Hacker News: jlmcgraw

Ask HN: Ideas for small ways to make the world a better place

jlmcgraw — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 20:18:59 +0000

I’m looking for some good, specific ideas on small ways to have a positive impact on the world on a daily basis.

What do you consider to be the highest return-on-efforts ways to make the world a better place for as many people as possible?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46917633

Points: 42

# Comments: 42

New comment by jlmcgraw in "Ask HN: Books to learn 6502 ASM and the Apple II"

jlmcgraw — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:52:15 +0000

There is "Apple Machine Language for Beginners" by Richard Mansfield https://archive.org/details/Apple_Machine_Language_for_Begin...

I have fond memories from the late 1980s of trying to get the assembler contained within this book working, typing line after line of the MLX listing in. Unfortunately I never did finish it back then.

A week or so ago I got the urge to complete this project and I literally just finished getting the source in it to a point where it can be compiled online and then within an emulator: https://github.com/jlmcgraw/LADS_DOS33

New comment by jlmcgraw in "John Carmack on mutable variables"

jlmcgraw — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 10:49:23 +0000

For what it's worth, I was experimenting with this idea for Python (in an almost completely vibe-coded fashion) here: https://github.com/jlmcgraw/pure-function-decorators

Whether it's of any actual utility is debatable

New comment by jlmcgraw in "RustGPT: A pure-Rust transformer LLM built from scratch"

jlmcgraw — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 11:26:47 +0000

Some commentary from the author here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1nguv1a/i_built_an_ll...

New comment by jlmcgraw in "Microsoft’s original source code"

jlmcgraw — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 22:42:36 +0000

I wonder who the handwritten notes on page 98 are by?

Starts with "confirm plane reservation on Tue. Sept 2 or Wed. Sept 3" which is correct for 1975

New comment by jlmcgraw in "The Washington Post kills off its "Democracy Dies In Darkness" slogan"

jlmcgraw — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 19:42:54 +0000

“Democracy drowns in dollars” seems sadly more accurate

the US lays out a road safety plan that will see cars 'talk' to each other

jlmcgraw — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 10:42:07 +0000

Article URL: https://www.engadget.com/transportation/the-us-lays-out-a-road-safety-plan-that-will-see-cars-talk-to-each-other-170043265.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41298720

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jlmcgraw in "Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)"

jlmcgraw — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 15:44:33 +0000

A style I picked up from a relative, who is a lawyer, is to make bullet points with minimal other fluff:

  Addressee,
   - Do this
   - Then that
   - Be sure to be aware of this

I found it impersonal at first, but it's very effective in calling out the things that need attention

New comment by jlmcgraw in "Hiding messages in x86 binaries using semantic duals"

jlmcgraw — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 17:20:19 +0000

:You’re thinking of A86:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A86_(software)

New comment by jlmcgraw in "Passwords: Using 3 Random Words Is a Really Bad Idea (2017)"

jlmcgraw — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 18:42:59 +0000

I wrote a perl script a while back to create random passphrases based on a random mnemonic word

It seems like a good idea to me but I’m not knowledgeable enough about cryptography to know if that’s really true and would be very interested to hear from anyone who does know

https://github.com/jlmcgraw/mnemonic_passphrase

New comment by jlmcgraw in "Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple"

jlmcgraw — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 22:15:00 +0000

Since devices that automatically set their own time are so common now I’ve sometimes wondered why we don’t try moving the time forward/back by some smaller increment each day instead of a full hour twice a year.

New comment by jlmcgraw in "How Long Is Long Enough? Minimum Password Lengths by the World's Top Sites"

jlmcgraw — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 12:32:17 +0000

I did something very similar but had the thought that making the passphrase be based on an existing word would make a good balance between security and ease of remembering without a password manager.

Of course it isn’t as strong as a purely random passphrase but hopefully it would be strong enough and still better than choosing your own password

https://github.com/jlmcgraw/mnemonic_passphrase

Ask HN: How is software used in complicated legal cases?

jlmcgraw — Fri, 21 Jul 2017 01:23:17 +0000

Just curious if anyone can comment on how software is used these days in complicated legal cases ( e.g. money laundering on an international scale with thousands of people involved, many layers of corporate structures, and terabytes of emails along with information obtained via wiretaps etc).

How is this information collected and correlated in an automated fashion? Does it assist in organization, simplification and presentation of exhibits?

Or is all of this still done manually?

Obviously IANAL but I'm very interested to hear how software is changing the practice of law. Thanks!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14817452

Points: 1

# Comments: 0