Hacker News: mikehall314

Show HN: Cushion – PouchDB on Deno KV

mikehall314 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 14:31:22 +0000

This project mostly came from knowing that Deno KV is backed by FoundationDB and that there were (are?) plans to use Foundation for CouchDB 4.0 too.

I like working on Deno. I like working in CouchDB. I like Deno KV but don’t enjoy the ergonomics of it.

So Cushion was mostly made for my comfort. PouchDB with Deno KV as the storage adapter.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49498995

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by mikehall314 in "AirPods Max 2"

mikehall314 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:25:16 +0000

[1] Playing audio would stop, the noise cancellation would shut off, they would disconnect from my phone, seemingly reboot, then reconnect again.

New comment by mikehall314 in "AirPods Max 2"

mikehall314 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:40:10 +0000

Yeah, the condensation issue was a problem for me too. I ended up having to take them in for repair to Apple several times.

The noise cancellation went flakey, the auto-switching went flakey, they would crash [1] if lifted one cup from the side of my head. Apple ended up replacing them completely, but then the new pair eventually developed all the same faults.

I hope some of these are addressed in the new models, because despite all this I really enjoy them as headphones.

New comment by mikehall314 in "Lost Doctor Who episodes found"

mikehall314 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:22:01 +0000

It has been suggested numerous times, but the BBC didn’t just record over the top - the tapes were erased with a degausser before reuse.

New comment by mikehall314 in "Lost Doctor Who episodes found"

mikehall314 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:46:15 +0000

You're correct but as Uvix has said, BBC Enterprises made film copies for overseas sales before the original tapes were erased.

The earliest episode to survive on its original videotape is Ambassadors of Death episode 1 from 1970. None of the original 60s tapes still survive, though I believe there is at least one tape that we know used to have Doctor Who on it but which now has another programme.

The earliest episode to survive in its original medium is possibly The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode 5 (The Waking Ally). That's because, while this was shot on electronic studio cameras as usual, there were no videotape machines available to record.

Instead the output of those cameras was telerecorded straight to 35mm film. AIUI the negative of that telerecording still exists.

New comment by mikehall314 in "Put the zip code first"

mikehall314 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:42:01 +0000

It’s easy enough to say “put the zip first because that will tell you city, state and country in one input”.

What happens to customers not in the United States? They have no zip to enter. Or if they have a postal code of some stripe, it has a different format.

What about folks who are in Turkmenistan, that you’re grumpy about having to scroll past? How are they signing up?

New comment by mikehall314 in "Why Objective-C"

mikehall314 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:05:47 +0000

Possibly! The tool was definitely named Atlas when it was going to be an open source tool made by 280 North [1]. But it could have been renamed Ninja after Moto acquired it.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/03/atlas-a-visual-ide-f...

New comment by mikehall314 in "Why Objective-C"

mikehall314 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:29:53 +0000

Yes, after which they announced they were canning their "Atlas" project, which was meant to be an Interface Builder for the web. Motorola decided they wanted to keep the technology in house.

No idea if they ever did anything with it!

New comment by mikehall314 in "Why Objective-C"

mikehall314 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:28:30 +0000

I think originally Apple was using SproutCore, which had similar aspirations to produce "desktop quality" web apps, and was one of the early frameworks to implement things like two-way data binding. This was back when iCloud was called MobileMe.

SproutCore 2.0 became Ember.js 1.0, but I don't know if Apple are still using it.

New comment by mikehall314 in "Why Objective-C"

mikehall314 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:10:55 +0000

Every so often I get weirdly obsessed with Objective-J, which "has the same relationship to JavaScript as Objective-C has to C". It is (was?) an absolutely bonkers project. I think it has more or less died since 280 North was acquired.

https://www.cappuccino.dev/learn/objective-j.html

New comment by mikehall314 in "JavaScript engines zoo – Compare every JavaScript engine"

mikehall314 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 14:13:10 +0000

Supposedly, although the team at Apple were able to implement it. I think they had some oddly named technology like Chicken which created a shadow stack trace? Half remembered.

New comment by mikehall314 in "JavaScript engines zoo – Compare every JavaScript engine"

mikehall314 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 13:10:05 +0000

I assume the 98% compatibility on ES6 for V8 is because they don't have tail call optimisation?

New comment by mikehall314 in "Why Bcrypt Can Be Unsafe for Password Hashing?"

mikehall314 — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 22:39:23 +0000

I agree 72 characters is plenty for most circumstances. However, as the blog points out, this is a byte limit not a character limit.

Some of the family emoji can be > 20 bytes. Some of the profession emoji can be > 17 bytes. If people are using emoji in their passwords, we could quite quickly run out of bytes.

I think it’s a limitation worth being aware of, even if “unsafe” is perhaps overstating it.

New comment by mikehall314 in "Doctor Who archive expert shares positive update on missing episode"

mikehall314 — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:32:38 +0000

Correct. The Beatles appearance on Top of the Pops survives only because a clip from that show was used in episode 1 of The Chase.

Ironically, The Chase often has rights clearance issues when it comes to home release because of this. Beatles music costs a fortune to clear, making releases untenable.

Double ironically. This is because the Beatles chose to mime to their studio record for Top of the Pops. If they had played live, it would have been less of a problem.

New comment by mikehall314 in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

mikehall314 — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 20:48:24 +0000

But all it takes in that world is for a single browser vendor to decide - hey, we will even render broken XHTML, because we would rather show something than nothing - and you’re back to square one.

I know which I, as a user, would prefer. I want to use a browser which lets me see the website, not just a parse error. I don’t care if the code is correct.

New comment by mikehall314 in "BBC Micro, ancestor to ARM"

mikehall314 — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 22:39:55 +0000

On the one occasion I met Steve Furber, he told me about how when they connected up the very first chip, he was surprised that the it started running before he had even connected the power.

Turns out the design was such a low power design that just the voltage from the data lines was enough to run the chip.

Microsoft's Recall feature is now blocked by Brave and AdGuard

mikehall314 — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 21:32:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theverge.com/news/713676/brave-adguard-windows-recall-block-microsoft

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44704894

Points: 23

# Comments: 0

New comment by mikehall314 in "RFC: PHP license update"

mikehall314 — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 07:40:19 +0000

I assume this is the reason they're characterising this as "PHP License V4 will have identical wording to BSD-3" rather than "We will switch license to BSD-3".

It amounts to the same thing, but the former framing means they're covered by the "or later".

New comment by mikehall314 in "I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since"

mikehall314 — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 21:26:17 +0000

Author here. The irony wasn’t lost on me haha.

I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

mikehall314 — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 19:55:39 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@mikehall314/im-more-proud-of-these-128-kilobytes-than-anything-i-ve-built-since-53706cfbdc18

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44536248

Points: 178

# Comments: 46