Hacker News: jmmv

New comment by jmmv in "Rune is now open source"

jmmv — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:49:57 +0000

It is, but you can start with a COPR repo instead.

New comment by jmmv in "Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables"

jmmv — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 02:31:03 +0000

I think I've cleaned up my box of cables twice in the past and, inevitably, _the very next day_ I did so, I needed one of the cables I had gotten rid of. Never again.

New comment by jmmv in "Haiku R1/beta6 has been released"

jmmv — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 20:03:03 +0000

I tried Haiku recently on a not-super-old PC and was impressed by the speed and the reasonable availability of software. I then wished I could run this on my old Powerbook G4 because nothing else seems to run there anymore with ease, and this seems like the perfect desktop OS for such old machines. And it turns out there is now a fork for PPC: https://github.com/ActionRetro/Tabby-PPC !

(Why a fork? Because it's primarily vibecoded and Haiku won't take the patches upstream. But hey, I'm gonna give it a try anyway.)

New comment by jmmv in "What's new in Emacs 31.1"

jmmv — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:11:27 +0000

Start with Doom Emacs. I haven't felt the need to customize almost anything since I switched (from VSCode) 4 years ago.

TBH, I had used Emacs before VSCode and had accumulated a bunch of cruft in my .emacs configuration, and I never felt it was "mine" anyway...

New comment by jmmv in "Every Fucking Website"

jmmv — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:32:16 +0000

Somehow the clicking around reminded me of Windows RG. Go check this old relic if you have never seen it: https://www.jamesweb.co.uk/windowsrg . Turn the volume up!

AI-generated vulnerability patches still require expert human review

jmmv — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 05:26:41 +0000

Article URL: https://1password.com/blog/why-ai-generated-patches-still-require-human-review

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49206189

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jmmv in "CP/M-386 – CP/M for 386 protected mode, derived from CP/M‑68K"

jmmv — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 06:17:47 +0000

That's not surprising. The page says the kernel is multiboot compliant, which means it can be loaded by existing boot loaders. Whether the kernel later provides a floppy driver is a separate story.

This is also pretty common even if you don't use multiboot. The I/O services exposed by the BIOS or firmware during boot may not be usable once the kernel has started, and thus the kernel has to provide its own drivers.

New comment by jmmv in "Substack writers, you need a website"

jmmv — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:14:49 +0000

I've been blogging for 22 years now. At the beginning I could tell I had a relatively steady audience based on frequent comments (when comments on blogs were a thing). These died off over the years. Then, in 2020, I implemented my own unobtrusive subscription mechanism and email distribution to try to regain such an audience. And... it's pretty disappointing. I've gotten less than 200 subscribers that way; conversions just don't happy.

Then I "switched" to Substack 3 years ago and the audience growth is real. I'm approaching 2000 subscribers (some of which are paid, which always surprises me and I appreciate), and these keep growing organically although I'm sure a large portion of which are fake. It's hard to say it doesn't work or isn't worth it.

Now... spoiler: I never "switched" to Substack. I continue to write all of my content on my website _first_, with all of the features it had before, but now I copy/paste the content into Substack and distribute it that way. It's painful, but I have scars from when I moved off of Medium and want to ensure I "own" the originals.

If you are curious, I had written more about this 2 years ago in https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging

New comment by jmmv in "EndBASIC 0.14: Are we multimedia yet?"

jmmv — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:26:43 +0000

Yeah, structs (records) is something I've been wanting to add and that became reasonably easy with the full rewrite of the compiler I did in 0.13. Probably in the next update!

New comment by jmmv in "EndBASIC 0.14: Are we multimedia yet?"

jmmv — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 22:23:57 +0000

What do you mean? FUNCTIONs are supported, and their arguments and return values are strongly typed.

EndBASIC 0.14: Are we multimedia yet?

jmmv — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 17:08:18 +0000

Article URL: https://www.endbasic.dev/2026/07/endbasic-0.14.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786970

Points: 49

# Comments: 11

New comment by jmmv in "Microsoft Needs Windows Lite"

jmmv — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 21:51:23 +0000

Two years ago, I spent time studying the Windows NT kernel internals and ended up writing a comparison against Unix here: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design . What I came out of that exercise with is that NT is actually well-made and was very ambitious and advanced at the time it was designed (although free systems have caught up by now).

