HN user
Rapid development of a cycle accurate Intellivision emulator, much of it unsupervised. (four part series)
https://keanw.com/2026/03/a-diary-of-an-agentic-retro-gamer-...
https://keanw.com/2026/04/a-diary-of-an-agentic-retro-gamer-...
https://keanw.com/2026/04/a-diary-of-an-agentic-retro-gamer-...
https://keanw.com/2026/05/a-diary-of-an-agentic-retro-gamer-...
Ok if you say so he's not racist, but you can keep him nonetheless.
It's a myth that US income tax is always lower than in Canada.
I worked in the US for a bit when I started out. I paid more income tax in CT than in Toronto on the same salary.
I just wanted to come back home. Even in small town CT, there were areas we were told to stay away from after dark.
Ok, but how does your hypothetical scenario apply to Canada though?
And anytime programmers start to discuss anything in detail, you know just when it's getting interesting: "Can we take this 'offline'..."
See also this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMVuRGw_a5A
I remember when computer magazines were aimed at programmers and had code listings in them.
Then there seemed to come a time when all they talked about was the IBM vs. Microsoft lawsuit. From then on they must have felt that they had discovered a formula, because all they ever yapped about after was insider baseball of computer companies.
I find this sort of corp. vs. corp. coverage boring, sort of like techie reality TV. Who will be voted out tonight, Debra, or Deborah...?
Back in the day when it came out, I gotta admit, Docker sort of got my my nerves as yet another thing coming to 'disrupt' how things are done.
(Half assed NOSQL 'databases' with poorly thought out storage models, everything having to be a microservice, turning every function call into a fallible RPC call etc...)
But I've come to appreciate it more, and i use it regularly now. I appreciate its relative simplicity.
But as in life, hell is other people's containers. My own I can at least try to keep them simple and minimal.
But I have seen many use the kitchen sink approach, giving me the feeling that even the developer don't seem to know how they arrived at their deployment anymore.
But this all seems quaint today. With LLMs, now we can look forward to a flood of code the developers haven't even looked at, but which is widely believed to work...
"hey, why do mathematicians keep changing rules on the fly, they just told me square of minus one doesn't exist
Mathematicians aren’t chasing numerical solutions, they’re chasing structure. ℂ isn’t just about solving cubics, it’s about eliminating holes in algebra so the theory behaves uniformly and is easier to build upon.
And as for "changing rules" they haven't changed, they have broadened the field (literally) over which the old rules applied in a clever way to remove a restriction.
I like to hang around at my local skate park.
I'm not very good on a skateboard, better on a BMX. In any case the vibes are usually good.
Sometimes you think people aren't even noticing you, till you finally land the trick you're working on and a total stranger yells 'whoo!'
[...] send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.
You know this part of the problem!
Politics is now consumed as entertainment, and ask any writer of books or screenplays and they will tell you _conflict_ makes for good entertainment.
Politics should be _boring_. The fact that we demand to be entertained by our political system is a big part of the problem.
It also looks hopelessly Gen Z to want all communication to be asynchronous and ignorable. If you guys have your way, we’ll all be connecting via API like 1U machines in a rack somewhere.
Seriously—if you’re going to go overboard, so can I.
WTF is it with everything having to be mediated by a machine these days? People can’t get around without GPS, remember phone numbers, or now even do their work or homework without 'AI.'
How do you explain how people managed to do all of these things before without assistance? And how do you square that with telling 'boomers'—who were able to do these things—that they’re stupid and that you’re somehow better?
Seriously, it’s like we used to have weightlifting competitions where humans physically lifted weights overhead, and then you guys decided, "Nah, that’s too old and boomerish. From now on, all weightlifting competitions will use forklifts. Anyone who wants to lift the weights themselves is boomerish and stupid."
And where's your solidarity? If you lose your job, you may find yourself wishing you could meet people in person, when all your 'ignoreable,' electronically submitted job applications somehow get thrown away.
I disagree. I feel there is a genuine insight at the core of it.
I still don’t buy the “slasher movie” framing of nature at all, and the only function 'pleasant lies' serves here is just low effort dismissal. :shrug:
Alas, I'm ceding ground by even arguing within your chosen framing. It's all very self defeating.
