News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

k310

Re:Tiny Basic for Arduino on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @10:59AM (#50353628)
We've come a long way. Dr. Dobbs, Volume 1 #5

http://cini.classiccmp.org/pdf/DrDobbs/DrDobbs-1976-05-v1n5....

Firefox will complain about http. Allow download. I checked it, it's real pdf.

Source (8080) available on github [0]

Others: [1]

I forgot how I first loaded it. Doubtful that I typed it in, but I do recall getting a paper tape from somewhere and loading it via a cheap optical reader.

Life got interesting when I got a NorthStar disk for the IMSAI. And ever after.

[0] https://github.com/kevinthecheung/tiny-basic

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC

Re:Affinity for iPad on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:32AM (#50351772)
2 GB, ipadOS 18. Free. Canva AI features and business features are extra AIP. Content local, upload to Canva optional. Canva account required, but no subscription for the free version.

> Canva does not use any of your Affinity content to train or develop AI features, and that includes anything you create using Canva AI tools within Affinity.

Related, not paywalled:

Dual‐Band Electrochromic Smart Window for Dynamic Switching Between Radiative Cooling and Solar Heating

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391903413_Dual-Band...

War without end. It's how dictators stay in power.

'Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.' --- 1984

Also found at:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/us-strikes-iran-s-qeshm...

https://www.rferl.org/a/33889371.html

Re:The future in old computer magazines (1984–2004) on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:36PM (#50347294)
The Archive seems to make a compromise in its scanning (software) that renders images (which are halftones ... dot patterns) sort of OK, but at the same time renders text as less than black characters on a muddy gray background.

I have asked in this forum if anyone could write scanning software that recognized images as images and rendered them well, and at the same time, recognized text areas, and threshholded them 0-100%.

When I must, I run a page through GIMP and do the above.

Alternatively, I run a pdf through Apple Preview.app, sometimes darkening it (Export -- lessen brightness Quartz filter) so that the next step, (Export -- black and white Quartz filter) will work well.

Images are trashed this way, so I then open up the original and the threshholded pdf's in "contact sheet" view, and swap images for the corresponding blackened-out pages.)

SWELL. It only is worthwhile when a pdf has few images, typically the cover. Line drawings do well in this scenario.

Of course, I prefer free and open source.

Try undoing Prop 13. It only benefits long-standing businesses and the few who never leave their home in 50 or more years.

For everyone else, the tax base resets upon sale, and people sell and buy homes.

Surprise.

Re:Ask HN: Is anyone else struggling with AI wealth FOMO? on Saturday October 31, 2026 @03:19AM (#50313944)
That usually marks a peak. The old saying was, when cab drivers brag about their market success, it's over. You described speculation.

The worst career and life killers are "woulda, coulda, shoulda."

I so wanted an academic career, say, in astrophysics or such. Then a "here's your uniform" war, and later various jobs in aerospace, university (staff), investment banking (unix servers), sales engineer for said servers, a startup or two.

I could have blamed that war for trashing a Nobel career, but I supported their computing. Not spectacular like the zucks of the time, but honest work, and I never harmed or took advantage of anyone, not in the service (USCG) nor in aerospace nor others.

A guy at Sun said that he bought a TV for a quarter millon. He sold Sun stock to buy it, and it went to the sky with the dot com boom.

If you want a coulda, I owned an Apple-1 and traded it at a swap meet for who knows what. I could never get a cassette tape working. They sell for over $600K now. So it goes.

Real value is often delivered by teams rather than an individual. I was the Woz kind of guy whose Jobs never showed up. I'm not griping. That's life.

Try to win in other ways. That cabbie probably blew the money gambling, and there's the story of a new IPO millionaire who drove his Ferrari off the road in Los Gatos.

Money? There's always someone with more, to make you jealous, except for one person, who is extremely unhappy and fearful of losing his money and his race being obliterated (It isn't). He only gripes and bitches about whatever.

Drugs? Sure.

Am I jealous? Hell no. The only thing I kinda envy is that my kid never smeared a booger on the president's desk. My own pranks were smaller, and my kid always was and is, very considerate.

Happiness from within.

I have pictures, slides, official documents (a few) and some negatives from family in pre-internet and pre cheap disk drive times. And Dad's paintings.