But what I also came out thinking was: none of that shows. The kernel is great, sure, but all of the crap that has been built on top doesn't let it shine, and that's what people interact with. Take Windows 11 with is dog-slow file manager and the overall feeling that everything is bloated and designed to annoy you. I wish there was a simpler edition... but it ain't gonna happen.

New comment by jmmv in "Half-Life 2 in a Browser"

jmmv — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:53:39 +0000

> Only the very first few models of Intel Macs had strictly 32-bit processors (the 2006 iMac and Mac minis with Core Solo/Core Duo processors), and none of them were realistically capable of playing Half-Life 2.

What? First, those chips were plenty powerful to run HL2 (the game predates them). And second, all x86_64 chips can run older x86 32-bit code unmodified.

The reason macOS stopped supporting 32-bit code has nothing to do with the processors but more about them wanting to remove support for 32-bit binaries from the kernel and from all user-space libraries. To run a 32-bit binary, you need itself and all libraries it depends on to be 32-bit too, including the syscall boundary, which is "fine" (both Windows and Linux do this just fine, so it's really on Apple to have removed this). And I suppose Apple removed those because it was building towards a 64-bit-only world to simplify the Apple Silicon transition.

Is anyone still using Emacs?

jmmv — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:22:31 +0000

Article URL: https://jmmv.dev/2026/06/is-anyone-still-using-emacs.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609438

Points: 35

# Comments: 5

New comment by jmmv in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

jmmv — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 23:57:24 +0000

> It's a little bit sluggish, isn't it? And takes quite a bit of time to boot, right? It's certainly usable, though, not worse than your average website these days. I intend to use this setup for next Advent of Code. > > But here's the kicker: This is Windows 2000 SP4 running on a Pentium 133 with 64 MB of RAM and a spinning harddisk

Heh, gotta reference https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972004) from a few years ago. There is a video in there of Windows 2000 running on a K7-600 from 1999 and it indeed flies.

New comment by jmmv in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

jmmv — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:00:29 +0000

Sure, and I'm not arguing that the answers are uninteresting, but I found it odd that this is being double-quoted several times as if it was taken out of the article.

New comment by jmmv in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

jmmv — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:21:00 +0000

I'm curious... why are people (this thread, but there are several independent others) replying to "Is anyone still using emacs?" ? I don't see that sentence anywhere in the article!

New comment by jmmv in "Boot Naked Linux"

jmmv — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:33:24 +0000

Thanks. I haven't documented it (yet?) but I did give a talk last year on the process that got me there and the internals behind this system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZFYTInWAqc

New comment by jmmv in "Boot Naked Linux"

jmmv — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:33:26 +0000

I went through a similar "thought process" to build this: https://www.endbasic.dev/endbox.html last year. I originally wanted to "just" launch my binary right after the kernel started... but in the end settled for a full NetBSD base system to get things like network and WiFi configuration to work with ease. (That said, I still hook very early in the boot sequence to launch my own program and take over the console so that the rest of the system is invisible and initializes in the background.)

New comment by jmmv in "Boot Naked Linux"

jmmv — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:22:11 +0000

They probably meant 2010s.

I remember this was the time when Google started pushing the Chromebook idea and highlighting how it could boot in "just a few seconds". One of the earliest models I got as a dogfooding device probably needed 20 seconds to boot or so. Nice, compared to the awful boot times of machines with HDDs... but not stellar.

But then, in 2011, my wife bought a MacBook Air with an SSD and I was blown away. That thing booted to a full desktop (and not the joke that ChromeOS was) in... 5, 6 seconds? It was ridiculous.

And we have lost all of those gains. I find it painful to witness how a recent Mac chews through I/O during boot or doing any sort of software update (iStat Menus is great to watch this sort of thing), and how these feel slower to that early experience of 15 years ago :-/