News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

woolybully

Re:ASCII by Jason Scott on Friday May 15, 2026 @02:52PM (#48152378)
Where can I read about his stalker and a different person trying to unalive his family. He alludes to these in passing on the linked blogpost, but I can’t find more.
Re:Autodesk's John Walker Explained HP and IBM in 1991 on Thursday November 06, 2025 @02:41PM (#45839393)
Also nitpicking: “bespoke” means made for a particular customer. I think here you need to”proprietary”.
Re:An Efficient Implementation of SELF (1989) [pdf] on Sunday October 26, 2025 @07:23PM (#45715940)
Taivalsaari’s Kevo is a marvelous language.
But Simon Peyton-Jones is UKish.
Tim Sweeney & Epic are creating the language Verse whose logic functional underpinnings will make concurrency & correctness easier in Fortnite. https://youtu.be/ub-dls31Pyw
Re:Tiny Glade: How Could They Do This? [video] on Wednesday October 16, 2024 @06:31PM (#41864514)
How could they do what? I watched for a few minutes, and they mentioned that people might lose a lot of stuff they worked on, but didn't indicate what that was. What did they do?
Re:Ask HN: Intro to Game Development path for a 12 year old? on Saturday September 07, 2024 @02:12AM (#41471830)
nand2Tetris https://www.nand2tetris.org/

30 Days Lost in Space https://inventr.io/products/adventure-kit-30-days-lost-in-sp...

CodinGame https://www.codingame.com/start/

Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess (book)

Soma Cube (there are lots of versions, both licensed and unlicensed, but be sure to get the booklet that shows 30 or more figures that can be built). https://fam-bundgaard.dk/SOMA/NEWS/N160817.HTM#PARKER

Thank you so much for this link. This article is so much more informative than the article of the title of this thread, which does, in my opinion, more harm than good to the pro-climate change crowd with its misleading catastrophizing.
Re:Pain is not the unit of effort on Friday August 18, 2023 @03:17PM (#37180706)
Why? Have you been burned before?
Re:A collection of quant riddles with answers on Friday August 04, 2023 @11:43AM (#37001565)
These are not riddles.
Luckily, your interests are very, very inexpensive.

One of the worst things school systems teach us, incorrectly, is that life is a linear progression. Every person on a career ladder is missing out on other career ladders that may be better for them.

Apply to every job that looks interesting, network, get in the habit of checking the careers section of websites you visit.

Locate a job advert you’re not qualified for, spend a week watching YouTubes on the topic, and apply.

Walk 3 miles across your town and count how many “hiring” signs you see. Apply for 10 of those.

Readjust your expectations every day (that’s right, no hyphen) for three weeks and then re-assess (yes, hyphen here). You’ll get a crappy job, but lots of fodder for your writing.

Your next job will be better.

Re:Which CPU is best for long time use Intel or AMD? on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @03:13AM (#34336261)
No.

ARM or RISC-V.

Apple makes some very nice ARM machines. If you’re running Windows, see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-arm-base...

Read Hennessy & Patterson and get back to us.

Re:Elements of a Great Markup Language on Monday October 31, 2022 @05:55PM (#33413827)
With apologies to Dr. Knuth…

The most important thing in a markup language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name, and now I am looking for a suitable language.