Legible media were a way of "preserving what's worth preserving" via what wasn't thrown away, and give or take disaster or deliberate shredding.

A kind of quality ranking, but what do we do in the age of bot clickbait "quantity over quality?"

Must we keep everything? I'll keep my slides even after that are scanned, but I already sorted out the best out of space and access concerns.

Sometimes constraints nudge us in the "right" direction.

Looking at my disk drives (seriously in need of sorting ) very little is unique (my products) [0], a lot of photo files and scans, and a ton of material I downloaded from the internet, of which a tiny bit is really still useful.

And books and music score downloads, which will probaby be safely archived by others.

I don't regret giving away hundreds of pounds of printed musical scores. They never laid flat, anyway. The ipad does.

[0] even when 100mb disks were common, one author said that his writings would fit on a floppy.

Re:Democrats' Secret Effort to Stack Alaska's Ballot on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:31PM (#50310420)
Posted previously (same NYT article)

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291006
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50282708
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50275750
So I have two questions:

1. If this is illegal (it isn't [0] ruled by Alaska Supreme Court in June, 2026) then why wasn't the uproar done much earlier? You know the reason. Certain presidents (who shall remain nameless) are desperate beyond measure.

Epstein investigations and revelation of hidden material coming?

2. A bit of trolling HN with repeated duplicate posts? Grow up, kiddies.

[0] https://www.rawstory.com/dan-sullivan-2677130432/

Re:Is a $100K salary good enough in your state? on Friday October 30, 2026 @03:12PM (#50308805)
Social Security, plus IRA RMD and one pension, some small mutual funds, don't come close to that number.
The act is dated July 15, 2026

Is this coming up for a vote just now? Is congress actually in session, or has Mike Johnson called for yet another vacation, in order to stall embarrassing motions from being introduced?

I looked for reasons but couldn't find any.

Re:Autonomous Airships Keep Tabs on Energy Infrastructure on Thursday October 29, 2026 @12:09PM (#50291342)
Tell PG&E. We've got helicopters buzzing about the countryside, checking power lines.

Whereas, from my ridge I can see 10 or 12 poles. I'll report for cheap.

Just my entire electric bill.

Re:Ask HN: Which is the best textbook you have ever read? on Thursday October 29, 2026 @10:49AM (#50290035)
I was going to say One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow, but that's not a textbook, so what stands out in my mind are the Feynmann Lectures.

When I started out in computing, think 8080 and 6502, there were basically no books. On the optics end, which eventually gave way to computing, probably Modern Optical Engineering, by Warren Smith.

Re:Open U.S. Department of Homeland Security Directory on Thursday October 29, 2026 @10:12AM (#50289397)
Oh the irony.

> A ... senior Trump administration official allegedly told Via The Independent that “if a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially the Chinese aren’t far behind.”

And who are that "bunch of kids"?

> The company in question is called Cathedral, which was founded by former members of the defunct US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a US government initiative established to reduce federal spending and bureaucracy, while modernizing government technology and operations.

The same "kids" that hacked every government computer system they could get their hands on. With Trump's blessing.

Note: this was via a bug bounty program.

Re:Tell HN: I know Firefox has update when it starts to glitch on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @01:04PM (#50276829)
Maybe it's something I did, but lately, Firefox won't write "print to pdf" files to external drives. (mac)

There was an update last night, Oops, same deal. No message, no file.

Writes to the Documents directory.

I do have lots of extensions and window manager tweaks going on, though I cleared history yesterday.

Re:Ask HN: Should something be done about paywalled articles? on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @11:18AM (#50275141)
If something is paywalled, and it interests me,

1. I'll go through the list of paywall-busters, and sometimes

2. just put the title into the search bar to see if the paywalled article has been syndicated. Quite a few (I can't say many) articles are syndicated by MSN, and many paywalled journal papers are indeed freely available from other journals, arxiv, and the author's institution.

In the latter case, the OP really should check and save a lot of repeated labor. The freely available copies are as ethical as can be to access. Either a syndication fee was paid, or the material was free in the first place and some troll put up a paywall.

My opinion.

The party must rename everything and rewrite history (1984)

From Emmanuel Goldstein's work:

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM [0]

PDF download: [1]

History must be rewritten to support the party.

As a web page: [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oli...

