MS Paint IDE
79 comments
·March 5, 2025jtwaleson
passivegains
> wifi for servers
I urge you to reconsider. Potential customers and applicants will immediately go all in and the "but this doesn't make any sense" step will never happen. We'll be reading blog posts like "I'm hooked on PCP (the Post-Cabling Paradigm)" from Google SRE's with comments praising the downfall of "Big Ethernet" while the emissions from datacenters vaporize flocks of migrating birds.
jtwaleson
Yes! The servers will look lit without those ugly cables. Zero-downtime cross-rack migrations will become possible.
FuriouslyAdrift
Cannot tell you how many uncomfortable conversations I have had trying to explain that you still need to run cables for power to wireless cameras (the outdoor cams work off of solar quite well, though).
hateful
But - hear me out - if all of your servers did have wifi - and it was usually disabled - but you could enable it, move the server, then disable it - that might be something?
I know having a redundant server is better - but there's something to it.
Also, this reminds me of a post I read a while ago about them moving a server from one building to another without unplugging it or something.
[Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059243]
itishappy
The technician changing the rack:
LeifCarrotson
It would take some downtime (or at least a really long extension cord and redundant power supplies for swapping one-by-one) because you'd still need to connect it to power.
The solution is obvious: Qi inductive wireless charge coils on the outside of the server cases.
spydum
Wireless fiber is the way of the future
mystified5016
Put a micro UPS in the server and just haul it around campus still online
jayd16
I'm down but I'm going to need Power Over Wifi for all my security cameras too.
throwway120385
I've been prototyping this but my neighbors are starting to complain about their canned foods coming out warm from the cupboard.
freedomben
One man's bug is another man's feature
FuriouslyAdrift
power over fiber is also a thing (it has very narrow use cases)
buryat
mschf is pretty close to what you're describing
jtwaleson
Wow, what a gem, thanks for recommending this! https://mschfhotels.com/products/flipped-flop
Suppafly
Those high heeled slides are kinda cool.
emchammer
SkiFree as a Service
navbaker
Enterprise tier adds the ability to disable users being devoured by the yeti?
rzzzt
Just the SSO login, sorry.
doubled112
Being devoured could be considered not safe for work.
xattt
Monetization opportunities include: pay-per-jump and Abominable Snow Monster rescue fee.
duckilicious
If you could make it as fast and reliable as ethernet you will be even richer. Cabling and getting those right at the scale of big cloud providers is a costly matter. Not to talk about technician errors losing these providers a lot of money which you will be able to solve.
eddythompson80
You can apply to Urbit.
ashoeafoot
It has a point though. Anything using clichees to communicate ,using something everyone knows, can spread like wildfire.
This is why some of user facing programable stuff pre node gives the users a interface like excel.
ironmanszombie
That was very funny. You should start a blog. If you already do, give out the link.
saghm
This reminds me of the classic StackOverflow question (maybe inspired by it?): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5508110/why-is-this-prog...
null
hombre_fatal
If anyone's confused, you can scroll down on the homepage.
I didn't realize that until I accidentally bumped my track pad.
Sometimes when things fit a little too neatly above the fold, it seems like there's nothing below it.
timando
It automatically resizes so even though I have a tall screen, I didn't think to scroll down because it looked like a basic landing page and had links at the top.
null
nashashmi
Whhhhyyyyy?
> The IDE may seem like a joke, but the research and development gone into it is most definitely not.
> MS Paint IDE uses a custom OCR that can be trained by nearly any font in any size, reading code from images in just miliseconds. The IDE's compiler and program output are in .png's, and automatically underlines any errors present and provides syntax highlighting with Java, Go, Python, and JavaScript currently being supported.
> The IDE also allows for arbitrarily editing any text file through Paint via a context menu option, with native-looking button overlays onto MS Paint to perform IDE actions.
why?
haswell
On HN, I think a better question is exactly the opposite: why not?!
