Hacker News: jonjacky

New comment by jonjacky in "Two Thousand Line educational operating system released by Cornell University"

jonjacky — Wed, 13 May 2026 03:59:09 +0000

Previously, 2023, 19 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35982037

There are updates in the last several months, so it looks like the project is still active.

New comment by jonjacky in "A Manifesto for the Intentional Internet"

jonjacky — Mon, 11 May 2026 01:53:05 +0000

Nice page design, so I will try to read the content.

New comment by jonjacky in "The Vatican's Website in Latin"

jonjacky — Thu, 07 May 2026 16:14:20 +0000

Also pertinent and well-written, from the Vatican itself, including some quotes from Pope Francis:

https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. "Francis ... on 14 January 2025 ... approved this Note and ordered its publication."

via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750835, comment by jimmcslim on Pope Francis has died.

New comment by jonjacky in "It's cool to care (2025)"

jonjacky — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:26:20 +0000

"Keep cool, but care" - McClintic Sphere, ca 1959 (fictional jazz musician in V, the 1963 novel by Thomas Pynchon)

New comment by jonjacky in "KukuOS: A self-hosting, ELF-emitting x86 stack in Kuku Yalanji"

jonjacky — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:11:17 +0000

This is a remarkable, very unusual project. It looks well thought out and is surprisingly complete -- it even includes an end-to-end ML training and sampling program as an example!

Is there a writeup somewhere that explains more about the motivation and history for this project?

New comment by jonjacky in "PyUnixOS – A Unix-Like OS in MicroPython for ESP32"

jonjacky — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:46:10 +0000

I'm getting a 404 on the repo.

Possible alternatives:

smolOS: https://smol.p1x.in/os/ https://github.com/w84death/smolOS/

upyOS: https://github.com/rbenrax/upyOS

MicroPythonOS: https://micropythonos.com/ https://github.com/MicroPythonOS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45525804

New comment by jonjacky in "The end of Star Trek is now official"

jonjacky — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:59:26 +0000

Starfleet Academy is some woke fever dream ...

This is entirely in keeping with the Star Trek tradition. It had a multiracial cast and female officers in 1966, when that was quite unusual in a TV show.

New comment by jonjacky in "Writing an OS in Haskell"

jonjacky — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:13:17 +0000

Very interesting!

FYI, other operating systems in Haskell:

House, 2005: https://programatica.cs.pdx.edu//House/

HalVM, 2008: https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM

also

HalNS network stack 2011: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2011-May/092...

New comment by jonjacky in "Obituary for the greatest monument to logical AGI"

jonjacky — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:53:20 +0000

Previously, 11 months ago, 282 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43625474

New comment by jonjacky in "Unix philosophy is dead Long live something else?"

jonjacky — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 20:52:20 +0000

Rob Pike, one of the Unix developers, observed people turning away from their philosophy back in 2001:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf

"What Unix does well isn’t what people want. ...

People prefer integrated environments and browsers. ...

Perhaps people don’t want to think about problem solving this way. Maybe Unix got it wrong. (Even within Unix, the tool approach is losing ground.)"

New comment by jonjacky in "Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80"

jonjacky — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:05:50 +0000

A newer book, from 2016, ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer by Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestly, and Crispin Rope

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262334433/eniac-in-action/

An interesting revelation here is that, although ENIAC was not originally conceived as a stored program computer, it was quite early converted to one. They repurposed a lookup table intended to calculate functions to store instructions instead. Many of the well-known ENIAC calculations, such as Monte Carlo simulations, were programmed in this mode.

New comment by jonjacky in "Learning Creative Coding"

jonjacky — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:41:56 +0000

Another book that might have some similarities, apparently from 2020:

https://aesthetic-programming.net/ Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31726334 (2022) but only one comment -- mine!

New comment by jonjacky in "Tony Hoare has died"

jonjacky — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 04:08:07 +0000

Mr. Hoare (yep not a Dr.)

Hoare's undergraduate degree from Oxford was in Literae Humaniores, nicknamed Greats - ancient Rome, ancient Greece, Latin, Ancient Greek, and philosophy. In the US, this course of study is usually called "Classics". According to Wikipedia, "It is an archetypal humanities course."

New comment by jonjacky in "Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it"

jonjacky — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:19:15 +0000

"There is an old saying: Once in your life you should build a house, plant a tree, and write an editor. I decided to start with the last one. ..."

from Vip - Vi-Style Editor in PicoLisp https://picolisp.com/wiki/?vip

New comment by jonjacky in "How important was the Battle of Hastings?"

jonjacky — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:26:05 +0000

Hastings affected the wider politics of Europe, not just England. For centuries before Hastings, England had been involved with Scandinavia, especially Denmark and Norway. After Hastings it was totally entangled with France, pretty much forever.

New comment by jonjacky in "Impending kOS (2014)"

jonjacky — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 16:02:10 +0000

"so, what happened with kOS since 2014?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251118 (2019)

see especially

https://gist.github.com/chrispsn/da00835bb122c42f429a084df83...

New comment by jonjacky in "Show HN: RISCY-V02: A 16-bit 2-cycle RISC-V-ish CPU in the 6502 footprint"

jonjacky — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:34:57 +0000

Thanks, I see. In your README you do briefly mention static vs dynamic, NMOS vs CMOS, and 6502 vs 65C02 but I didn't appreciate those could make a 3x difference in the transistor count.

I agree it's a nice CPU design, and the whole project is quite impressive. Will Tiny Tapeout make you an actual chip that you can run?

I'm curious about how you used Claude. Is the CPU design itself completely handmade, or did Claude fill in some details? Did you use Claude for both the Verilog code and the Python emulator and test code? Did you provide Claude with some of your own hand-written code to demonstrate the style you wanted and get it started?

New comment by jonjacky in "Show HN: RISCY-V02: A 16-bit 2-cycle RISC-V-ish CPU in the 6502 footprint"

jonjacky — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 07:35:08 +0000

Impressive project! But I have question:

The Highlights section near the top of the README says:

13,844 SRAM-adjusted transistors (vs 13,176 for 6502 on same process)

But the Wikipedia article on the 6502 says it only had 3,510 transistors, and says the Monster6502 was built with 3,218 discrete transistors.

Why the discrepancy?

New comment by jonjacky in "Microgpt"

jonjacky — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 20:24:36 +0000

I wonder if such a small GPT exhibits plagiarism. Are some of the generated names the same as names in the input data?

New comment by jonjacky in "Python VM in Assembly (contributor is Claude)"

jonjacky — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 05:15:44 +0000

Previously, six days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102764