Re:Elements of a Great Markup Language on Monday October 31, 2022 @05:48PM (#33413739)
Jeffrey Kingston’s Lout is pretty good, though it’s only lightweight if LateX is. https://src.fedoraproject.org/lookaside/pkgs/lout/user-guide...
Re:A Scott Kim Ambigram for George Hart on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @05:09PM (#30078822)
You shouldn't; some people find them fun... a celebration of human creativity, which sometimes turns out to be useful.
Good on you for considering this. I had one job where the company owner loved his naps, so napping was tolerated at the company. Half the people would have a 30 minute nap after lunch. Heaven! Made the afternoons so much more pleasant, and more productive. I'd just set my watch alarm and put my head on my desk (with proper drool precautions).
Re:Ask HN: What challenging hobbies do you have? on Thursday January 02, 2020 @10:57AM (#21936402)
learn a musical instrument
Re:Tony Brooker, creator of Mark 1 Autocode, has died on Saturday December 14, 2019 @06:43AM (#21789026)
tech is anything made, invented, not natural. So, the stirrup, eyeglasses, agriculture, our control of fire.
Re:Ask HN: Hardware to Teach CCNA Skills? on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @08:45PM (#21132441)
Can you recommend a simulator or two? And a curriculum?
Well, another term for a locomotive is an engine, a train engine. So a person who works on those is an engine-eer.
Have a look at StrongTalk.
Re:Ask HN: In what order did you learn your languages? on Monday October 16, 2017 @02:30PM (#15485529)
APL, Snobol, Fortran, BAL, Pascal, Basic, Cobol, C, C++, Smalltalk, Objective C, Java, Lisp, Dylan, Perl, Tcl, Haskell, Scala, Clojure, Python, Erlang,
Re:Ask HN: How to teach programming to children? on Friday June 02, 2017 @06:38PM (#14473801)
Can she/he do non-twitch games like Sokoban, Bloxorz, Incredible Machine? Not just the beginning levels, but the more advanced levels. If so, advance to one of the thousands of programming enviroments that've been developed for kids. Unfortunately, there's currenly no clear winner. My favs are Racket, Alice, Logo, TouchDevelop, and soon, http://code.world (but not yet).
Everyone's suggesting VR rigs, as you requested, but hold up a sec, he wants to learn to skateboard or rollerblade. While some of the VR rigs may help a person learn such a skill, most are purely "rides", with the person having little or no control. I'd urge you to not be so quick to forgo actual skateboarding, rollerblading, or similar actual, physical activities. He wants the feel of the wind in his face, the feel of balance.

Can he ride a bike? Has he ever, and can he still? How physically strong is he currently? Can he still lift himself out of a chair? If he's not very strong, perhaps you could sit with him on a long board and go down gentle slope, or start on a flat. Maybe take your sisters first and get their approval. A Razor skooter might be a good compromise - very easy to learn, but have the correct wind and the balance components. How much does he weigh? If you outweigh him by a good margin, you could both rollerblade, with him between your arms, and your arms under his, so you can be his training wheels. Again, obviously much caution with everyone's approval before you actually do this.

How 'bout a Big Wheel? If you get on a snow ski slope, there are other options; have you seen these bi-skis where a person sits and a person behind them stands and steers?

Of course, none of these preclude also going the VR route, though budget may. Just wanted to throw out some options possibly more inline with what he may have in mind.

C because, a) every language we're currently using is a reaction to C (or a reaction to a reaction to C, etc.), and b) it is still going strong in areas such as Linux development, and is enjoying a huge resurgence in areas such as Arduino.
Re:Ask HN: Any advice for a disillusioned young developer? on Saturday February 06, 2016 @09:21AM (#11047817)
"full-stack", you say... Do you respect your stack? I've found that not only do I have to respect the customers I'm building for, and believe in the product we're making, I also have to believe in the technology stack we're using. Part of that is a desire to keep my skills current, but a another, large, part is a desire to build something well, something that will last. And that's difficult to do with crappy tools and materials. Also, do you respect the people you're working with? Maybe form a cohort within your company to eventually break off and form another team/project/company.
Well, there's designing a pl and there's implementing a pl, and many other subquestions as well. For implementation, yes, the Dragon book is fundamental, but also look at other points of view, such as packrat parsing, or non-textual syntax. For design, wow, hmm, does the world need another programming language? If you're thinking of an OO language, look at the design space of OO languages, for example, is inheritance class-based or prototype-based. if you're looking outside OO languages, look at the crazy menagerie of languages that have been created so far: APL, Plankalkul, Toontalk.