Hacker News: ralphc

New comment by ralphc in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

ralphc — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:03:57 +0000

I didn't save the tweet I saw it in but I saved the joke - "I wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres." "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had enough money to."

New comment by ralphc in "Windows 11's Start menu was built using React – now switching to native WinUI"

ralphc — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 14:28:03 +0000

The big headline for our household will be to pause updates as long as needed. My wife is a CPA and having to manually delay and delay updates during the end of tax season(s) (March for corporates, April for personal, then again six months later) is an extra, unnecessary stress during those times for her.

New comment by ralphc in "Show HN: Jido 2.0, Elixir Agent Framework"

ralphc — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:15:45 +0000

I'm in the same boat as waynesonfire and I'm afraid this doesn't answer the question sufficiently. What do you do with an agent? What's a concrete example vs. typing in a chat box.

New comment by ralphc in "Ask HN: Chromebook leads for K-8 school in need?"

ralphc — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 15:01:35 +0000

I don't know your autonomy with regards to IT within the confines of your classroom but if you can't install ad blockers on the Chromebooks can you set up something like PiHole and direct DNS traffic through it? It won't solve the overall slowness of the Chromebooks but it will help with some web sites.

New comment by ralphc in "Descent, ported to the web"

ralphc — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:53:59 +0000

I had a Spaceball Avenger which made it so intuitive to play.

From my old reddit post about it, "The Spaceball Avenger is a gaming peripheral. It has the usual buttons, but the big ball is used for six degrees of freedom movement. With pressure sensors the ball is pushed up/down, left/right, and in/out for X, Y and Z axes. The ball can also be rotated for pitch, yaw and roll.

Plugged into the computer's serial port it came with drivers for games such as Doom, for which it was a good controller, but the Spaceball really shined for the Descent family of games. Descent is a FPS with no gravity, where your ship moves in ALL directions, and controlling with with the Spaceball feels like you're holding the spaceship in your hand and you're just moving it to where you want it to go."

You can see it here https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/gmusxs...

New comment by ralphc in "Asahi Linux with Sway on the MacBook Air M2 (2024)"

ralphc — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 03:43:24 +0000

Rarely mentioned is the audio, the Mac's bass and overall sound is much better than any other laptop its size.

New comment by ralphc in "86Box v5.3"

ralphc — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:07:37 +0000

How does 86Box and PCem compare with DOSBox in terms of accuracy?

New comment by ralphc in "The Bob Dylan concert for just one person"

ralphc — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:13:54 +0000

Due to the nature of the sport (one person in a metal box, pit crews distanced from each other), after an adjustment period NASCAR races happened during the pandemic. To empty stands. The winner would get out of the car and instead of thunderous applause, or boos depending on the driver, there would be absolute silence. The word surreal is overused but it was that kind of experience for the driver and people watching at home.

New comment by ralphc in "Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops"

ralphc — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 01:08:28 +0000

The reason my 2018 Chevrolet has HDR radio and my wife's 2024 doesn't.

New comment by ralphc in "The programmers who live in Flatland"

ralphc — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 05:34:48 +0000

The nerdiest project on github sounds like a high bar, what's the project?

New comment by ralphc in "How good engineers write bad code at big companies"

ralphc — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 21:30:29 +0000

I worked at a perfectly reasonable company that was acquired by Oracle. This was in the 2000s. We were working on a big Java project and were using ADF, the "Oracle Application Developer Framework". It was a piece of crap. One time I asked my manager why we were using it and he said that the project would probably fail and if we used something else the higher ups would blame it on not using ADF and fire him, so...

New comment by ralphc in "How I fell in love with Erlang"

ralphc — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 04:42:23 +0000

Everyone talks about GenServers and OTP and all that, and that part is great, but what sells it for me is that it's a practical functional programming language. You get 80% of the FP part of Haskell but you don't have to mess with monads. It has tail call optimization which makes it easy to write functions in general, one "function" is made up of several that call each other, much easier to reason about and write. In general code I use what I call the "holy trinity", atoms, tuples and pattern matching.

As for it being fun and addictive, I'm retired. I can write code in any language I want, or don't write at all, and I choose to write in Elixir.

New comment by ralphc in "What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?"

ralphc — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:22:44 +0000

Technically not updates but if you hook up a PowerPC mac with 10.4 Tiger on it you can still get it updated to the latest version released, 10.4.11

New comment by ralphc in "Forth: The programming language that writes itself"

ralphc — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 02:12:13 +0000

As a user, I'm just here to offer ::applause:: for GraFORTH.

New comment by ralphc in "How Kids' TV Got Way Too Normal"

ralphc — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 02:06:43 +0000

I often look for movies and series on streaming for when I'm on the exercise bike. Enough plot to keep me interested but not so much that I slow down.

New comment by ralphc in "Top Programming Languages 2025"

ralphc — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 17:47:50 +0000

I had to look up Solidity, which I've never heard of but see is at least 10x popular. It's sole reason to exist is for Ethereum.

New comment by ralphc in "Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine"

ralphc — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 21:09:14 +0000

So. Much. Modula-2. It must have been the future, there were as many compilers, ad, reviews as there were for C.

What killed Modula-2?

New comment by ralphc in "Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)"

ralphc — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 13:46:44 +0000

There's a "Mega Replay" store near where I live, it has second-hand electronics, games and DVDs. The biggest section in electronics is the VR goggles, a lot of people have given up on them.

New comment by ralphc in "Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years"

ralphc — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 04:01:09 +0000

If the product is API based then it's possible to use a TUI library and make an app that someone can keyboard their way through and have it talk to the mothership through the APIs.

New comment by ralphc in "Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?"

ralphc — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 02:11:23 +0000

What, if any, advantages that VSAM, IMS or DL/1 have over the SQL databases we're more familiar with here?