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Algebraic Semantics for Machine Knitting

https://uwplse.org/2025/03/31/Algebraic-Knitting.html
65•PaulHoule•1h ago•6 comments

ClickHouse gets lazier (and faster): Introducing lazy materialization

https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse-gets-lazier-and-faster-introducing-lazy-materialization
56•tbragin•1h ago•12 comments

I should have loved biology too

https://nehalslearnings.substack.com/p/i-should-have-loved-biology-too
31•nehal96•44m ago•3 comments

Are polynomial features the root of all evil? (2024)

https://alexshtf.github.io/2024/01/21/Bernstein.html
21•Areibman•40m ago•2 comments

Abusing DuckDB-WASM by making SQL draw 3D graphics (Sort Of)

https://www.hey.earth/posts/duckdb-doom
123•tanelpoder•3h ago•26 comments

Surprises in Logic (2016)

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/surprises.html
47•jxmorris12•2h ago•7 comments

Recover (YC W21) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/recover/jobs/76dMle9-head-of-finance
1•nickgulino1•29m ago

Supabase raises $200M Series D at $2B valuation

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-supabase-raises-200-million-112154867.html
136•baristaGeek•2h ago•130 comments

Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

https://github.com/morphik-org/morphik-core
26•Adityav369•1h ago•1 comments

Launch HN: Infra.new (YC W23) – DevOps copilot with guardrails built in

25•TankeJosh•2h ago•17 comments

David Tong Lectures on Theoretical Physics

https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/books.html
37•alonfnt•2h ago•5 comments

The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great

https://technologizer.com/home/2025/04/22/pc-connection-ads-raccoons/
30•coloneltcb•4h ago•10 comments

Join the W3C Exploration Interest Group: where standards start

https://www.w3.org/blog/2025/join-the-w3c-exploration-interest-group-where-standards-start/
37•pentagrama•3h ago•13 comments

Libro: a command-line tool to track your books

https://github.com/mkaz/libro
68•marcuskaz•2d ago•30 comments

Show HN: I built a Ruby gem that handles memoization with a ttl

https://github.com/mishalzaman/memo_ttl
16•hp_hovercraft84•39m ago•3 comments

Using physics simulations to find targeting strategies in tenpin bowling

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/15/4/045222/3344017/Using-physics-simulations-to-find-targeting
30•PaulHoule•3h ago•10 comments

Pike – a dynamic programming language with a syntax similar to Java and C

https://pike.lysator.liu.se/
37•gjvc•3d ago•39 comments

WebAssembly: How to Allocate Your Allocator

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2025/04/19/
9•ingve•3d ago•1 comments

Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

https://blog.videah.net/attacking-my-landlords-boiler/
301•ericvolp12•13h ago•163 comments

An Utterly Incomplete Look at Research from 1825

http://bcmullins.github.io/research-from-1825/
14•wannabebarista•1h ago•1 comments

Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

https://github.com/ericjenott/Evertop
507•harryvederci•19h ago•166 comments

Living with Lab Mice

https://nautil.us/living-with-lab-mice-1202657/
15•kawera•2d ago•7 comments

Does RL Incentivize Reasoning in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?

https://limit-of-rlvr.github.io/
60•leodriesch•7h ago•21 comments

Verus: Verified Rust for low-level systems code

https://github.com/secure-foundations/verus
136•mmcloughlin•1d ago•30 comments

Detecting if an expression is constant in C

https://nrk.neocities.org/articles/c-constexpr-macro
5•ingve•8h ago•0 comments

The Cold Start Problem: Using Network Effects to Scale Your Product – A Review

https://madhavajay.com/the-cold-start-problem-using-network-effects-to-scale-your-product/
42•williamtrask•4h ago•3 comments

A Real-Time Algorithm for Non-Convex Powered Descent Guidance [pdf]

https://depts.washington.edu/uwrainlab/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/AIAA_SciTech_2020.pdf
33•nill0•3d ago•3 comments

Handheld detector for all types of ionizing radiation improves radiation safety

https://phys.org/news/2025-04-handheld-detector-ionizing-safety.html
40•PaulHoule•2d ago•16 comments

We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15B Miles Away [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg
136•noselasd•3d ago•9 comments

I Open-Sourced My AI Toy Company That Runs on ESP32 and OpenAI Realtime API

https://github.com/akdeb/ElatoAI
85•akadeb•3h ago•50 comments
Open in hackernews

FreeDOS 1.4 Is Here

https://www.freedos.org/download/announce.html
83•BSDobelix•7h ago

Comments

torginus•5h ago
I wonder if FreeDOS has anyl relevance in our modern cloud-based VM world, where a real-mode operating system could serve as a razor thin wrapper for running applications on virtual machines with minimum overhead.

