Hacker News: superdisk

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

superdisk — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:18:26 +0000

This one does. You can configure the noise injected into the signal and when it gets too much, it loses sync and the picture starts rolling. It's actually a software NTSC modulator/demodulator, not just an effect to simulate it.

https://github.com/LMP88959/NTSC-CRT

New comment by superdisk in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

superdisk — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:34:28 +0000

I see you ran into Markus Triska. He's indeed a legend and his StackOverflow posts were super high effort and illuminating.

New comment by superdisk in "WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64"

superdisk — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:36:52 +0000

He's clearly doing a bit where he pretends to be confused and incompetent, and the punchline of the video is that he ends up with a working Windows CE port. He did a bit of soldering on the N64 board in the video so I think he probably does know what he's doing to a certain degree.

That said, LLMs have gotten extremely good at this kind of thing and you'd be shocked what you can do with this kind of low level work.

New comment by superdisk in "QBE – Compiler Back End"

superdisk — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:43:38 +0000

As the other commenter said, I don't think contributing it would be that useful, since QBE is a rather zen-garden project and I don't think the author would accept slop. Also he could just generate it with a prompt himself :P

It's certainly fun as a toy though!

New comment by superdisk in "QBE – Compiler Back End"

superdisk — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:41:53 +0000

The backend is only ~1300 lines. QBE is a super simple project which is why adding a backend to it worked so well. I just pointed Claude at the existing RISC-V backend for reference and it whipped up the MIPS one. It really does work, though there might be bugs I didn't run into. I compiled an Amiga MOD player, written in my language, to the N64 and it worked fine, if that gives you an idea of how stress tested it was. IIRC it runs about 5x slower than GCC-generated code.

https://gist.github.com/SuperDisk/1aa50263a773143c82a39d4771...

New comment by superdisk in "QBE – Compiler Back End"

superdisk — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:55:52 +0000

Cool project, and FWIW it's like one Claude prompt to add MIPS support to this. I did that and then was able to compile my little custom language to the N64.

New comment by superdisk in "Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE"

superdisk — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:01:47 +0000

Looks cool and does aim to address some of the annoying warts in Pascal. Especially the memory model.

New comment by superdisk in "Why Japan has such good railways"

superdisk — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 10:34:12 +0000

You can plug your ears and accept riding run-down trains full of shit, litter, puke, and threatening mentally ill people, in the name of not being "hateful," or as a society you can choose to have dignity and not put up with that.

New comment by superdisk in "GitHub's fake star economy"

superdisk — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 10:28:28 +0000

I maintain a niche-popular project that I didn't do any marketing for. My understanding is that even for popular projects, the usual dynamic is that there's just one guy doing all the work. So "getting off the ground" just means getting people to use it, and there shouldn't be any reason to artificially force that.

New comment by superdisk in "GitHub's fake star economy"

superdisk — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:32:03 +0000

An open source project really shouldn't be something you need to "get off the ground." If it provides value then people will naturally use it.

New comment by superdisk in "Why Japan has such good railways"

superdisk — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 22:45:08 +0000

I actually am speaking from experience, I saw both of those things my first week in New York. It's really not uncommon, I find it hard to believe that you've never run into shit/barf, usually when a car pulls up that has nobody in it, that's what's in there.

And this is all to say nothing about the decrepit state of the stations and cars themselves.

I've also been to Japan and experienced their trains. It's in such a different league that it's almost comedy.

New comment by superdisk in "Why Japan has such good railways"

superdisk — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:50:18 +0000

It's extremely common for there to be human shit in the train cars, and lunatics going nuts. It's absolutely nothing like Japan.

New comment by superdisk in "A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw"

superdisk — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 16:28:21 +0000

It's just very poser behavior.

New comment by superdisk in "Ask HN: What weird or scrappy things did you do to get your first users?"

superdisk — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 02:40:57 +0000

I worked on a language learning site and in order to try to onboard tutors, I wrote a script that scraped the Preply tutor list, which gave first names, pictures, and a YouTube account link.

From there I made a spreadsheet and spent hours googling names and trying to match up pictures to faces, sending messages asking if they'd like to be a part of a pilot program on my platform.

Got quite a few people willing to try it out :) but sadly the startup didn't succeed. Fun times though.

New comment by superdisk in "Ask HN: DDD was a great debugger – what would a modern equivalent look like?"

superdisk — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:46:35 +0000

This is a legitimate question but this was clearly generated using an LLM.

To add something constructive, this demo represents an amazing ideal of what debugging could be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72y2EC5fkcE

New comment by superdisk in "30 Years of ReactOS"

superdisk — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:12:35 +0000

I sometimes daydream about becoming a billionaire and bankrolling this project to completion. Would do the world so much good.

New comment by superdisk in "Claude's new constitution"

superdisk — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:08:56 +0000

America wrote the Japanese constitution.

New comment by superdisk in "Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?"

superdisk — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 06:57:40 +0000

This is true. There are a few stock topics that will consistently get the fanboys out (Postgres, Ruby, Rust, SQLite) which is, IMO, usually just uninteresting fodder. And then interesting stuff which requires some intellectual engagement very often rots.

HN does have a much higher ratio of gems to dirt than any other place though, so I'm still here for the forseeable future :)

New comment by superdisk in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

superdisk — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 19:13:10 +0000

If he made this I would buy it in a second. Right now my non-work daily driver is a Thinkpad X1 Carbon because I fell for the Thinkpad meme, but it's honestly pretty terrible all things considered. Battery life sucks, touchpad sucks, the shell is plasticky and weird. Mac-tier hardware that runs Linux would be extremely welcome.

New comment by superdisk in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

superdisk — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 19:09:13 +0000

I'll actually answer your question, it's horrible. I have a X1 Carbon and get maybe 3-4 hours on Linux.