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People interested in such instruments could look up the Scientific Instrument Commission https://scientific-instrument-commission.org/

Their latest annual event was https://www.sic2026.ch/

Ah! memories... When I typed that program in and RUN it to show it around, my aunt asked "Did the machine think of the joke itself?"

> (TeX is written in pascal and typically translated to C before building.)

Actually, TeX is written in WEB and can be "tangled" into different programming languages. It used to be tangled to Pascal originally, but nowadays ctangle produces C directly.

Repeating a comment I belatedly made in another thread about sanctioned people:

Looking at it from the reverse side, I am not sure many people are aware of the underlying business risk: if you do business with this individual (or others in a similar situation), you risk being associated with them and suffer similar consequences.

Question to the HN crowd that sells services online: do you check/vet every one of your customers against the Entity List?

Asking as a non-American: have any businesses (restaurants, bars, ...) ever tried operating with a no-tip-necessary policy? To see whether customers reward this business model?

Looking at the comments, can a business operate with transparent, "this is what you will pay at the end" prices shown (which include everything like taxes)? Is this even allowed?

Looking at it from the reverse side, I am not sure many people are aware of the underlying business risk: if you do business with this individual (or others in a similar situation), you risk being associated with them and suffer similar consequences.

Question to the HN crowd that sells services online: do you check/vet every one of your customers against the Entity List?

Ehmm... MongoDB is not open source.

Maintaining Open Source Software in the age of AI...

XKCD Tasks (from 12 years ago, to the day!) https://xkcd.com/1425/

Well, you don't know me, but I can assure there exists at least one person (me), who bought a Nissan Micra CVT in 1993 and still uses it, and they had never had any issue with the CVT. The rest of the car obviously shows its age, but CVT has never been a problem.

People may be interested in the work of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) https://c2pa.org/

Oh, uk.co definitely existed for companies. The other 2nd-level domain (besides the academic uk.ac and uk.co) was uk.mod (Ministry of Defence), equivalent to the US .mil. And then, because life is never this simple, things appeared that were neither universities nor companies nor military, so uk.bl was given to the British Library. There might have been others as well, I don't remember.

Back then the code in various pieces of software had hand-written exceptions for domain processing. The joke was that all Computer Science departments in the UK (uk.ac.university-name.cs) ended up in Czechoslovakia.

For this exact reason, I'm using Immich by pointing it to my folder structure as an "external library" https://docs.immich.app/features/libraries/

RDF modeling is the way to go, especially since you can automatically get a number of relationships (like reverse) deduced automatically. Plus you get for free the fact that you can store an arbitrary number of information on each person.

Besides Tk and the ease of creating GUIs, Tcl has some unique advantages. As I have written before, a favorite of mine, which I have not found in other languages (besides LISP, obviously) is the ability to treat data as code combined with the existence of safe slave interpreters.

This is extremely useful for configuration files: they can use some functions you have defined, but may also include arbitrary code. In order to load them, you simply fire up a safe slave interpreter to execute the code and you're done!

Imagine a config file like:

    host machine.example.org
    port 9000
    dbhost server.example.org

This can obviously be manually parsed easily, but this is also valid Tcl code, if one has defined the functions "host", "port", and "dbhost". And this allows people to extend the config file to something like:

    set mydomain example.org
    set type prod
    host machine.$mydomain
    dbhost server.$mydomain
    if {$type == prod} {
        port 9000
    } else {
        port 9999
    }

Having a "full-blown programming language" for free in config files is sometimes desirable.

I'm writing much more Python than Tcl these days, but this is a feature I sorely miss. I keep looking for similar functionality in Python, but I am always disappointed. Starlark has been proposed in the past, but unfortunately it means you have to work with something different than Python (in developing, in deploying, etc.), doubling your dependencies.

Case in point, the "new Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR)" of the article entered into force on 11 February 2025 -- and it had been in discussion and consultation processes for years before.

If you're going to support RDF, please also consider supporting SPARQL for querying the data.

Not really a proof, since AI can generate such videos as well.

"Write what you do. And then do what you wrote."

Countdown is an actual UK game show, on air since 1982 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_(game_show).

It was originally a French game show (Des chiffres et des lettres), it has been adapted in many countries, and in the UK has spawn off the comedy show "8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown".

Simple and easy to play.

I usually play the Countdown variant, where a letter cannot be re-used. But it starts with 9 letters and one can have multiple instances of the same letter in the starting set.

It would be fun if you could implement this, as well. An initial switch might determine what rules are in effect.

I think every professional type designer I know uses this software.

I have trouble coming up with any other example of total domination of a market segment. Maybe Photoshop in its glory days, or Quark Xpress before that, but even in those cases, there were alternatives in (minor) use.

Microsoft recently introduced typing via Windows key plus hyphen (en dash) and plus shift (em dash). Much easier.

To be precise, it takes 1 employee to say "used in X". It takes corporate decision to say "used by X". And it takes a written agreement to be able to use the trademarked logo of X on your page. (I know, because I have collected more than 60 such agreements to show logos on a page).