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jhallen
joes-sandbox
C2014–2022
jhallen / joes-sandbox

joes-sandbox

Discover this repository through its Hacker News conversations.

25Distinct people
57Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
679GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year57 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-10-24 03:31:51 UTC to 2022-03-06 00:45:44 UTC.

0510152014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 3 submissions, 3 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 2 submissions, 11 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC633
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13211
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Joe Allen's Open Source Projects Projects outside of joes-sandbox libnklabs - A library for quickly making MCU-based products Joe's Own Editor Relaysbc - A single board relay computer Ivy Programming Language Atari Tools CP/M Emulator OrCad Tools Reverse engineer Zon JR XL Acoustic delay line memory (on Hackaday!) ExorSim - A Motorola EXORciser Simulator An I2C bus monitor for an Altera FPGA An item tracking application for an Opticon OPH-1005 or OPH-3001 scanner My YouTube Channel Some projects within joes-sandbox x86 Bootloaders x86 Coff Linker AACC Compiler generator Nicetex Psiman - an early version of markdown Zebra-140 Typesetter Small UNIX utilities Verilog Tools Notif - X Widget Library Farb - arbitrary precision ASCII floating point library SDU - structured data loader JCC - A C language pre-processor / tokenizer A Btree library A version of Malloc Some regular expression code A C library Some compression code Some math code: complex roots / Fourier transform JTERM - an MS-DOS terminal emulator Phantom - A "ghost" clone (partition archiver) Tetris for Zortech-C A drafting program for SCO Xenix
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

57 sources
It's amazing how old ZPL is. I wrote a Zebra-140 driver (in C..) in something like 1993. https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/doc/zebr... It's a simple macro-based typesetting language that can be used to quickly make many different label images from a database. You uploaded the compiled labels into a handheld computer so that labels could be printed on a production line. One option for the computer was the Psion Organizer II. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Organiser
In Writing a printer driver in JavaScript
I've done similar things with UARTs over long distance- I was about to write about it, but I actually have it on github: https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/hw/lined... CAN is interesting in that the protocol is pretty complex, but from software point of view it's just send_packet() and register a handler for receive packets. The annoying thing is that MCUs don't have built-in CAN line drivers. A new thing is 1000BASE-T1- Gigabit Ethernet over a single twisted pair. This is supposed to be the future in the auto world..
In SPI: The serial peripheral interface [video]
I had a good use for these old compilers- in this case I ended up using code from the Zortech-C library to reduce memory usage for ARM embedded. It turns out that the float to ascii conversion functions for printf from the Zortech-C library are much smaller than the ones in newlib. I'm sure they are less accurate, but I don't care for this application. Same for strtod. Also they are faster. I put the code here: https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/blob/master/snippets... I see the Aztec ones for x86 are hand assembly..
In The Official Aztec C Online Museum (2009)
Well it's here, but you probably have to join the group to get access: https://groups.io/g/dosOrCAD/files/OrCAD%20driver%20without%... I put a copy in one of my github repositories: https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/blob/master/pcb/orca... I think this is a description of what's going on: https://airborn.com.au/layout/vddtest.html Well this is getting really off topic, but it appears that you can run DOS programs in 64-bit Windows 10: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/ntvdmx64.html https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64
In I still use WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS
I think there are some applications or problems that are likely to be favourable to native desktop apps for a long time. For inspiration, simply look at what hasn't already become web based. Some things I thought of: 1. Heavy lifting - As others have mentioned, running some code in a browser is quite a few times slower than locally. As Moore's Law comes to a screaming halt we're going to be need to get better at creating efficient software rather than relying on the underlying hardware to get faster. 2. Capability - Some things are inherently difficult to do in the browser, such as custom networking, calling kernel functions, accessing various hardware, etc, etc. You can always have your native app launch a web-based front-end, but going back the other way is not possible by design. 3. Hardware Access - Sometimes you need to access a came
Read the rest
ra, USB device, GPIO, I2C, SPI, run architecture specific instructions on the CPU, access the GPU, etc, etc. Again, the browser typically won't let you access these by default. 4. Security - This comes in a few parts: (a) You're able to bypass "most" security and do what you want within reason. As long as the user ran your application you usually have the same privileges. (b) Now that you're dug-in you can enforce a level of security that may not easily be available otherwise. (c) Features such as app signing mean that the user can more easily guarantee the app came from you, rather than relying on their ability to read the exact URL in some email at 2am. If I run `apt-get install <X>` or equivalent in other OSes there is a chain of accountability. 5. Memory - Put simply the browser adds massive overhead to any application and typically has inefficient data structures. Compare something like Atom [1] to any equivalent native editor for example. (There is some existing efforts in comparing editors [2].) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_Editor [2] https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/editor-p...
In Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
It can absolutely still be useful, and it would make sense for an early stage startup or someone's side project to use it so they're not duplicating work porting it to .NET, Cocoa and Qt or whatever. And sure, having an identical look and feel everywhere is nice. But with all the resources that Slack and Microsoft have, they need to publish a lengthy guide for the users to deal with their performance problems [1]? They take 22 seconds to load a 6 MB XML file [2]? Ehhh... it's not asking that much of a multi-billion dollar company. You deserve better! [1] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/wiki/Performance-Issues [2] https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/editor-p...
In Uber lays off 435 people
My editor JOE has a built-in calculator equivalent to a Casio scientific: for example it can do statistics (sum, count, average, standard deviation) on a block of numbers you select in the edit buffer. I use this all the time. In another project, I wrote a preprocessor for TeX- somewhat like Markdown, so that you can make TeX documents with an easier syntax. One of its features is a built-in calculator/spreadsheet. The idea is that \{1+2+3} is expanded with 6. You can also assign and reference variables \{a=3}. If these appear in a table, you can reference other cells: \{RRD+7} "Get first expression from cell two to the Right Right one Down and add 7 to it". https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/doc/nice... Anyway, I'd like this capability in the editor, will add it someday..
In Soulver – Notepad, meet calculator

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