Top all-time · #4029
Rick Carlino
Personal blog · rickcarlino.com · on HN as rickcarlinosystemsprogramminghardware
Rick Carlino's personal blog at rickcarlino.com covers systems, programming and hardware. Since 2016, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 41 times, most often “Fabulous text-only websites, 2018 edition”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for hands-on technical walkthroughs, such as burning the FlashForth bootloader onto an Arduino and building a Raspberry Pi Linux system, plus a list of text-only websites.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Rick Carlino | Software Systems, Computing History, and Practical Engineering
Most-linked posts?
- Fabulous text-only websites, 2018 edition3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-09-05
- /2017/05/26/up-and-running-with-flashforth-on-arduino-html.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-21
- /2020/keeping-an-offline-copy-of-stackoverflow-with-kiwix.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-07-28
- /2021/seeking-collaborators-for-projects-in-2022.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-12-17
- What Were CGI Scripts?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-21
- Building Tiny Raspberry Pi Linux Images with Buildroot2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-12
What Hacker News says?
I just posted a blog article about this a few days ago. If anyone wants to work on something big in 2022 (very open-ended), please get in touch: https://rickcarlino.com/2021/seeking-collaborators-for-proje... My background is in IoT / full-stack web dev. Media projects are particularly of interest, but I am open to other ideas also.
Comment linking /2021/seeking-collaborators-for-projects-in-2022.html
on “Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?”Submitted A Year of Developer Journals with jrnl.sh as a story · 186 points
HN discussionServer side image maps are a fun one also: https://rickcarlino.com/2021/what-were-server-side-image-map...
Comment linking /2021/what-were-server-side-image-maps.html
on “Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts”Submitted Build a Raspberry Pi Linux System the Hard Way as a story · 132 points
HN discussionMost of your questions revolve around acquiring readers and sharing content. I am not sure my reasons for blogging are the same as yours, but I will say that it has been beneficial for me, both personally and for my career. During job searches, it is helpful to have a collection of writing samples that show I am competent and indeed a real human rather than an LLM fabrication. On a personal level, it’s been very rew…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?”Submitted What Were CGI Scripts? as a story · 130 points
HN discussionWith LLMs being a thing now, plugin systems like this can bring a lot of value to users, assuming the docs are easily LLM readable. I wish more apps had Lua or JS sandboxes for plugins. https://rickcarlino.com/notes/ideas/using-llms-to-create-end...
Comment linking /notes/ideas/using-llms-to-create-end-user-programmable-software.html
on “Plugin System”Submitted Exploring Simplex.Chat, a Scriptable, Decentralized Messaging App as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> https://www.amazon.com/HiLetgo-USBTiny-USBtinyISP-Programmer... > https://rickcarlino.com/2017/05/26/up-and-running-with-flash... Once again, thanks for the links! I don’t have too much time right now, but I’ll definitely have to explore this when I get an opportunity. > Starting Forth by Leo Brodie Funny you mention this… I found it myself, and am most of the way through it already! I’m probably not going through…
Comment linking /2017/05/26/up-and-running-with-flashforth-on-arduino-html.html
on “Lisp in Forth”Submitted Software Tools for Hobby-Scale Projects as a story · 4 points
HN discussionOne of these: https://www.amazon.com/HiLetgo-USBTiny-USBtinyISP-Programmer... It allows you to burn the FlashForth bootloader on an Arduino, or to re-burn the Arduino bootloader if you'd like to program your Arduino with C/C++ instead of Forth. This blog has a good walkthrough of burning the FlashForth bootloader: https://rickcarlino.com/2017/05/26/up-and-running-with-flash...
Comment linking /2017/05/26/up-and-running-with-flashforth-on-arduino-html.html
on “Lisp in Forth”Submitted Fabulous text-only websites, 2018 edition as a story · 4 points
HN discussionGnutella and Gnutella2 used something like a single hash bloom filter to route p2p file queries across the mesh in a less wasteful manner. It was not perfect, but it worked enough to scale to very large user counts. https://rickcarlino.com/notes/p2p/how-gnutella-scaled-to-han...
