a genetic origin. I could get an analysis by uploading my genome to Genetic Genie, but ultimately the homocysteine test was the proof.

New comment by jdswain in "Show HN: Vet turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis"

jdswain — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:53:19 +0000

I tried clover. Eventually it just got replaced more and more with grass, now there's not much there. It was meant to be more drought tolerant than grass, but it didn't work out that way. I probably need to do more research.

New comment by jdswain in "How did Atari apply side art to Arcade Cabinets?"

jdswain — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:40:51 +0000

One thing that I don’t think the article mentions is how many times a screen could be used?

New comment by jdswain in "Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)"

jdswain — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:11:26 +0000

Make sure you look after your own health too, if you lose that it’ll be a lot harder to help those around you.

New comment by jdswain in "MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production"

jdswain — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:36:18 +0000

I'd like to see the same thing applied to desktop computers, a Mac Neo maybe. The Mac mini has moved up the cost/performance ladder, there's room at the bottom for a simple, low cost desktop, maybe with Neo colours too.

New comment by jdswain in "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion"

jdswain — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:20:33 +0000

In a way it's not a joke. I was just considering that myself. I pay for a M365 family license, but when I think about it, I could do everything I actually use it for in Numbers and Pages. The only thing is file format compatibility, it is useful to be able to open word documents and be sure the formatting is correct, but even that is less important than it used to be. I used to make use of Office to edit work documents on my Mac, but security considerations prevent this now.

New comment by jdswain in "Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser"

jdswain — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:31:36 +0000

Preview.app in NeXTstep used to have a postscript window where you could type in postscript (or paste it in) and interactively work with it. It was an essential development tool to help write postscript before including it in a source code file as a pswrap.

New comment by jdswain in "QNX on the Commodore 900 – Raiders of the lost hard drive [video] (2025)"

jdswain — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:40:34 +0000

Yes, very similar to what you did with the script, but I’d guess you could enter a small routine into memory with the monitor then jump to it to execute. This would be faster than serial port speed, but really not that different. In the end anything that works would be good enough.

New comment by jdswain in "QNX on the Commodore 900 – Raiders of the lost hard drive [video] (2025)"

jdswain — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 22:58:07 +0000

Really good presentation, although I was nerd-snipped just by the title (which is incorrect, it's Coherent, not QNX).

It's great we live in a time where enough information is available to restore these obscure machines, although getting the hardware seems almost impossible. I'm building up a small collection of old computers so that in 10 or 20 years when I have the time to work on them I'll have them there, I'm guessing I won't be able to afford them by then. Already missed the boat on the Lisa, probably the one computer I'd most like to have. I still remember the first time I got to use one, and the Apple employee explaining to me how to use a mouse.

Michal showed a huge amount of persistence getting this computer going, and it paid off in the end, far from a likely outcome. I think I probably would have written a disk formatter in Z8000 assembly rather than using the terminal, but that was probably a lot easier.

New comment by jdswain in "A Few Good Magazines From the 70s and 80s"

jdswain — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 08:25:20 +0000

I did. The only Playboy magazine I ever bought contained an interview with Steve Jobs. Unfortunately I lent it to a friend and never got it back.

New comment by jdswain in "VisiCalc Reconstructed"

jdswain — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 19:19:50 +0000

Which is somewhat akin to downloading one today. If, however, that same kid started small, with a data model, then added calculation, and UI and stepped through everything designing, reviewing, and testing as they went, they would learn a lot, and at a faster pace than if they wrote it character by character.

New comment by jdswain in "Tony Hoare has died"

jdswain — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:12:43 +0000

Our Graphics Lab at University used to be in an old house opposite a fish and chip shop. The people at the fish and chip shop were suspicious of our lab as all they saw was young men (mostly) entering and leaving at all hours of the night. We really missed an opportunity to name it "Hoare House" after one of our favourite computer scientists.

New comment by jdswain in "The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)"

jdswain — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 04:40:32 +0000

The windows 95 user interface was 'inspired by' the NeXT user interface, and to some degree the Mac UI. Microsoft had a NeXT computer to copy off, even though they wouldn't develop for it.

New comment by jdswain in "LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop"

jdswain — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:21:48 +0000

There has been some discussion around this, and Lee Davison is no longer with us so that makes it more difficult. It appears from the source code that Lee's independent basic is highly based on Microsoft Basic. I'm sure it is no longer an issue, especially as Microsoft has provided a free license for Microsoft 6502 basic, but the licensing situation is not entirely clear.

New comment by jdswain in "Coding agents have replaced every framework I used"

jdswain — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 01:32:16 +0000

I treat code quality, and readability, as one of the goals. The LLM can help with this and refactor code much quicker than a human. If I think the code is getting too complex I change over to architecture review and refactoring until I am happy with it.