Hacker News: jdswain

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.

New comment by jdswain in "Canada"

jdswain — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 22:13:18 +0000

There's a selfish case for the wealthy to care about this: rising tides lift all boats, including theirs. When the bottom 80% are struggling with housing insecurity and desperation, the consequences don't stay contained to poor neighbourhoods. San Francisco seems like a good example—the visible decline in public spaces, safety concerns, and urban decay affect everyone who lives there, regardless of income. The wealthy can insulate themselves to a degree, but they can't fully escape a deteriorating society. They'd be better off in a city where everyone has a baseline of stability.

New comment by jdswain in "Geology of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary"

jdswain — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 04:08:48 +0000

Also where Jim Gray was sailing too when he went missing. His yacht has never been found.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gray_(computer_scientist)

New comment by jdswain in "Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?"

jdswain — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 23:22:51 +0000

Software Development is much more than writing code. Writing code may have become 90% easier, but a lot of the other development tasks haven't appreciably changed due to AI, although that might come. So, for now at least the answer to the question posed in the headline is no.

An exception might be building something that is well specified in advance, maybe because it's a direct copy of existing software.

New comment by jdswain in "Autodesk's John Walker Explained HP and IBM in 1991 (2015)"

jdswain — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 17:26:36 +0000

Commissions were different back then. I worked part time selling computers around 1990 and a little earlier, margin on computers was moving down, but was as high as 50%, I recall it moving down to 30% and stabilising there for a while. I don't remember software margins, but it could have been about the same. I used to get 50% of the margin as commission.

New comment by jdswain in "Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres"

jdswain — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:44:43 +0000

What sort of systems do you work on to require this kind of traffic volume? I've worked on one project that I'd consider relatively high volume (UK Post Office Horizon Online) and we were only targeting 500 TPS.

New comment by jdswain in "Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition"

jdswain — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:16:05 +0000

(Hi Andrew)

It's the misuse of OO constructs that gives it a bad name, almost always that is inheritance being overused/misused. Encapsulation and modularity are important for larger code bases, and polymorphism is useful for making code simpler, smaller and more understandable.

Maybe the extra long names in java also don't help too, along with the overuse/forced use of patterns? At least it's not Hungarian notation.

New comment by jdswain in "Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Microprocessor – Version 1.1"

jdswain — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 22:04:08 +0000

It's likely that is is mostly just the standard Microsoft Basic with some modified I/O routines. Since Microsoft Basic is now under the MIT license you are free to modify the code, it may be relatively easy to re-implement the I/O routines and have a legal 'recreation' of the P2305 cartridge.

New comment by jdswain in "The Framework Desktop is a beast"

jdswain — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 19:32:57 +0000

My company provided Dell has the same issue (Intel CPU). Comes and goes a bit with firmware updates.

New comment by jdswain in "Bill Atkinson: Polaroids Showing the Evolution of the Lisa GUI [video]"

jdswain — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 19:42:44 +0000

Well Woz was pretty good at software too. He wrote a lot of the early Apple software, including Integer Basic (to write games) and the low level disk software, called RWTS for Read/Write Track/Sector.

New comment by jdswain in "Ask HN: How do I give back to people helped me when I was young and had nothing?"

jdswain — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 23:28:47 +0000

I'm not good at this at all, but if you do want to thank people that helped you, and let them know what it meant to you, don't leave it too late. I've had one regret after another as people who were significant in my early life died and I didn't get the chance to let them know what they meant to me.

New comment by jdswain in "Why the original Macintosh had a screen resolution of 512×324"

jdswain — Wed, 28 May 2025 04:59:06 +0000

It has 32-bit registers, but it has a 16-bit ALU, so it's a matter of opinion if that makes it a 16 or 32-bit processor. I'd go with 32-bit in that it's instruction set gives the impression to the programmer that they are working with a 32-bit system.

And for more evidence, the Z80 is referred to as an 8-bit processor but has a 4-bit ALU.