Come on you can't come up with a single five minute period when observing animals where they seem to be calm?
That does not fit the evidence.
And besides you can read thousands of articles on HN about anxiety in humans, a mostly useless anxiety focused on societal 'threats' which we suffer from just as much.
At least a deer is on the lookout for something real.
Also if you compare animals lives to human ones, with our propensity for war and torture and persecution, I think the animals _do_ objectively live calmer lives.
You don't see them systematically tearing each other to pieces over made up goods like money.
I think this trope that "nature is a constant struggle" is a projection of human values (or lack of) onto nature.
then flee at maximum speed because a well-fed 200+lb apex predator is passing by, it sure looks like work and effort.
I think the 'effort' being described in the article—despite using analogies of overgripping and physical strain—is mental effort.
When the rabbit has escaped, he returns quickly to a relaxed state. A typical human reaction would be to continue to worry about the predator, to form plans to rid the whole _world_ of all predators, to build a fortress with grass to eat on the inside...
This whole saying that "Nature is red in tooth and claw" is overstated. Most animals have normal, humdrum days like we do.
However, I think it was the Buddhist teacher, Ajan Cha who said: "We live in a world where we must eat to survive, and some of us are uncomfortable about being eaten."
But this does not mean that every animal lives a life of unremitting terror all the time.
I’m wary of your use of 'romantic' as a descriptor here. It's a rhetorical shortcut which makes it easy to pre-emptively dismiss a position as naïve without further examination.
it was the worst debugging experience one could have.
Hard disagree. I'm not going to argue that Java debugging was the best, however:
1. You could remote debug your code as it ran on the server.
2. You could debug code which wouldn't even compile, as long as your execution path stayed within the clean code.
3. You could then fix a section of the broken code and continue, and the debugger would backtrack and execute the code you just patched in during your debugging session.†
This is what I remember as someone who spent decades (since Java 1.0) working as a contract consultant, mainly on server side Java.
Of course this will not convince anyone who is determined to remain skeptical, but I think those are compelling capabilities.
† Now I code in Rust a lot, and I really enjoy it, but the long compile times and the inability to run broken code are two things which I really miss from those Java days. And often the modern 2025 debugger for it is unable to inspect some for the variables for some reason, a bug which I never encountered with Java.
Prediction: Non-determinism will become acceptable in areas we used to expect accuracy.
For example we will accept 'probabilistic bookkeeping' because it's cheaper than requiring ledgers to balance to the penny.
But this leeway won't be equally applied. Powerful institutions like banks will use “probabilistic models” to decide they probably don’t owe you that refund, but if they decide you owe them money, they will still hold you to every cent.
Nondeterminism for the powerful, determinism for everyone else. Yay!
elections be damned.
Isn't the current administration more culpable on this point? (viz. the last time Trump lost an election)
And in terms of norms I mean that there isn't a strict law or constitutional clause written to proscribe each and every thing that the president can and cannot do. The system relies on the people acting in good faith, which is definitely not happening in this case. Instead they are cynically trying to exploit every loophole they can to smash a system they don't even understand.
whilst simultaneously calling a legitimately elected government a "regime".
It _is_ a regime. Who elected Musk or his Doge minions?
Most dictatorships consolidated power legally. That it was legal doesn't mean I want to live in one.
ANd speaking of having it bot ways, you can easily infer what side I'm on, but I get the sense that you are trying to hide behind 'just so arguments'. Could it be that you support the new regime and are trying to avoid saying it out loud?
I wonder why someone would want to hide that...?
Don't you see? They would give the exact same speech about the other side and absolutely believe it, and in fact so would many other people.
Of course I see, and like in a chess match I looked past it cos I thought it was too obvious.
But I say again your argument amounts to false equivalence.
They can believe crazy and false things as fervently as they like, it doesn't make those beliefs an equivalent mirror image to what liberals believe.
This whole thread started with a complaint from you about Schedule F being 'unfair.'
Apparently anything except the liberals handcuffing themselves and letting themselves be frogmarched out of their jobs is unacceptable.
Meanwhile the new 'unitary executive' is allowed to jump up and down like Donkey Kong on anything he feels like no matter what the rules norms, laws or the constitution says.
Did I capture the essence of it?