Comment linking /notes/p2p/how-gnutella-scaled-to-handle-query-traffic.html
on “One Hash Bloom Filters”Submitted Fabulous text-only websites, 2018 edition as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis is a nice tutorial. You learn a lot when you do things starting with the fundamentals. I went through similar things to get openwrt running on a raspberry pi. Turns out you can pull it off if you just follow along step by step, and afterwards you have ideas . EDIT: wait, this other article is awesome too: https://rickcarlino.com/2021/01/21/practices-that-make-raspb...
Comment linking /2021/01/21/practices-that-make-raspberry-pi-work-easier-html.html
on “Build a Raspberry Pi Linux System the Hard Way”Submitted A card memorization game for Forth programmers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSimilar (but NOT identical) concept in RetroForth I really enjoyed learning about years ago: https://rickcarlino.com/2021/til-how-retroforth-implements-d... It’s nice to see Forth internal deep dives hitting the front page, great article.
Comment linking /2021/til-how-retroforth-implements-deferred-behavior.html
on “Implementing DOES> in Forth, the entire reason I started this mess”Submitted Building Tiny Raspberry Pi Linux Images with Buildroot as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis project came out of Rick's blog post: https://rickcarlino.com/2021/seeking-collaborators-for-proje...
Comment linking /2021/seeking-collaborators-for-projects-in-2022.html
on “Forth BBS 2 (1985)”Submitted TIL How RetroForth Implements Deferred Behavior as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI hear this often but haven’t seen too many translation-free alternatives for the non-immersion tasks (eg: memorizing vocabulary for a standardized exam, daily study in a non-immersive environment). Have you seen any good monolingual techniques beyond “just get tons of exposure”? I’ve been experimenting with monolingual vocab this month but it is too soon to say if I like it or not: https://rickcarlino.com/notes/kor…
Comment linking /notes/korean-language/monolingual-vocab-card-experiment.html
on “Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing”Submitted FORTH Programming as a Learning Experience as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI’ve always been fascinated by information systems that predate the transistor. I’ve been slowly compiling a list in my Obsidian notebook. In case anyone else has a similar itch to scratch: https://rickcarlino.com/notes/ideas/primitive-information-te...
Comment linking /notes/ideas/primitive-information-technology.html
on “The Prehistory of Computing, Part II”Submitted Gnutella: A Protocol Outlives the World That Created It as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://www.rickcarlino.com/2020/keeping-an-offline-copy-of-... not so sure about that
Comment linking /2020/keeping-an-offline-copy-of-stackoverflow-with-kiwix.html
on “StackOverflow Is Down”Submitted My First Meshtastic Network as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI’ve been using LLMs to create readable rewrites of RFCs and specs that interest me. It is not precise enough for implementation use, but it has increased my understanding of the underlying RFC. Another useful approach has been asking Codex to implement complex things, like a Kademlia DHT or BitTorrent client in a literate style with the explicit purpose to increase understanding by reviewing the source code. Exampl…
Comment linking /notes/note-dump-and-ai-summaries/index.html
on “How I use LLMs to learn complex topics”Submitted How Gnutella Scaled to Handle Query Traffic as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSome examples of modern tech, which might not be that modern: [1] Reactive programming, seems fairly modern, but can be traced back to the 1970's. [2] Microservices/Serverless, are basically the same as CGI scripts from the early 90's. [3] Software As A Service (SAAS) can be traced back to the 60's apparently... [1] https://spring.io/blog/2016/06/07/notes-on-reactive-programm... [2] http://rickcarlino.com/2019/07/20…
Comment linking /2019/07/20/what-were-cgi-scripts-html.html
on “Ask HN: Concepts the modern tech industry falsely believes it invented?”Submitted Keeping an Offline Copy of StackOverflow with Kiwix (2020) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
