Hacker News: mlaux

New comment by mlaux in "RuneScape Bench: MMOs for Agents [video]"

mlaux — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 22:44:42 +0000

I also got into programming through this scene, though a little later (irc.rizon.net #rsbotjava around 2008). I had already been doing a little coding but couldn't come up with decent project ideas (other than games, which always stalled out because I didn't know any artists or how to collaborate online). The RS scene was a perfect combination of interesting programming challenges, a decent size community of mostly other teenagers to hang out with, and getting to see my programs working in a "real" (virtual, ha) world. I learned about JVM internals, compiler techniques, IDEs, GUI programming with Swing, version control...... I don't know if I would have chosen CS as my major and gone into programming professionally if it weren't for this game and the community around it.

New comment by mlaux in "Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?"

mlaux — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:58:10 +0000

The serial port stuff is very close to what I'm working on - what's on the other end of the connection? What does "integrating them into modern systems" look like for you: getting data out/pushing data in/both?

New comment by mlaux in "Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?"

mlaux — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 23:21:16 +0000

Not exactly, freely available solutions are already good enough for people who just want to run their apps on modern hardware, and have been for a long time. What I was thinking about writing is a tool that eases migration by using interrupt and I/O hooks to detect common patterns and, say, builds a modern SQLite database as the business uses their dBase program. Whether anyone actually needs this, I don't know.

New comment by mlaux in "Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?"

mlaux — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 23:14:34 +0000

My idea is basically a DOS runtime with hooks on interrupts and I/O that would allow for either migrating databases to modern formats, or converting I/O accesses for modern USB peripherals. Customization for every customer and AI not being much of a help are pluses for me... lack of money not so much.

New comment by mlaux in "Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?"

mlaux — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:55:36 +0000

My idea is a DOS emulator with a really thorough log of every DOS interrupt called and I/O port interacted with. This could then be used to automatically, say, insert rows into a sqlite table when the DOS app updates a .DBF file, or forward GPIB data to a modern USB adapter. I wanted to avoid low level/cycle-accurate emulation as much as possible, only adding quirks as needed to support the most popular business application suites.

Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

mlaux — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:37:55 +0000

Do you currently work with or know anyone who is still using:

* dBase/Clipper/CLARION/Paradox/other DOS RAD environments on period hardware to run business processes?

* CNC mills/spectrometers/microscopes/other industrial instruments controlled by ISA cards (either bespoke or standards like GPIB)?

* Anything with a parallel port dongle?

If so, I'd be very interested in hearing your experience here, or feel free to send me an email at the address in my profile. I'm not trying to sell anything, just doing some research for an idea around keeping these going on modern hardware.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49848955

Points: 298

# Comments: 304

New comment by mlaux in "Show HN: Copperhead – Cursor for circuit boards"

mlaux — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 04:48:45 +0000

While this new competency of LLMs in EDA is objectively neat, I can't help but feel a little sad about the way this is going. Electronics projects are my refuge from the new hyper-speed low-quality software world. I want to "just not use it" and continue to enjoy electronics, but if I ever want to turn one of my ideas into a product, I'll be up against people who are building extremely quickly and to a lower quality standard. Yes, potential users of a cool new gadget care about having their problems solved above all else, but I can tell this is going to turn into another field we're all here saying "what happened to craft?" about, and idk, I just don't like it. And this is coming from someone who enjoys (turn by turn) LLM-boosted programming.

New comment by mlaux in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

mlaux — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:15:14 +0000

Looks like all three breaking changes are patches for inadvertent chain of thought disclosure. Someone found out (don't have the tweet handy) that if you created a bogus "think_deeply" tool and then forced the model to use it, it would output what is believed to be its raw thinking there - I believe the first breaking change stops this. The second two are aimed at people getting Haiku to repeat thinking blocks from other models verbatim (since it can see the decrypted version). I get that in their eyes it's an "exploit" but still kinda disappointing that they patched this

From /Init to Code Execution with Opus 5 – An Indirect Prompt Injection Story

mlaux — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:38:21 +0000

Article URL: https://veganmosfet.codeberg.page/posts/2026-07-27-opus5/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49071168

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by mlaux in "Happy Zelda's 40th first LLM running on N64 hardware (4MB RAM, 93MHz)"

mlaux — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 23:35:07 +0000

I tried to build this but it's missing the weights.bin file and my computer is too weak to generate it. Can you add it to the repo?

