Hacker News: jhallenworld

New comment by jhallenworld in "The redistribution of housing wealth caused by rent control (2023) [pdf]"

jhallenworld — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:53:09 +0000

When Boston ended rent control in the late 90s, all of the sudden the landlords invested in their goldmine buildings and generally improved the city. It sucks for those trying to rent or buy (including me, I paid 60% more for a house in 2002 than what it was worth in 1996), but the city has certainly had a renaissance.

IMHO, the problem now is bad zoning. The rich car-centric suburbs are preventing denser housing- to their own financial detriment. A recent fight is that the state has forced them to allow higher density housing around commuter rail stops. Similar fights about rail trails, future abutters are afraid of change but they are valuable everywhere they exist- in that they are a desirable feature and raise your house's value.

Another problem is that they overbuilt $100/sqft bio-lab space. These are sitting empty, and the owners refuse to lower the rent.. I don't understand how the owners remain solvent.

New comment by jhallenworld in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

jhallenworld — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:35:25 +0000

Suppose you want shelter. It used to be that you could buy a house for a reasonable price and move in. But now that's unaffordable, so instead your have to pay rent. In CPI thinking these are equivalent forms of shelter, but I bet if you asked most Americans, they would not agree with you.

New comment by jhallenworld in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

jhallenworld — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:51:13 +0000

No it's cooked. For high tech items, they assume that improved technology means you are getting more for your money even if the price goes up, so they discount it. It's true that you get more for your money, but it ignores threshold effects, like you just can't buy an equivalent phone for $10 even if todays phone's are 200x better.

Then there's the "owner's equivalent rent" BS and this is 25% of CPI. It answers the question "If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished, and without utilities?" It assumes rental price and housing costs are somehow linked when in reality asset prices have far outstripped rent.

New comment by jhallenworld in "xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab"

jhallenworld — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:57:23 +0000

>There are no dark GPUs

This might not be true. Someone was comparing Nvidia's production rate with known data center capacity, and they do not match. Their conclusion was that people (possibly even Nvidia) were hoarding GPUs- in the very short term this might be a good strategy, but GPUs go EOL fast. There are other stories about paused datacenter builds that match with this.

TSMC is definitely fully allocated, based on current 40 wk lead times for FPGAs..

New comment by jhallenworld in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

jhallenworld — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:27:31 +0000

Also: Musk's shares have 10x voting power, he can not be overruled by anybody (he will retain ~80% of the votes).

Also: SpaceX debt is $20 billion.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

jhallenworld — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:24:55 +0000

New comment by jhallenworld in "The dead economy theory"

jhallenworld — Sat, 30 May 2026 03:11:35 +0000

Yeah, it's how you pay dividends at capital gains rate instead of income rate. But also, Apple is kind of stagnant.. if they had something better to do with the money they wouldn't be doing the buybacks.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)"

jhallenworld — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:10:57 +0000

Not only that, the operating itself was configured by a process known as "sysgen". You relink the entire operating system with options set the way you wanted. It was generally a miserable slow process.

At least on PDP-11 that's how it went for something like RSX-11. I believe same is true for early IBM mainframe operating systems like DOS 360- I think all programs had to be relinked because one option you had was to move things around in memory, and ancillary programs had to know the memory map.

Even later: I wrote a device driver for Xenix: you got a link kit for the OS, you relinked it with your custom driver object file included.

On CP/M you patched the running image (perhaps with DDT), then use the CP/M SYSGEN command to install it on a disk.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)"

jhallenworld — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:04:14 +0000

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpHKygZ7OHY

CP/M 1.0 was demoed to Intel in 1974, but they didn't buy it. iCOM FDOS was the first operating system that was available to people, and it sure didn't have environment variables.

Anyway, these operating systems didn't have multiple directories. But you could use CP/M 2.x's ASSIGN command to bind a logical name to a physical name. Minicomputer operating systems had this, also IBM mainframe had JCL DD commands.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Ti-84 Evo"

jhallenworld — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:07:14 +0000

My favorite cheap Casio is fx-115ES Plus 2nd Edition, $17

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientifi...

Includes GCD and LCM, some of the newer ones don't have them.

If you want graphing, there is the newish fx-CG100 has a nice display, but they removed Casio basic, it now only has micro Python (way too awkward to type on a tiny keypad):

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-ClassWiz%C2%AE-Calculator-Funct...

The older ones that still have basic:

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-9750GIII-Graphing-Calculator...

BTW, here is a review I made of many calculators, measuring keyboard efficiency: (HP-15c still the best)

https://github.com/jhallen/calculator/wiki

New comment by jhallenworld in "JOE 4.8"

jhallenworld — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:57:02 +0000

(JOE 4.7 was also recently released)

JOE 4.8

jhallenworld — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:57:02 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/joe-editor/joe/releases

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953673

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by jhallenworld in "Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux"

jhallenworld — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:38:48 +0000

VxDs and Watcom C... now those are names I haven't heard in a long time.

Do any screen editors work in the command prompt windows? Try with "export TERM=ansi".

New comment by jhallenworld in "How Motorola’s 2N2222 and 2N3904 transistors became the default NPNs"

jhallenworld — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:45:45 +0000

A somewhat little know part is a "pre-biased transistor": this is a bipolar transistors with built-in resistors, and will often work as a drop-in replacement for a logic-level MOSFET (like 2n7000), but is an order of magnitude cheaper.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/diotec-semiconduc...

New comment by jhallenworld in "Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975"

jhallenworld — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:55:19 +0000

Byte's first mention of the 6502 (6501) I think:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-11/page/n57/m...

New comment by jhallenworld in "Visualizing CPU Pipelining (2024)"

jhallenworld — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:48:13 +0000

Now do a dynamic scheduling out of order engine with renaming, 20 pipes, speculative execution and hundreds of instructions in flight. I guess you could make a multi-person game for this.

New comment by jhallenworld in "PicoZ80 – Drop-In Z80 Replacement"

jhallenworld — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:04:12 +0000

I want to make something like this as a classic CPU ICE, with trace memory, disassembly, etc. (note that you need a crystal oscillator circuit for many CPUs- 6802, 8085, etc.)

It would be useful for debugging classic computers like Altair 8800, etc. What you do is get a boot trace (record the first 100,000 instructions) of a working machine and diff it with the one from your broken machine. This finds the problem in like 5 seconds.

New comment by jhallenworld in "IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm"

jhallenworld — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 21:00:25 +0000

How well do commodity systems protect your financial transactions from cosmic ray-induced bit errors?

New comment by jhallenworld in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

jhallenworld — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:28:36 +0000

I thought it was big time defamation risk for Afroman to call him a pedofile.. but maybe the cop is afraid of discovery in this case..

New comment by jhallenworld in "Use GPT-5.4/CODEX to reverse engineer ancient machine code"

jhallenworld — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:39:30 +0000

I gave it the .S19 file containing the EDOS resident 6800 FORTRAN compiler machine code and asked it to reverse engineer it. It wrote a disassembler in Python along the way.