asalahli (u/asalahli)

asalahli commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025) · Posted by u/david927

robotguy · 4 days ago

I'm working on Mutacortechs, an ALife simulation where "organisms" each have their own emulated 16-bit processor with 64K RAM. Like Core Wars for the 21st century. It's a small project compared to what some others here are working on, but it's an order of magnitude larger than anything this embedded EE has ever written. I have the ISA designed, assembler complete, emulator stage 1 complete (160/204 instructions implemented), and the start of the simulation working. Last night I wrote a program in custom assembly for an "organism" that looked around, found food, moved toward it, and ate it. I'm pretty excited by the milestone!

asalahli · 4 days ago

Any way to follow the progress of the project?

asalahli commented on Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted) evanhahn.com/stopping-bad... · Posted by u/emschwartz

paulbjensen · 20 days ago

In theory you can change the licence and hope that those that use the software respect the licence terms, but that depends on trusting others.

I think of the case of the Russian programmer who was arrested and jailed for stealing proprietary code from Goldman Sachs. During the trial it was revealed that Goldman Sachs would use open source software and replace the software licence with their own:

"Open source was an idea that depended on collaboration and sharing, and Serge had a long history of contributing to it. He didn’t fully understand how Goldman could think it was O.K. to benefit so greatly from the work of others and then behave so selfishly toward them. “You don’t create intellectual property,” he said. “You create a program that does something.” But from then on, on instructions from Schlesinger, he treated everything on Goldman Sachs’s servers, even if it had just been transferred there from open source, as Goldman Sachs’s property. (At Serge’s trial Kevin Marino, his lawyer, flashed two pages of computer code: the original, with its open-source license on top, and a replica, with the open-source license stripped off and replaced by the Goldman Sachs license.)"

From: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma...

asalahli · 19 days ago

https://archive.is/J3n3q

asalahli commented on Building a Durable Execution Engine with SQLite morling.dev/blog/building... · Posted by u/ingve

yyx · a month ago

Sounds like a Celery with SQLAlchemy backend.

asalahli · a month ago

Canvas, celery's orchestration system, leaves a lot to be desired

asalahli commented on Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering? · Posted by u/_1tan

asalahli · a month ago

Check out The Payments Engineer Playbook[0]. I don't work on financial systems but I'm subscribed and like the occasional distributed systems insights.

One of the posts turned up on HN front page a year ago[1]. Thats how I discovered it

0. https://news.alvaroduran.com/

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42269227

asalahli commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025) · Posted by u/david927

n0um3n4 · a month ago

I’m working on a MUD server. I want text-based adventures.

Also... would it be crazy if services and social media were text-based applications too?

Not necessarily through telnet, but with some kind of standard so that instead of the web/browser, we use a CLI(s).

I dunno, maybe I’m just bored.

asalahli · a month ago

Recently I've been wanting to build a chat server that works over ssh. And by that I don't mean it uses the ssh protocol but that you ssh into the server and the shell you get is the chat client.

One day, maybe

asalahli commented on Become unbannable from your email karboosx.net/post/PJOveGV... · Posted by u/bfoks

polycaster · 2 months ago

I‘m following this scheme for years now and frankly never found a site that only accepts selected providers.

asalahli · 2 months ago

AliExpress is one of them, as far as I know

asalahli commented on Litestream v0.5.0 fly.io/blog/litestream-v0... · Posted by u/emschwartz

turnsout · 3 months ago

Real talk, how do you actually avoid N+1? I realize you can do complicated JOINs, but isn't that almost as bad from a performance perspective? What are you really supposed to do if you need to, e.g. fetch a list of posts along with the number of comments on each post?

asalahli · 3 months ago

Avoiding N+1 doesn't have to mean limiting yourself to 1 query. You can still fetch the posts in one query and the comments of _all_ posts in a separate query, just don't issue a query for _each_ post.

More formally, the number of queries should be constant and not linearly scaling with the number of rows you're processing.

asalahli commented on I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/speckx

geerlingguy · 3 months ago

Just to add context — I've been experimenting on my 2nd channel (Level 2 Jeff) with titles that are straight/barebones exactly describing the content of the video, vs a slight bit of clickbait (never untrue, but certainly more intriguing and not describing the exact topic of the video).

The ones that are dead straight with no clickbait are 10/10 (the worst performers), and usually by a massive margin. Even with the same thumbnail.

The sad fact is, if you want your work seen on YouTube, you can't just say "I built a 10 node Raspberry Pi blade cluster and ran HPL and LLMs on it".

Some people are fine with a limited audience. And that's fine too! I don't have to write on my blog at all—I earn negative income from that, since I pay for hosting and a domain, but I hope some people enjoy the content in text form like I do.

asalahli · 3 months ago

FWIW I like Level 2 Jeff more and I would watch the videos with or without the clickbait-y titles. As you've said I've never found your titles deceptive so if they bring you more money, then more power to you

asalahli commented on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah nbcnews.com/news/us-news/... · Posted by u/david927

asalahli · 3 months ago

I don't think dang was a moderator at that time

asalahli commented on The key to getting MVC correct is understanding what models are stlab.cc/tips/about-mvc.h... · Posted by u/csb6

whstl · 3 months ago

This problem that MVC has is similar to the problem with OOP itself, with monads, or with some design patterns: the original/popular definitions were so incredibly abstract and disconnected from real life usage that they ended up being whatever the person implementing it wanted it to be.

And then, 10, 20 years after the fact, people will start attacking popular implementations that differ from the original using some "new canonic interpretation" that is either extremely recent, or an interpretation that is old but was lost in time.

This is especially common around Smalltalk and OOP for some reason. Smalltalk's OOP is nothing like what existed either before or after, but since Alan Kay invented the term, Smalltalk is weaponised against C++/Java-style OOP. Not that C++/Java OOP is the bees knees, but at least their definition is teachable and copyable.

Design patterns suffer because in most explanations the context is completely missing. Patterns are totally useless outside very specific contexts. "Why the hell do I need a factory when I can use new"? Well, the whole point is that in some frameworks you don't want to use new Whatever, you dummy. If only this was more than a two-sentence blurb in the DDD book (and the original patterns book totally glosses over this, for almost all patterns).

And monads became the comical case, because they are totally okay in Haskell, but once it gets "explained" and migrated to other languages they become this convoluted mostly useless abstraction at best, footgun at worst (thinking of the Ruby one here).

asalahli · 3 months ago

> the original/popular definitions were so incredibly abstract and disconnected from real life usage that they ended up being whatever the person implementing it wanted it to be.

This is what happened with REST too, and it frustrates me more than it probably should.

The original pattern is such a good idea and not even remotely abstract. It's a well defined architectural pattern for a well defined problem yet people still managed to bastardize it to the point that the term REST barely means anything today