New comment by mlaux in "Show HN: Game demo made with my homemade game engine"

mlaux — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 19:44:10 +0000

I love the art style! Echoing the others, I'm stuck in the second room - would be cool to have a few hints at the beginning to help out with discoverability.

New comment by mlaux in "Unheard works by Erik Satie to premiere 100 years after his death"

mlaux — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 15:11:06 +0000

My favorite Satie piece is “Vexations” [1], a short clip that the composer ostensibly wished to be played 840 times in a row.

As a little art project, I recently made a version for MS-DOS and AdLib [2] that starts with a piano-like sound and gradually distorts the timbre every repetition by flipping a random bit in the AdLib’s registers.

I never made a recording of it because I was envisioning it as an “if you got to see it in person, cool” type of thing, but I should probably go back and do that

[1] https://youtu.be/7GoV2psW-OE

[2] http://constcast.org/vexations.html

New comment by mlaux in "Show HN: Tool-Assisted Speedrunning the Boring Parts of Animal Crossing (GCN)"

mlaux — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 17:02:18 +0000

This is so cool! AC and ACWW were a huge part of growing up and I dare say have a little impact on who I am today. Back then, I went on Tumblr’s AC community and found all the little debug menus but didn’t know how MIPS worked at that point to go any further. <3

New comment by mlaux in "Show HN: I built a website that explains any difficult concept in seconds"

mlaux — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 05:37:05 +0000

Looks like `nodsgy.com` works, but with `www.nodsgy.com`, this appears:

> Backend Not Found

> Why am I seeing this?

> There are a few potential reasons:

> You haven't deployed an app yet.

> Your app's first Rollout may still be in progress.

> This is a custom domain, but we haven't finished setting it up yet.

> How can I deploy my first app?

> Refer to our App Hosting documentation to get started.

New comment by mlaux in "Show HN: Zipshare – one-step Android screen sharing for support teams"

mlaux — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 20:31:39 +0000

Thanks for trying it out! I'll keep an eye on this issue. As much as I love native apps, for something like this where the fewer steps the better, doing everything in the browser would definitely be an advantage.

Show HN: Zipshare – one-step Android screen sharing for support teams

mlaux — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 15:50:50 +0000

Hello HN community!

I work as an Android developer at a large retailer, on the app that the in-store employees use to see their schedules, view product details, get support, etc. Part of our engineering on-call rotation involves helping these in-store employees with any app issues they may encounter. There are always a few times every rotation where I know solving someone's problem would be way easier if I could just see their screen as if I were in-store with them.

However, many of these employees are non-technical and wouldn't want to go through the onboarding of TeamViewer or Zoom, are under time constraints in a busy store, or (understandably) just wouldn't know how to get set up.

As a side project over the past few weekends, I've been building an Android screen sharing tool called Zipshare (https://www.getzipshare.com, demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iuc3HBIuMZE) that aims to be absolutely as easy as possible to use for the person sharing their screen. All the sharer needs to do is receive an email (or eventually a text) on their Android device and click a link. They will be sent to the Play Store, and upon launching the app, will automatically be sent to their session. Users don't need to create an account or enter a meeting code - there's literally one screen in the app ("xyz@abc.com invited you to share your screen, would you like to?") In fact, I originally wanted to use Play Store Instant Apps to eliminate the installation step entirely, but you can't open a raw socket from an Instant App, which I currently depend on... [1]

You can try the live demo by entering your email address and waiting on the next page, while clicking the link you receive on an Android device. Allow the screen share and you'll see it appear in your browser on the first device. When this is more built out, support agents will be able to sign in to their account and click a button to generate a new link/send it out. I also want to integrate with platforms like ServiceNow, PagerDuty, and Zendesk to allow generating screen sharing sessions directly from tickets.

I focused on Android for this initial version because the wide variety of devices makes giving support more difficult than on iOS, and because I have way more experience with Android :)

Other features I want to include are automatic notification suppression while sharing (for privacy), an "instant connectivity check" that reports basic system state to the agent like cell/Wi-Fi signal strength and whether a VPN is enabled, and an annotation feature so that agents can draw attention to certain areas of the screen.