I’ve built bizarre things that no one will use purely to learn about things.
Many projects are about the process itself and less about the outcome. Every one of those “useless” projects has informed my productive work throughout my career.
ninetyninenine
Just in the past couple of weeks someone ported doom into typescripts type system. Even bigger why.
david422
I'm gonna guess it started as a fun idea, and the fun continued by solving and implementing fun new features ...
But seems like a huge amount of time sunk into something that I can't imagine anyone would actually use for more than a couple of minutes.
INTPenis
Just think of all the useful software they could have written.
treve
Just think of the shareholder value they could have created instead of having fun.
jancsika
But also just think of all the useful software that hasn't been written by people sitting around thinking about all the useful software that could be written.
I'd love to see a project on github that mines HN posts for a decent sized list of this.
I'll start-- off the top of my head I remember a post from Mike Hearn about starting the web from scratch using a format that announces the size of the incoming message rather than making the recipient check for terminator(s).
There must be a dozen dozen such thoughts-without-software of "the web, but good" on here.
If we have a list then you could plug it in to a script and have a spit out a random set, and then you could focus specifically on those.
Anyway, I'm thinking it should be stored and maintained as a quine...
prophesi
It made me laugh, and that's reason enough for me to code anything.
notepad0x90
We need awards for absurdity, I love this. Lots of good ideas and innovation come from the pursuit of the absurd. Don't ask why, ask why not!
Lramseyer
As of recent, I have had this pet theory that there's a brilliance / stupidity spectrum, but if you go too far in one direction it loops back on itself. Some things are just so stupid that they're brilliant. I really like this!
Also, I should clarify that "brilliance" and "stupidity" in this theory are not raw intelligence, but the application of said intelligence.
thumb
I can see utility in something like this where someone sent you a screenshot of code and you wish to compile/execute the code in the screenshot. Anything else is a bonus. I dig the project, keep it up!
grodriguez100
Planned features: acquire JetBrains
(https://wiki.ms-paint-i.de/features)
Looks good to me. Solid product and a solid roadmap :-)
SamBam
Nice, although I was disappointed that you program by typing into MS Paint. I would have thought trying to draw the letters using your touchpad would be more intuitive.
Every bank seems to accept the weird single line that gets drawn when I try and scrawl my signature using my trackpad, so there must be quite a bit of interesting magic going on there.
glitchc
The secret is that no one is checking that scrawl for authenticity. Not unless there's actual fraud, that's when the forensic experts are brought out to analyze and pontificate.
SamBam
Yeah, that was a joke. It's the same with the single line I draw across the screen after I swipe my credit card.
omnibrain
This is a true piece of art!
adhamsalama
It doesn't have any AI features? Amazing. I might actually use it.
sakesun
Next version of MS Recall/Copilot will watch the code you type in any IDE or editor and try to give compiler warning automatically.
gpderetta
Needs StableDiffusion as a copilot alternative!
odo1242
Technically OCR itself is an AI feature though lol
cantrecallmypwd
OCR predates modern AI including deep learning and LLMs. It worked based on heuristics that were hard-coded. These techniques are faster and require less CPU power but are more error-prone while AI-assisted combined heuristics for written and typed content recognition can deal with more variability. Even still, the USPS employs people (or at least it did) to correct addresses manually that its automated pre-modern AI address scanning software cannot determine with enough confidence. Perhaps modern AI (deep learning) could replace most of those jobs but perhaps not all as some could be read by humans that algorithms might not be able to decide with enough confidence and other labels are truly undecipherable even with all the AI techniques in the world and need to be returned to sender (RTS).
naikrovek
People who have web pages for graphical tools of any kind, where screenshots of the tool are not front & center on the website, I have a question for you: WHY?!
If I ever become filthy rich, I would like to start companies around nonsensical products. Just to see how long you can make it last until potential customers and applicants are like "but this doesn't make any sense". This project is a perfect fit! Other ideas I had were things like wifi for servers.