Hacker News: mackid

New comment by mackid in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

mackid — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:08:38 +0000

Congrats, great project and great writeup. That would have won MacHack back in the day.

Now that the MacBook Neo has an A18, I wonder if you could get MacOS running on an iPhone? :)

New comment by mackid in "ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering"

mackid — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 22:08:05 +0000

Might checkout what people have done on the 6502 in an Apple II.

https://youtu.be/wM3deQAgMpE?si=h2O1uTQqxFtCRCsh

New comment by mackid in "65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform"

mackid — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:52:57 +0000

I’ve wondered about a temporal trend. My feeling is that it has gotten more negative over the last 10 years. Could the OP run the analysis for each year and see if there are trends?

New comment by mackid in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

mackid — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 18:22:44 +0000

Timing seems to be about the same (but just in production now). But tariffs/taxes were 55% of merchandise cost. DHL is expensive too, $52 for 10 boards (shipping to Cali). I haven’t used OSHPark.

New comment by mackid in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

mackid — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 17:44:32 +0000

I’m building A2Fusion [1], a dual RP2350 expansion board for the Apple II to provide, storage, hdmi video and other functions in one card. The PoC is currently a big mess of wires. Waiting on JLCPCB for first prototype boards.

[1] https://m.facebook.com/groups/5251478676/permalink/101664026...

New comment by mackid in "VMware Workstation: Bringing Virtualization to the x86 Architecture (2012) [pdf]"

mackid — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 13:46:44 +0000

Bill/MS acquired Connectix’s virtualization technology [1] in 2003. VirtualPC and Virtual Server went on to become Hyper-V and power Azure to this day. VPC was released in 1997 and VMW founded in 1998.

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/source/2003/02/19/microsoft-acqui...

New comment by mackid in "The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia"

mackid — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 21:04:33 +0000

Microsoft did a bunch of research into low-bit weights for models. I guess OAI didn’t look at this work.

https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2020/file/747e32ab0fea7...

New comment by mackid in "Show HN: LA Wildfire Satellite Analysis"

mackid — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 06:01:33 +0000

They integrate a number of sources. Satellite, cameras, weather, CalFire, etc. Check out their app, it’s free. They are a non-profit Startup, which is an interesting approach.

New comment by mackid in "Show HN: LA Wildfire Satellite Analysis"

mackid — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 05:19:03 +0000

Thanks for sharing. Do you work with the folks at Watch Duty?

New comment by mackid in "Make timelapses easily using FFmpeg"

mackid — Mon, 20 May 2024 04:44:26 +0000

I took photos every few minutes for about a year. I wrote some custom code to pick out a set of frames from several consecutive days, but with the sun at the same angle in the sky. I then blended these frames together. This makes a ghostly look, without the bright flashes of cloud passing or weather changing. As I moved forward in time, I selected frames from the next angle in the sky, so it looks like only a day passes. You’ll see the shadows move as if a day passes, when really a year goes by.

https://youtu.be/RAsJE5ddt_U

Microsoft Azure AI silicon Maia details

mackid — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 01:42:25 +0000

Article URL: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-maia-for-the-era-of-ai-from-silicon-to-software-to-systems/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39937878

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by mackid in "The art of high performance computing"

mackid — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 09:04:42 +0000

Mark did a good video on ChatGPT infra.

[1]. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-b...

New comment by mackid in "The art of high performance computing"

mackid — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 05:16:35 +0000

Mark Russinovich gives a good talk most years on the internals of Azure and the systems that run it. [1] is an example. Look for talks from other years as well.

Meta also publishes a number of papers/blogs/OSS projects on their engineering site [2]

James Hamilton of AWS gives a talk most years on their infrastructure. Worth watching multiple years [3].

[1] https://youtu.be/69PrhWQorEM?si=u7vh_Um6SQNoyeFH

[2] https://engineering.fb.com/category/data-center-engineering/

[3] https://youtu.be/AyOAjFNPAbA?si=nFRJVcQI4EiamC-O

ProDOS 2.4.3 for all Apple II computers

mackid — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 02:49:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.callapple.org/modern-apple-computing/announcing-prodos-2-4-3-for-all-apple-ii-computers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38821324

Points: 16

# Comments: 1

New comment by mackid in "The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud"

mackid — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 22:26:32 +0000

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” - Alan Kay

New comment by mackid in "Show HN: San Francisco Compute – 512 H100s at <$2/hr for research and startups"

mackid — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 01:05:28 +0000

Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross setup a 2,512 H100 cluster [1] for their startups, with a very similar “shared” model. Might be interesting to connect with them.

[1] https://andromedacluster.com/

New comment by mackid in "Apple's interactive television box: Hacking the set top box System 7.1 in ROM"

mackid — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 10:06:20 +0000

The person in the center is Peter Hoddie.

New comment by mackid in "Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer"

mackid — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 20:05:25 +0000

1977 Apple ][ Introductory price US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,270 in 2022)

I think folks are missing the point that this is the first Pro version. Likely targeted at developers and early adopters. I’m sure there will be an Air/Lite/etc version that cost reduces overtime.

New comment by mackid in "BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product"

mackid — Thu, 11 May 2023 19:25:14 +0000

Love BBEdit, but you can also get Rich to fix your KitchenAid Stand Mixer. (No joke) Must be an interesting story on how this second career came about.

https://www.mixerology.com/

New comment by mackid in "xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition"

mackid — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 22:52:13 +0000

Great comments and advice. My neighborhood burned in the #GlassFire [0]. While our property was severely damaged, our home survived, due to many of the hardening techniques you mentioned and great work by CalFire. We had evacuated the night before and were staying in a local hotel watching the flames advance on our house via our security cameras. (Redundant net connections and a generator kept everything online). As our deck started to burn I called 911 to report it, figuring nothing would happen. About 20 minutes later a fireman walked into the frame of the camera and 2 minutes later the deck was out and the house was saved. I was cheering like I won the Super Bowl. So I really appreciate all the hardening I did, on-site water and CalFire.

When we rebuilt the exterior, I installed a set of sprinklers that ring the house and cover the roof/deck. They are not designed to fight the fire, instead I can activate them before a fire arrives to get things good and wet. This perimeter reduces the available fuels, reduces the heat load on the structure and reduces the risk of ember cast. It was a fun project with an ESP controller to sequence the valves and provide remote control.

Over the last few years, the Alert Wildfire Camera system, now over 700 cameras, has been a valuable resource. [1] Early detection of the fire, before it grows to extreme size has made a big difference. In the North Bay of California last year, this early detection and CalFire having nearby Air Attack resources on standby kept many small fires from becoming large ones in this area.

Another great resource is the Watch Duty app. [2] This is a non-profit, volunteer, but extremely professional service. They started in Northern California and are rapidly expanding. It is the go-to resource for Wildfire related information in the area.

Lastly, if anyone is looking at the X prize for satellite detection, I’d spend some time researching MODIS/VIIRS data products from NASA. [3]. A good starting point in some of the challenges of wildfire detection from space.

[0]. Fire tornado outside my window. https://youtu.be/1tZjWqh3-EU

[1]. https://www.alertwildfire.org/

[2]. https://www.watchduty.org/

[3]. https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/