My goal with Zipshare was to do one thing and make the experience as streamlined as possible. For example, there's no voice or video calling because chances are the two parties will already be on some other kind of call.

Technical details:

* Screen sharing: WebRTC with signaling provided by a self-hosted LiveKit server instance

* Android side: Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, LiveKit SDK, Play Store Referrer API to route the session ID through to the app install, "classic" Android 3rd party libraries (OkHttp, Retrofit, KotlinX serialization, ...)

* Website and API: Node.js, Express, two Pug templates, one CSS file, 50ish lines of JS excluding LiveKit, SQLite DB with one table.

Design details:

* Icon: Fiverr

* Colors: ChatGPT

* Landing page copy: The best I could come up with

Please give it a try and let me know what you think! I am eager to test this on as many devices as possible, especially older or low-end devices. I built this because I wanted it, but would it be useful for you or your team? Any feature requests?

[1] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/191070661, naturally "Won't Fix", definitely something to hack around in the future

(note: I was given the OK to repost this for a second chance)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42451447

Points: 12

# Comments: 2

New comment by mlaux in "What does LETTER. do in LISTRD in FAP from 196x?"

mlaux — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 23:19:52 +0000

You might already know this but here’s my guess:

OK, so this looks like it’s reading one card’s worth of code from either an actual card or tape. Based on how KNOW is used, the mystery LETTER looks like it’s classifying each word based on what type of token it is… then it goes into an interpreter loop with what’s basically a switch statement on the IDENT of each word (derived from its entry in KNOW). So I think each card could have 14 tokens of up to 6 chars each, some only one character (like a parenthesis) or some an entire literal?

A108 is the per-word outer loop and A105 is the per-char inner loop. A102 and A104 are the labels where the loop indices are updated and it jumps back to the beginning of the loop. As far as I can tell, MADIN and MADOUT are no-ops. I’m not sure what KGETIN is doing.

I believe the 343434343434k is meant to simulate some extra cells with a bunch of right parens so you could just end your program without wasting another card on closing everything?

Edit: I just read page 24 of the linked SLIP manual and what I’m calling tokens they’re calling SLIP cells.

Show HN: Zipshare – one-step Android screen sharing for support teams

mlaux — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 15:42:39 +0000

Hello HN community!

As a side project over the past few weekends, I've been building an Android screen sharing tool called Zipshare (https://www.getzipshare.com) that aims to be absolutely as easy as possible to use for the person sharing their screen. All the sharer needs to do is receive an email (or eventually a text) on their Android device and click a link. They will be sent to the Play Store, and upon launching the app, will automatically be sent to their session. There's no need to create an account or enter a meeting code - there's literally one screen in the app ("xyz@abc.com invited you to share your screen, would you like to?") In fact, I originally wanted to use Play Store Instant Apps to eliminate the installation step entirely, but you can't open a raw socket from an Instant App, which I currently depend on... [1]

I focused on Android for this initial version because the wide variety of devices makes giving support more difficult than on iOS, and because I have way more experience with Android :)

You can try it by entering your email address and waiting on the next page while clicking the link you receive on an Android device. When this is more built out, support agents will be able to sign in to their account and click a button to generate a new link/send it out. I also want to integrate with platforms like ServiceNow, PagerDuty, and Zendesk to allow generating screen sharing sessions directly from tickets.

Technical details:

* Screen sharing: WebRTC with signaling provided by a self-hosted LiveKit server instance

* Website and API: Node.js, Express, two Pug templates, one CSS file, 50ish lines of JS excluding LiveKit, SQLite DB with one table.

Design details:

* Icon: Fiverr

* Colors: ChatGPT

* Landing page copy: The best I could come up with

Please give it a try and let me know what you think! I am eager to test this on as many devices as possible, especially older or low-end devices. I built this because I wanted it, but would this be useful for you or your team? Any feature requests?

[1] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/191070661, naturally "Won't Fix" - definitely something to hack around in the future

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228461

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mlaux in "Do not use secrets in environment variables"

mlaux — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 18:09:36 +0000

Typically seen more often as something like:

    http://example.com/viewPost.php?post=../../../whatever

(where the server side code has the bug, not the web server configuration itself)

Interface Hall of Shame (2000)

mlaux — Tue, 16 May 2023 15:42:17 +0000

Article URL: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35963396

Points: 1

# Comments: 0