Hacker News: kjs3

New comment by kjs3 in "One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed"

kjs3 — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 01:04:05 +0000

It was a states rights issue...the right of those states to own slaves. If you read the articles of succession for each of the confederate states (the actual words the actual people who decided "screw that Union thing..." put on paper to justify what they are doing and sent to Washinton), every one of them explicitly states "we are doing this because you are threatening our right to own slaves". This is the "well ackshually..." argument used to pretend the Confederates were fighting a noble cause and the rest of the hypocrisy being shoveled about.

New comment by kjs3 in "One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed"

kjs3 — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:48:43 +0000

No atom bomb. Wow...that some nearly Shockley levels of 'engineers disease' right there.

Edit: clarified which part of the post I was referencing.

New comment by kjs3 in "Linux 7.2"

kjs3 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:17:28 +0000

Yes, but for many (not all) it's better than OOM killing your processes.

New comment by kjs3 in "Linux 7.2"

kjs3 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:12:31 +0000

It's basically fine as long as you read the release notes carefully and don't do anything the release notes say not to do (e.g. RAID5, let the disk fill up). It still has some sharp edges, but they're all documented.

New comment by kjs3 in "Linux 7.2"

kjs3 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:08:25 +0000

"I installed Ubuntu on peoples laptops and was extremely lucky they happened to have compatible hardware or didn't notice the stuff that didn't work and had a non-borked firmware". FTFY.

This was absolutely not everyones experience, including mine.

New comment by kjs3 in "Captain Zilog"

kjs3 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:01:45 +0000

Yes, it's marketing materials for their computer products, including the Z80. "Not for use in life support" is extremely common in computer hardware disclaimers.

New comment by kjs3 in "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb (1986)"

kjs3 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:57:30 +0000

Not everything in real life distills to a programming analogy.

New comment by kjs3 in "CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s"

kjs3 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:38:05 +0000

I don't disagree with you, but my concern is more people simply accepting the 'answer' because how could the AI be wrong and not for a moment thinking 'I should check if this is right', and if called out defaulting to 'not my problem, the AI said so'.

New comment by kjs3 in "CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s"

kjs3 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:28:19 +0000

That's pretty clever, but not surprising. NuBus was designed as a multimaster bus, so it should work (famous last words). The fact that your boss said YOLO and tried, that it actually did work, and the boot code helped out, is very cool.

New comment by kjs3 in "CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s"

kjs3 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:27:43 +0000

Welcome to our collective future; enjoy your stay.

At least we can still spot the deception. That won't last forever.

New comment by kjs3 in "CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s"

kjs3 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:23:08 +0000

Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts

Or they wanted to plug a couple of NuBus coprocessor boards in.

New comment by kjs3 in "CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s"

kjs3 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:17:46 +0000

It's worth reading the article and understand "funding" in this case means "they bought NeXT computers like everyone else who bought a NeXT...they just bought a lot of them". This is an article about commerce, not covert activities, other than "we're going to use the computers we bought for things we're not going to tell you about".

New comment by kjs3 in "Ask HN: What physical publication do you still buy?"

kjs3 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:31:23 +0000

Buying boxes of NatGeo mags at estate/yard sales is not a bad answer. Lot's of folks want to get rid of them, and they are still in every way amazing.

New comment by kjs3 in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

kjs3 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:23:16 +0000

Interesting...I don't know much about sophgo and bouffalo chips. Not surprising since the 8051 is patent-free these days. Something I found crazy is how many places someone embedded an 8051 core. Like the tire pressure monitor in every tire these days. Fun stuff.

New comment by kjs3 in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

kjs3 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:08:44 +0000

Interesting comment. I suspect without solid facts that new bespoke stuff is mostly either 1) some ARM variant, or 2) some rando US$0.001 Chinese uproc. I think 8051 survives because there's many decades of experience using it, but as I understand the cool kids going into embedded don't think the boomers 8051 is fun and the pool of talent is shrinking fast. SO we'll see what the future holds.

New comment by kjs3 in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

kjs3 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:56:39 +0000

Amen. I remember the about 6 months when the benchmark cawboys were screaming that they had to be able to have access to directly program the Pentium Pro micro-instructions because 'that would be so much faster' and no matter how much the Intel architects who actually knew how things worked said "I don't think those words mean what you think they mean" there was some conspiracy to keep the PPro from achieving it's max performance...as if Intel didn't want the PPro to show it's max performance.

Humans are weird.

New comment by kjs3 in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

kjs3 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:36:45 +0000

I really don't know anything about this space

And yet you couldn't help yourself...

but you just said that 8051 is dominant

I said absolutely no such thing.

If the Software can't run because of hundreds of extensions

The software in the x86 world runs because there aren't hundreds of mutually incompatible extensions. I think the last time there was a major completely incompatible x86 ISA divergence was AMD "3DNow" vs other SIMD extensions. AFAIK the rest were "processor X got feature Y later than competitor Z".

Which ISA means my software runs on the most devices?

Easiest question evah: x86.

New comment by kjs3 in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

kjs3 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:13:16 +0000

I keep seeing this line of reasoning and have no idea why it's relevant. You don't program that 'internal representation'. The software people want to run only care if that software doesn't run. Cyrix, Transmeta,NexGen, Centaur, WinChip, etc., etc, theoretically had "more capable internal representation". The only thing that actually matters is "does it run the exact same x86 software I bought X many years ago" and "does it run it at a decent price/performance ratio". Everything else is dick measuring.

Today, we have Intel and AMD, and some bit-player embedded folks.

New comment by kjs3 in "Ask HN: What physical publication do you still buy?"

kjs3 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:04:47 +0000

Garden and Gun (https://gardenandgun.com/)

It's absolutely not a 2nd Amendment apologist rag.

New comment by kjs3 in "Super Mario Derivations"

kjs3 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:12:07 +0000

It's 'fun', for some folks 'nostalgic', possibly even 'interesting', in a casual sort of way. You apparently aren't familiar with these concepts. No need to hate on it.