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mac3n

Re:Handles are the better pointers (2018) on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @10:57AM (#50353586)
see Jovial language (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27390796) SERIAL and PARALLEL tables.
Re:Ask HN: What happens when "everyone" codes? on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @10:36AM (#50353322)
not the same as coding, but: https://techjournal.org/the-great-computer-science-exodus-wh...

more coders, less computer science

Re:Northflank Breached on Friday October 30, 2026 @12:31PM (#50306309)
> There's no amount of "nicer to use" that can replace security, at least certainly when selling to enterprises

Azure would beg to differ.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50301854

of course it's 'elite'. sounds much better that way.
sue it isn't some guy in an Armored Personnel Carrier?
Re:Historical Telecommunications on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @12:45PM (#50261899)
described in the delightful "Tent Life in Siberia" by the abovementioned George Kennan.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12328

Re:Historical Telecommunications on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @12:35PM (#50261739)
Anyone remember the Proteon token ring? Seemed much simpler/cheaper than IBM, but they had to switch to IEEE 802.5.
Re:What was a Token Ring network? on Friday October 16, 2026 @05:01PM (#50124649)
everything can be deterministic until you lose the token.
Re:What was a Token Ring network? on Friday October 16, 2026 @05:00PM (#50124629)
the token bus combines the one-user-at-a time of a bus with the potential-token-loss of a ring.

IEEE 802.4 token bus standard was withdrawn

polled buses with a master are pretty common when you don't mind the performance hit and central-point-of-failure. i believe cable networks work this way.

mmmm! Brain-aaS!
another Sam in play here who can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
yeah, sooner later everybody is "the enemy".
Re:Toki Pona on Monday October 05, 2026 @09:46PM (#49973175)
Chinuk Wawa <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_Jargon> a trade pidgin with a simple vocabulary of several hundred words. in common use in the Pacific Northwest a century and a half ago, and still appears in many place names. A few terms even made it into common usage, many by way of the labor movement.
Re:Watson Jr. memo about CDC 6600 on Monday October 05, 2026 @09:32PM (#49973065)
I might have gone to the same college, in the 80s. I was a TA helping students punch FORTRAN on cards - already pretty obsolescent.

One thing about the CDC - it had perhaps the worst command interface I've run into. Data files were modeled as tapes, and you had to keep rewinding them.

Compiling a program appended to the object file, but running ran the start of the file, so you needed to rewind between, lest you run an old version. Much time lost trying to figure out why changes were ineffective.

FORTRAN variables had 8 significant characters, but the linker had only seven, so it was possible to get unintentional aliases.

As a grad student, I got to use a VAX.

Re:'Neanderthals Among Us' by Peter Sahlins Review on Sunday October 04, 2026 @06:27PM (#49958582)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.11.711219v1...

"Hypothesis: A modern human range expansion ~300,000 years ago explains Neandertal origins", an alternatate take by David Reich, who has done a lot of work in this area. He notes that Neanderthal haplotypes appears largely replaced by Sapiens.

This would make them our siblings rather than our cousins.

what's the Salmon thinking?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/scicurious-brain/ign...

> At the fish counter, he spoke the words that will echo down the centuries as a testimony to the dedication and drive of neuroscientists throughout the ages:

> "I need a full length Atlantic Salmon. For science."

Re:Let's Ditch Google (Verb) on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @02:40PM (#49912679)
i "altavista'd it.
Re:SDF Public Access Unix System ... est. 1987 on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @02:34PM (#49912616)
see also theworld.com
> "could"

yeah, i've written [supercomputer] code like that

Re:The Test on Friday September 25, 2026 @12:55PM (#49847010)
oh, man! i want to see Philomena Cunk interview some of these guys!
Re:Any nerds out there who've read a lot of research papers? on Thursday September 24, 2026 @05:00PM (#49836663)
see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-968X.12...

include a SUMMARIUM in Latin and ΣΥΝΟΨΙΣ in Greek, for that real Scholar effect.

Re:Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop on Thursday September 24, 2026 @10:54AM (#49831509)
This talks about the "desktop" experience. My desktop is a laptop. I don't have a desk or a large external monitor. Tiling window managers don't work for me. I try to keep windows stacked in different virtual desktops, but they're getting pretty crowded. I've got Slack and Signal in one, editor and terminals in another, etc.

I work mostly with remote cloud services or headless servers via VPNs. For the cloud I rely on Firefox over networked X (something that is getting harder to support).

A single-computer desktop is no longer a realistic working environment.

it means they're Going Mobile. And they Won't Get Fooled Again.
Be careful!

I hear the old Microsoft Word save files used memory dumps, which became an undocumented nightmare of a file format.

You need total control over memory layout of the saved runtime state. No hidden fields. No pointers either - you want to be able to reload at another address. Sooner or later, you might want to add some state, and you'd need a place to put it.

That said, I have used mmap something like this, mostly so state (data) could be paged in on demand.

Re:Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating? on Sunday September 13, 2026 @02:04PM (#49686785)
"the fish stinks from the head down"
I'm afraid trust and OpenAI are inconsistent.

After all, they're on a mission from Roko's Basilisk!

i think it's dark _energy_ that's used to explain accelerating expansion.

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