In these scenarios, having another layer of memory protection and pre-emptive multi-process multitasking might be completely unnecessary.

arghwhat•5h ago
No, the technology serving what you're describing is microVMs, or taken even further, unikernels.

FreeDOS has no technical relevance other than its intended purpose of continued support for legacy DOS applications on modern hardware - which is perfectly fine.

gwbas1c•4h ago
Last time I wanted to run an old DOS game, I used DOSBox. (But it appears DOSBox isn't actively maintained)
sirwhinesalot•4h ago
With how fast hardware is these days, full hardware emulation of old motherboards/CPUs/etc. is better, as in PCem
p_ing•4h ago
DOSBox-X is actively maintained.

https://dosbox-x.com/

bni•4h ago
or DOSBox Staging, https://www.dosbox-staging.org
denkmoon•4h ago
more for running oem firmware tools and such than dos games.
arghwhat•4h ago
Not anymore, it's either signed EFI binaries or handled live from user space (with LVFS covering the Linux side). Sometimes vendors still ship boot images, but nowadays it's likely a small Linux live ISO.
dspillett•5h ago
Real mode would not be an efficiency gain at all on modern CPUs.

Even if they were not the case I think it would only have any use between containers and full VMs when you want more separation than the former but less weight than the latter, and there are various existing microVM options that seem to have a handle on that space.

diggan•4h ago
> I wonder if FreeDOS has anyl relevance

Well, just yesterday I had to run FreeDOS from a USB in order to run a sas2flash utility that didn't run on Linux or directly via UEFI, so I could flash some firmware to a SAS controller. Seems at least some of us still need it :)

Btw, avoid getting a SAS controller if you can, and get a motherboard that directly supports as many SATA drives as you need. Few things have been as frustrating as dealing with this SAS controller thing.

vin047•4h ago
Off-topic, but what SAS controllers are you having trouble with? Was going to get some for my NAS, would be good to get some insight on what to get and expect!
diggan•2h ago
As mentioned in the other comment, the controller shipped with IR firmware, while I wanted IT firmware on it, so all drives shows up in the OS, instead of doing hardware RAID. I don't think this specific controller is more/less problematic than others, just that all the tooling around SAS seems to suck. At first I couldn't get sas2flash to work on Linux, so ended up trying to boot an UEFI shell with sas2flash.efi instead, which refused to work seemingly because of some motherboard/UEFI version/controller incompatibility.

So ultimately I used FreeDOS to finally be able to run sas2flash, so I could flash the IT firmware. Maybe I'm spoiled, but overall it's been a somewhat confusing journey.

And today I also started looking into getting LTO8 for long-term backups, probably will be even worse, judging by the docs I've gone through so far...

rekoil•4h ago
When I have to deal with a SAS controller my go to is always to see if it's possible to flash it with IT (initiator/target) firmware so that it just becomes basically pass through disks for the OS to handle however it pleases.
diggan•2h ago
Yes, this is exactly why I had to dive into that rabbit hole, since the controller arrived with IR firmware and I need it to run IT...
WillAdams•4h ago
What is the nicest programming environment which will run in this (and fit on a floppy)?

Some small programming tool (nicer than Q/QuickBASIC) which had a nice facility for creating a Text UI could be useful.

vekatimest•4h ago
Maybe Borland Turbo C? I also think Visual Basic for DOS had a text-mode UI editor.
dmoo•3h ago
Indeed VB for dos had a UI designer with buttons, forms, dialogue boxes etc.
_0ffh•4h ago
For nice, you might be interested in DJGPP/RHIDE. It's somewhat more than fits on a floppy disk though.

https://www.delorie.com/djgpp/.

anta40•4h ago
Or Turbo Pascal...
nopcode•1h ago
Or the maintained open source alternative Free Pascal and its Free Pascal IDE.
int_19h•3h ago
It depends on the task. E.g. FoxPro 2.6 is basically proto-RAD, complete with visual form and report designers and an online help system, but it's too high-level for systems programming. Borland Pascal 7.0 is probably the sweet spot of power and convenience - no visual designers, but you get Turbo Vision for TUI, a very nice integrated help system, and decently powerful object-oriented language. Better yet, early versions of FreePascal that targeted 32-bit DOS.

I don't think any of these would fit on a floppy, though; you'd have to unwind a little bit for that. Say, Turbo Pascal 5.5?

snvzz•1h ago
Fasm comes with a cute small DOS IDE.

Or ditch DOS and embrace Wirth's Oberon (the OS and language).

There is a one-floppy build.