Hacker News: vandyswa

New comment by vandyswa in "Show HN: Audiomass – a free, open-source multitrack audio editor for the web"

vandyswa — Sun, 24 May 2026 23:54:04 +0000

What's a waveform box and how does one select it?

New comment by vandyswa in "I prefer OG style websites – what are yours?"

vandyswa — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:10:35 +0000

Here in the Seattle area ferry schedules can matter. I cooked up this webapp, 4.5k bytes to load the front page, another 1/2k per destination you query.

Web technologies call out to the minimalist in me, but I appear to be in the minority.

New comment by vandyswa in "Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords"

vandyswa — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 14:04:47 +0000

When I wrote the login program for my VSTa microkernel, I took a page from the CDC side of the world--it echoes a _random_ (but small, non-zero) number of *'s. So you get feedback, but indeed peering over your shoulder will not disclose password length.

And yes, it remember how many it echoes so backspace works correctly.

New comment by vandyswa in "EVi, a Hard-Fork of Vim"

vandyswa — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:59:27 +0000

Same motivation, different generation. I carry my own fork of vim 5.7, from around 2000. It did what I needed, and did it well, and I could already see where it was going.

SMH at what I see in it now!

New comment by vandyswa in "Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards"

vandyswa — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 14:43:35 +0000

Yes, I'm glad to see a comment on Prolog. I think of it as _the_ foundational programming language for solving such problems. It isn't so much that it's a back propagation language; it's just that, based on which variables are bound at a given point, it will go forward deductively, or backwards inductively.

New comment by vandyswa in "Making RSS More Fun"

vandyswa — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:05:11 +0000

To me, it feels like most feed readers are made by people who don't use RSS, and just exercise their feed reader on a few feeds. I seem to be at 211 feeds with (currently) 13,000 cached entries, organized across a couple dozen categories.

A reader where you'll click into the body under a headline only 1-5% of the time is a totally different beast.

New comment by vandyswa in "Inside Amazon's engineering culture: Lessons from their senior principals"

vandyswa — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 21:05:04 +0000

With Amazon layoff blood running in the gutters today, I'm sure their PR people shook the tree to get something nice to drop onto the interwebitudes.

New comment by vandyswa in "Public trust demands open-source voting systems"

vandyswa — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:54:34 +0000

A solid starting point, but it's easy to lose sight of the other critical part of the puzzle--integrity of the voting rolls. High quality vote tabulation needs to start from voters, where _only_ legitimate voters vote, and each only votes (at most) once, after which yes, their vote is accurately tabulated.

New comment by vandyswa in "Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour"

vandyswa — Sun, 11 May 2025 13:12:53 +0000

Yes, I understand the C++ aspect, but I was never a C++ coder, and D "fit in my hand" in a way which made me certain that its creator had coded extensively in C and understood the aspects which made it so perfect for its time. It really felt like D, not D++ to me.

(Oh, disclosure, I'm just a D user, no organizational or financial interests here.)

New comment by vandyswa in "Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour"

vandyswa — Fri, 09 May 2025 21:16:38 +0000

FWIW, another take on "C Alternative" is the D programming language:

https://wiki.dlang.org/Tutorials

Comparatively mature, there's even a freeware book which is quite good:

http://www.ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html

New comment by vandyswa in "Doge Put a College Student in Charge of Using AI to Rewrite Regulations"

vandyswa — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 21:49:24 +0000

Is there any sign of its effectiveness (or lack thereof)? It seems like the world of dense regulatory language may actually be amenable to such techniques. If a (presumably bright) college person driving the tool gives good results--who cares?

New comment by vandyswa in "Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots [showcase]"

vandyswa — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 13:46:57 +0000

I have a static web page with a table of A href's. Source controlled under git. Problem solved.

New comment by vandyswa in "Recommendation for non-DOS/Unix open source OS outside x86/X64"

vandyswa — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 03:26:57 +0000

RSX-280 for the Z280 CPU:

https://github.com/hperaza/RSX280

Nothing like DOS. Nothing like UNIX.

New comment by vandyswa in "Married Women Could Be Stopped from Voting Under Save Act"

vandyswa — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 18:24:55 +0000

Assuming this act even moved forward (big IF), "bugs" like this show up in first drafts of bills all the time. They'd do a little research, then apply a fix. Amusing that the "coverage" didn't seem interested in "how could this easily be addressed?".

New comment by vandyswa in "I miss Vim"

vandyswa — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 14:51:11 +0000

I'm that old guy who married his highschool sweetheart and never looked back. I'll be sticking with vim 5.7 until the day I die:

https://sources.vsta.org:7100/vim57/index

New comment by vandyswa in "How Unix spell ran in 64kb RAM"

vandyswa — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 02:22:10 +0000

This spell check must have come later. The original spell check burst the words of the document, and sort -u'd them:

makewords sentence | lowercase | sort | unique | mismatch

New comment by vandyswa in "The genesis of today's recruiting crisis (2023)"

vandyswa — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 18:22:31 +0000

A nice limited hangout. Within the suspended reality field of the current USA military, the loss of a warrior culture must not be addressed. In fact, hidden. You are richly rewarded to place emphasis on almost anything else.

New comment by vandyswa in "RFC 35140: HTTP Do-Not-Stab (2023)"

vandyswa — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 01:38:29 +0000

RFC's operate under the IETF. RFC's are developed under some specific group, and you can join that group, the business is generally conducted on email. There are (well, were back when I participated) in-person meetings, but attendance there was not mandatory.

New comment by vandyswa in "U.S. women are outpacing men in college completion in every major group"

vandyswa — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:31:08 +0000

It's sad that women are dominating in accrual of debt to purchase something where the actual value is drifting downward rapidly. Yes, there are places demanding the credential, but they're entering the region of danger where what they actually are selecting is people with poor cost/benefit analysis skills.

New comment by vandyswa in "The economy is going great, except for the housing market"

vandyswa — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 14:33:35 +0000

Just scratching my head on this "great" economy. Brutal food prices, energy prices, car prices, commodity prices. Lots of "jobs" that pay less with fewer or no benefits. All the side streets and park-n-ride lots with campers. And the federal debt around $35 trillion with debt service bigger than our bloated military budget?

I get it, for this author the loudest squeak is housing cost. But he really needs to also work for a big picture.