I am totally serious about the need for resistance. The new people in charge just walked up to an unguarded lemonade stand which runs on the honour system, drank all the lemonade, pissed in the jar stole the money and smashed everything.
And why can they do that? Because they don't go in for honour and decency, but they expect us to. Democracy provides the tools and the freedom for people to subvert democracy.
I don't expect the new regime to grant such generous 'equivalent' terms should it manage to consolidate it's position.
I don't mean violent resistance, but we do have to resist.
This is false equivalence.
There is such a thing as true and false, and there is such a thing as right and wrong.
I know which side's views and plans are almost always on the side of the false and the wrong.
One side wants to divide, one tries to unite, one seeks the truth, the other side does more than lie, it attempts to erase the very notion of truth. One side denigrates, insults and immiserates the weak and the poor. The other attempts to lift them up.
Often in a moral quandary ask yourself 'Which position would be more difficult for me to take?' that's a strong indicator of what is right.
It's easy to divide, denigrate, spread rumours, and to make statements without regards to truth or falsehood. It's easy to hate, to dehumanise and to cause pain.
I've said it in another post. Why are there so many people ready to line up to defend the powerful against the weak, the rich against the poor?
What a brave and noble purpose! I'd love to see you defend that.
One thing I first started noticing in the 2000s on sites like kuro5hin were young conservatives.
Like I mean 20 year old's using conservative talking points, mostly in an absolutist aggressive sort of way. Many I guess were coming at it from Rand's 'philosophical' writings. (Basically an overly intellectual cover for being an asshole).
I remember asking them on that site with a post: "Why are you young guys conservative?" I mean they weren't religious, or at least none of them cited this as a motivation, they weren't rich so they had nothing to 'conserve'. I remember being like WTF?
Looking back on it now I think most of them were in it for the trolling. Conservative thought often skews insensitive and absolutist, so I guess these dudes were using it as a basis to troll more sensitive posters.
Now 25years later and we are living the consequences of a 4chan presidency.
There's no theory of government in which this is supposed to play a part.
This is resistance. It is justified. Expect more of it.
I'm a Trump voter (2016, 2020, and 2024) so I obviously find all this a good thing, just for transparency.
Burning the system down because of hurt pride doesn't sound like a good thing to me.
Your agent of retribution is now threatening my country.
It's because of people like you that I now have to start thinking of what I have to do if they start massing troops in Buffalo. No wars indeed...
And just so you know, invading us will never work. You are right to not want the US to enter a war. Because it has lost every war it has ever started.
This is the bit I don't get. Why are there so many people ready to line up to defend the powerful against the weak, the rich against the poor?
What a brave and noble purpose! I'm real proud of people like that...
The richest man on earth in charge of cost cutting. Go and bathe in a jacuzzi of cash Musk, and stop acting like a sore winner...
I share the author's frustration with this trend that _everything_ be a JSON object.
Just recently I had some colleagues create a 200Mb JSON blob representing data records with the goal of querying the data in various ways.
I instead loaded it into a SQL database and wrote a few queries which quickly got the job done.
Also I totally agree that people have forgotten how to stream data via HTTP now, coming up with all sorts of crappy handcrafted approaches, often involving JSON. I've seen many sorry examples of this too.
See: https://jargonfile.johnswitzerland.com/stone-knives-and-bear...
The timing makes me think that its just another rich guy re-aligning himself with Trump.
If this is the case it's interesting to see how each different tech figure expresses this fealty.
Summary: Rich white guy complains that it's too much effort to figure out what we're supposed to call 'coloured people' these days. It reads like the lament of a sore winner who has been forced to think of other's feelings against his will.
And all of this is couched in a pseudo-histororical style that perhaps the author hopes will shield it from being read as an 'emotional' argument.
And you know what's the worst thing? We live in a conservative world. They set the rules of the game, the draw the chalk outlines of the playing field, they own the ball the stadium and the referees.
And now they tell us we have to be silent when they rough us up too?
I think that over time, AI will tend to make all programmers into average programmers.
For those who are beginners, it can bring their skills up and make them look like better developers than they are.
More insidiously, expert programmers who overuse of AI might also regress to the mean as their skills deteriorate.
I think what was intended was that _human_ nature hasn't changed.