Posted by ColinWright 5 days ago
Inspired is a strong word. I didn't invent the concept of an accurate emulator, although I'm certainly a fan of his approach.
A brand new 68k Mac emulator quietly dropped last night!!
“Snow” can emulate the Mac 128k, 512k, Plus, SE, Classic, and II. It supports reading disks from bitstream and flux-floppy images, and offers full execution control and debugging features for the emulated CPU. Written using Rust, it doesn't do any ROM patching or system call interception, instead aiming for accurate hardware-level emulation.
* Download link (Mac, Windows, Linux): https://snowemu.com
* Documentation link: https://docs.snowemu.com
* Source link: https://github.com/twvd/snow
* Release announcement: https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12509
-- https://oldbytes.space/@smallsco/114747196289375530
I understand why links get re-written, but I think the context is relevant and can help the random reader who is unfamiliar with the project.
I wish Apple would bring back the white menubar background and the coloured logo.
The white menubar makes the whole computer easier to use in a small but constant way. The coloured apple icon would suggest they no longer have their heads stuck up their assess and might bring back "fun" rather than "showing off" to their design process. And then maybe, maybe... with that "suggestion" symbolised in the UI, we can hope they might bring back the more rigorous user-centric design process they used to be famous for.
I suppose a built in volume mixer is still too much to ask for though.
It’s not churn its change, and it’s inevitable. No sense getting worked up over it.
The only improvement I've seen has been for mac they have the command+space launcher which is functionally like the win+type the app you want. Graphical file browsers haven't changed since the original Mac and/or Win 3.1. Mac has never had a good tree view IMO but they do have a version of it.
The only reason UIs would change at this point is to keep UI/UX folks employed and busy, and give the marketing department something new to talk about.
But I'm not going to upgrade whilst the back/next buttons are floating 3m above the window as suggested in that screen shot.
I go through phases with transparency off or on.
Sometimes I enjoy the translucent menus. They make the machine look "glossy" and expensive. But they're definitely harder to read than opaque flat ones.
With "reduce transparency" on, it's better, but the menubar still isn't white. It's a textured light grey that's closer to the look of an unfocused app window than the solid, dependable, flat thing I wish it still was.
A color logo might be added with an overlay app – or you reminisce a black&white screen.
Links to the actual project are in the submitted post, so you can get an overview before then being directed to the project itself.
As always YMMV, indeed, YMWV, but I like seeing the announcement giving the context rather than a bare pointer to the project.
But as the Man in Black says in The Princess Bride: "Get used to disappointment".
The guidelines are clear that the original/canonical source is what we want on HN:
Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
But you're welcome to post a comment with links to other sources that give the extra information and context, and we can pin it to the top of the thread, or do what I've done here and put them in the top text.
I understand the rationale, and as someone who moderates other communities I can totally understand why this is administered as a blanket policy. Having said that, it does sometimes result in what I think of as sub-optimal situations where information is unnecessarily lost or obscured.
In particular, adding a link to the original post, as you have done here, is likely to be of minimal value. People will click on the headline link, wonder what it's about or why it's "news", and close the window. On the other hand, clicking through first to the post means people will see the context, then those who are interested will click through to the project site(s). I've done this analysis in other contexts and found that the decision tree for engagement and user-information is in favour of linking to the post, not the project.
But as I say, I understand your position, and in the end, it's not my forum, not my community, and not my choice.
We always want the source that contains the greatest amount of information about the topic. As I wrote in the other reply in this subthread, the heuristic is whether a source contains "significant new information" vs an alternative.
That means, as explained in that reply, an article about the findings of an academic study is better than the academic paper, if it contains significant new information that isn't easily found from the paper itself (particularly if the article contains quotes from interviews with the researchers). A project creator’s blog post about a new project or release is better than a link to the project's GitHub page.
We generally prefer not to link to a third-party's social media post about a project, on the basis that it's light on significant new information and takes traffic/attention away from the primary source or another in-depth article about it. (It's different if it's a 3rd-party's detailed blog post about a project, which includes their own experiences using the project and comparing it with other projects in the same category. But then it's more of a review, than a report about the project itself.) Another problem with submitting a 3rd-party post about a project is that it then becomes a topic of debate in the comments, why one source was chosen over another, which happened here.
In a case like this, the information that was in that social media post could easily have been quoted in a comment in the thread, that we could have pinned.
Given that the author of the project posted an announcement in a discussion forum, there could be a case for making that the HN source, given that it contains the other relevant links and some additional commentary, though in this case it's a bit light on detail. But it makes all the difference that the source we link to is by the author of the project.
In the case of this submission, the story has been on the front page for 12 hours already, including some time at #1, and is still going strong, so I don't think anything has been lost.
You're always welcome to make a case for why a particular source is the one that contains the most "significant new information" and is thus the one that should be the HN source.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381297
[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19244
[3]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-pyramid-like-shape-always-lands-the-same-side-up-20250625/In the case you cited, the Quanta Magazine article is a report about the study’s findings that is readable and understandable to lay people, and includes backstory and quotes from interviews with the researchers and also images.
I.e., there’s plenty of information in the article that isn’t in the paper. So we’ll always go with that kind of article, over the paper itself, particularly in the case of Quanta Magazine which is a high-quality publication.
In other cases an article is “blog spam” - I.e., it just rewords a study without adding any new information, and in those cases we’ll link directly to the study, or to a better article if someone suggests it.
Anyone is always welcome to suggest a source that is the most informative about a topic and we’ll happily update the link to that.