[1] https://archive.org/download/the-theory-and-practice-of-olig...

[2] https://genius.com/Emmanuel-goldstein-the-theory-and-practic...

The party must rename everything and rewrite history (1984)

From Emmanuel Goldstein's work:

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM [0]

PDF download: [1]

History must be rewritten to support the party.

As a web page: [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oli...

[1] https://archive.org/download/the-theory-and-practice-of-olig...

[2] https://genius.com/Emmanuel-goldstein-the-theory-and-practic...

I posted on another thread.

> A pilot phase with 38 ministry employees kicked off last year to trial Collabora's suite with Office documents. However, this trial was terminated when elections took place earlier this year. A spokesperson confirmed that the experiment had concluded, and would not resume again. They also confirmed that no evaluation benchmarking Collabora's performance against Microsoft Office had taken place either.

Okay.

PS the main gripe was ODF vs. OOXML

Gripe defeats evaluation.

Re:Apple introduces the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @11:23AM (#50260738)
I don't want AI. I am preparing for a jump (back) to Linux. "Choice" disappeared, and yes, I know about the "fix" [0]

Maybe this idea may be foreign to many, but personal computers were something I built from bags of parts socketed and/or soldered onto S-100 cards, and that experience was the foundation of most of my career.

I was a Henry Higgins, and proud of my Eliza(s). While I get along cooperatively with Eliza (the happy ending to "My Fair Computer") I don't want Eliza to be my caretaker. This morphing of computers and internet into nannies and caretakers is IMO reverting to the "good old days" of servants. While some inventions are truly liberating (ask the guy who missed his Mom at an airport and freaked out for hours until she showed up at my home, courtesy of a cab or bus) how many are just replacing people with machines?

I could seriously use some friendship of the human variety, rather than a humanoid in a box (or an especially nice robot as in "I Sing the Body Electric" by Ray Bradbury, memorable on The Twilight Zone) Try being older and living alone, typing away.

I don't even use GPS any more, since I trashed Apple Maps when they kissed the Emperor's big fanny.

[0] https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI

Re:Beauty Is Everywhere. But What Is It For? on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @09:10AM (#50258663)
To see beauty as pattern or "rhyme" in other things, say a house or canoe or other people is to distance ourselves from them, whereas mystics see the oneness, and I view my photos that way. Sometimes sunrises present themselves in nice geometric "rule of thirds" ways, and at other times, gloriously irregular.

The author uses Gerard Manley Hopkins for a sense of "rhyme"

> “By taking pleasure in the pure experience of rhyme,” he writes, “we provide the training sets for our own minds.”

Mechanistic? I read "The Windhover" by Hopkins long ago. It's a love poem to life itself [0]

When we identify with the universe rather than set ourselves apart from it, whether by the Mystic Law of Buddhism, or identifying with Christ, as Hopkins did, or other, we see both form and purpose, whether divine or natural, the "wish of the universe" since we are both physical, geometric as the laws of physics IRL dictate, but also metaphysical.

Why are things beautiful? Because they "are". Especially in music. My love for Sibelius' violin concerto was not shared by a friend, who found its expressiveness painful.

It's how we relate to things and others.

Even in embers, notoriously irregular.

> and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

> Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

But heck, it's a book review and plug.

[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover

Does anyone remember when computers "did things" for you, like power tools do, rather than being your care giver?

I won't give up agency in life.

Re:Quasiturbine Chainsaw on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @08:12AM (#50257971)
In a practical sense, dragging a compressor and hose around is like a generator and cords.

Or damn long hose and cords.

Batteries work fine and electric motors run smoothly.

Re:Why Notes will never let us edit Markdown on Monday October 26, 2026 @04:24PM (#50250394)
Notes blows away line breaks.

Use Text Fixer. [0] I use it every day to make video transcripts readable. Such tools pop up and go away as ad or other revenue fails to pay the bills.

Two modes:

> Convert line breaks to paragraph breaks (it makes paragraphs by converting single line breaks to double line breaks)

> Add a paragraph break after sentences (for text with absolutely no line breaks, this can dramatically increase readability)

Otherwise, I paste into Pages and kick up the paragraph spacing.

Geniuses.

[0] https://www.textfixer.com/tools/add-line-breaks.php

Translation: We created this monster and please pay us even more to contain it.

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