Hacker News: osullivj

New comment by osullivj in "My Friend Aaron"

osullivj — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:19:01 +0000

Lovely bit of writing. I enjoyed being drawn in, and the dawning realisation that it is fiction. Aaron as a malign archetype was great too; techie Widmerpool even! One note of mild criticism: the narrator seems entirely passive, with none of his own life events.

New comment by osullivj in "Ask HN: Should I do a CS masters at Cambridge or start as a new grad at Amazon?"

osullivj — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:15:18 +0000

This! So long as OP is under 40.

New comment by osullivj in "The war on terror primed America for autocracy"

osullivj — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 08:28:37 +0000

I agree with you on Brexit, austerity. But you can always find an expert briefing in yr direction cf Walters, Lawsom, Thatcher

New comment by osullivj in "Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?"

osullivj — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 01:32:38 +0000

This comment is wild :) In Europe we send our best athletes into athletics, not sport. Athletics is track and field, which reduces to speed, strength and endurance. Sport - football, cricket, tennis - is about technical mastery first, and only secondarily the speed strength and endurance to support it. Lionel Messi and Sachin Tendulkar would both have been deselected by any athletic selection procedure. The emphasis on athleticism over technical mastery is what makes American sport boring.

New comment by osullivj in "Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts"

osullivj — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 06:30:20 +0000

Richard Gabriel: Worse is Better

New comment by osullivj in "I design with Claude more than Figma now"

osullivj — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 06:24:37 +0000

Sounds like desk strat RAD work is moving to LLM gen code at JS. My recentish experience of that kind of work has been Athena at JPMC and Quartz at BoA; both Python with functional style via DAG or pixie with py ui framework to match. Which enables quick dev of the parts of trading workflow that don't need to be quick, like booking tools or EOD risk. I know first hand Athena and Qz are crufty when you get into the weeds. The bonsai framework with Elm inspired ocaml impl sounds v cool. So I can see how this approach can accelerate a lot of trading tech dev. But does it have any traction over the hard problems where we turn to C++ or Rust: near real pricing and risk across multiple instruments and markets?

New comment by osullivj in "Illusions of Understanding in the Sciences"

osullivj — Sun, 17 May 2026 09:01:10 +0000

So, to summarise, consistency is the virtue of a narrow mind?

New comment by osullivj in "The Vatican's Website in Latin"

osullivj — Thu, 07 May 2026 02:03:29 +0000

Catholic Social Teaching: 19th C origins. An alternate base to Marxism for social justice.

New comment by osullivj in "Founders Need to Be Ruthless When Chasing Deals"

osullivj — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:09:39 +0000

Yep, "enterprise" sales will kill ya. And when you do "close" you then get beaten up by "vendor mgmt". And when you finally get the invoice in, it's the finance dept and 90 day terms.

New comment by osullivj in "Software Preservation Group: C++ History Collection"

osullivj — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:00:21 +0000

Is C++ the most heavily documented programming language? If so, these docs could form the most detailed description of a subset of possible software ontologies for Von Neumann architectures. By possible software ontologies, I mean the debate around OOP, DOD ArrOfStruct vs StructOfArr, out of bounds and mem safety, GC vs manual mem mgmt, atomic types vs arrays vs objects and their layout in memory, function dispatch mechanisms, genericity mechanisms etc.

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.