Hacker News: osullivj

New comment by osullivj in "We rewrote our Rust WASM parser in TypeScript and it got faster"

osullivj — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 05:49:08 +0000

Strongly agree from an Emscripten C++ wasm pov: it's key to minimise emscripten::val roundtrips. Caches must be designed for rectilinear data geometry, and SharedArrayBuffers are the way for bulk data. But only JS allows us to express asynchrony, so we need an on_completion callback design at the lang boundary.

New comment by osullivj in "Bandit: A 32bit baremetal computer that runs Color Forth [video]"

osullivj — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:30:48 +0000

Jupiter Ace: a ZX80 with a Forth ROM. Inspired me to port an 8080 FIG Forth listing to the Camputers Lynx back in 83.

New comment by osullivj in "Number Research Inc"

osullivj — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:22:35 +0000

Are they finding the numbers least likely to be used on lottery tickets?

New comment by osullivj in "Japanese Death Poems"

osullivj — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:41:58 +0000

By "procession", do you allude to the filioque clause? Agreed on difficulty of translation as I follow Quine so think a language as a whole is the unit of meaning as opposed to any specific granular element.

New comment by osullivj in "Can you rewire your brain?"

osullivj — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 11:31:08 +0000

No mention of Imperial College's psychedelic programme and it's recent findings re neuroplasticity.

New comment by osullivj in "Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter"

osullivj — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:48:18 +0000

Flat plane or cross plane? Cross plane cranks necessitate an asymmetric firing order, which produces the wonderful burble from US V8s. Flat plane is more common in Europe - think Ferrari - and has a symmetric firing order that produces a toneless metallic howl.

New comment by osullivj in "OpenClaw is changing my life"

osullivj — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 03:26:32 +0000

Yep; nothing genuinely new since Xerox Alto in 73. Mouse, GUI, TCP/IP, Smalltalk 72.

New comment by osullivj in "Data Poems"

osullivj — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:10:03 +0000

Allusive and romantic. My view is to see data as geometry, not poetry. Rectilinear data is cache friendly.

New comment by osullivj in "The Z80 Membership Card (2015)"

osullivj — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:36:56 +0000

Love the Freak Brothers references; two US counter cultures that do cross pollinate. Z80MC RAM & ROM seem v generous compared to the ZX81 I used to cut my asm teeth, wobbly RAM pack and all...

New comment by osullivj in "The Napoleon Technique: Postponing things to increase productivity"

osullivj — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 14:21:06 +0000

In the 19th Century British Foreign Office the Napoleon Technique was called "masterly inactivity". For instance "the Russians are threating Afghanistan, so we must move troops up to the NW Frontier". No! Not every action merits a reaction.

New comment by osullivj in "Swapping two blocks of memory inside a larger block, in constant memory"

osullivj — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:05:10 +0000

Also useful for cache locality, a more recent trend. But I guess that's just another slighlty diff case of tight mem; this time in the cache rather than RAM generally.

New comment by osullivj in "Web development is fun again"

osullivj — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 23:38:00 +0000

Neat summary of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Riding!

New comment by osullivj in "Blame as a Service"

osullivj — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 05:06:29 +0000

Also UK style outsourcing eg Capita, Serco and recently Tata Consultancy Services fubaring JLRs infra.

New comment by osullivj in "A Room of One's Own (at last)"

osullivj — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 05:47:32 +0000

Sounds positively monastic, in the best way. Your magnum opus rendered as glorious coding codex is surely preordained. I'm reminded off Cyril Connolly's Pram in the Hallway. We are all prisoners of our brain chemistry.

New comment by osullivj in "US Launches Financial Rescue of Argentina, Treasury Buys Pesos"

osullivj — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 05:38:16 +0000

Cf GBP exit from the ERM inc Soros

New comment by osullivj in "Show HN: I've built a tiny hand-held keyboard"

osullivj — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 02:24:13 +0000

I saw that demoed at Notts Micro Computing Club in the early 80s. IIRC a Microwriter was used to drive input for an Acorn Electron.

New comment by osullivj in "Grounding AI with Wittgenstein: From Language-Games to Epistemic Honesty"

osullivj — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 16:50:58 +0000

Yes, completely agree. LLMs instantiate Searle's Chinese Room argument; symbols alone have no meaning. And yes, I buy the Kripkenstein argument. The meaning is the use, and intersubjectivity is key. My fear is that the humans who should know the use are having their grasp on that use degraded by production and consumption of AI slop text. Understanding requires application, and AI slop is letting the lazy off that hook.

New comment by osullivj in "Top Programming Languages 2025"

osullivj — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 14:06:33 +0000

I'm guessing Swiss Bank/UBS as a mate used to trade there and had a NeXT workstation and loved Wingz. Later I heard they were doing server side pricing work on Apple servers. I stand corrected; thanks!

New comment by osullivj in "I only use Google Sheets"

osullivj — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:41:02 +0000

dbase II offered similar capabilities on 8 bit CPM workstation in the early 80s.

New comment by osullivj in "Show HN: Autism Simulator"

osullivj — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:31:39 +0000

Feyerabend: the only rule is "anything goes"