Hacker News Reader

bakulon FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

Yes.

bakulon Show HN: A graph paper generator that renders vector PDFs in the browser

Penrose tiling with kites and darts would be neat!

bakulon The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

Strict Vegetarians don’t eat eggs. No D vitamin fortified milk in his days. Many vegetarians don’t eat mushrooms, the only plant based source of vitamin D.

bakulon The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

Darker skinned people in northern latitudes. Made worse for vegetarians like Ramanujan in England.

bakulon The desperation of NYTimes

https://sccld.org/nyt-online/

It used to be 3 days until some time last year.

bakulon The desperation of NYTimes

It’s now one day only, at least through my library.

bakulon Integrated by Design

forums.freebsd.org may be a good place to discuss these sort of questions.

bakulon The next generations of Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles are available now

I just want a terminal that can also run fully graphical interfaces and that scroll as more lines are typed or a later command outputs text! Next level up from sixels or escape sequences.

bakulon Linear Address Spaces: Unsafe at any speed (2022)

Poul, have you looked at the Mill Architecture? It doesn't provide capabilities but provides "turfs". A turf is a set of [base..limit) regions in a single address space. Threads within a turf can only see what the turf allows them to see. Regions can be shared between turfs if so desired (& how one may communicate large amounts of data). When a thread makes a "portal call" it is in another turf and can only see what is in that turf (+ call args, passed on the "belt"). Not clear if this will go anywhere & might get forgotten but it is an interesting architecture worth exploring.

bakulon I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer

May be you need to have "scheduled downtime" when your undergirding system is down for "maintenance" and they will notice! [Half joking... Probably not possible but better to have scheduled maintenance than have to do firefighting under extreme time pressure]

bakulon Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust

Something like this? https://github.com/magiblot/turbo

bakulon Goiaba: An experimental Go compiler, written in Rust

The default serial build of V (tcc backend) takes 0.6 (with production compiler) to 1.3 seconds (with tcc backend compiler).

The production (clang backend) parallel build of V language takes about 3.2 seconds. All on an m1 mac. Even the go compiler seems slow in comparison.

bakulon My Foray into Vlang

I have used both Go (extensively) and V (not so much). Go's cross compilation, concurrency support, GC & stability are much better than V's. V compiles much much faster in spite of generating C (unless you use clang), plays better with C, its syntax choices seem better (default to const, less onerous error handling, sum types, option type, not relying on Capitalization for exporting etc.), optional GC (though far from perfect), etc. I can see writing an OS in V (but not in Go). I am in two minds about whether it should try to simulate concurrency like Go does (goroutines are coroutines, mapped to system threads only for blocking syscalls) as that might not be the right choice for kernel level code.

V hasn't had the resources or backing that Go continues getting. Most of its work is done by volunteers. AFAIK it hasn't had the benefit of the experience of multiple world class programmers like Go's designers. Good language design also involves leaving out features and that involves discussing or experimenting with such features. IMHO V can use more of that. But so far I like a lot of what I see in V.

bakulon Lisp from Nothing, Second Edition

Read the author’s “Raja Yoga Revisited”.

bakulon DNA tests are uncovering the true prevalence of incest (2024)

I found one map that may be interest: https://araingang.medium.com/cousin-marriage-in-south-asia-f...

But note that the article is really talking about first-degree incest/pedophila/sexual abuse which is taboo in pretty much every society.

bakulon DNA tests are uncovering the true prevalence of incest (2024)

I has asked friends who would know more about South India. If you have any references about statistics and causes please share. Thanks!

bakulon DNA tests are uncovering the true prevalence of incest (2024)

AFAIK this is far more common in muslims but not in hindus, jains etc. While growing up I had heard/read that as per the Vedas you can not marry someone with whom you have a common ancestor within 7 generations. [My scientifically minded atheist parents agreed with the idea.] Of course, in practice this isn't always followed but in any arranged marriage such proscriptions would presumably be checked.

bakulon Use Your Type System

Pascal had range types such as 0..9 (as of 1970). Subranges could also be defined for any scalar type. Further, array index types were such ranges.

bakulon V.S. Naipaul: The Grief and the Glory

I've read them both and Naipaul is the much better writer. Perhaps that always rankled. Anyway they "buried the hatchet" in 2011.

https://bookertalk.com/poison-pens-when-writers-friendships-...

bakulon Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim

I used the rand editor in early 80s & loved its “infinite” quarter plane model. Dave Yost enhanced it quite a bit and called it the Grand editor. But it was hard to maintain as it relied on K&R C. Eventually I gave up and went back to vi.

bakulon Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

from the above post:

  > April 1, 1999
  >
  > FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Forward to the past?

bakulon British tourist detained by US authorities for 10 days over visa issue

She was on a tourist visa. She should have gotten a J-1 visa who can do 20 hours/week part time work with some constraints. Some details about this visa: https://yfuusa.org/2024/05/16/j1-student-visa/

bakulon The lost language extensions of MetaWare's High C compiler (2023)

Thanks. I got interested in this topic as people are talking about writing OS kernel code in Rust but a) it only helps new code and b) very hard to justify rewriting millions of lines of C code in Rust (plus rewrites are never 100% faithful feature wise). If on the other hand if C can be made safer, may be through a stepwise process where the code is rewritten incrementally to pass through C->C0->C1->Cn compilers, each making incremental language changes, much more of code can be made safer. It will never be as good as Rust but I do think this space is worth exploring.

bakulon The lost language extensions of MetaWare's High C compiler (2023)

> The solution for C I proposed is backwards compatible, and does not make existing code slower.

Where can I read about it? The only way to make ptrs to array elements also safe that I can think of, is to replace them with triples: (base, element ptr, limit).

bakulon Beirut airport bans pagers, walkie-talkies on all flights

The law of unintended consequences…

bakulon Apple Watch Series 10

Back in the day many of us switched to automatic mechanical watches that didn't require manually winding.

bakulon FreeBSD considers Rust in the base system

Did anybody mention plan9? At any rate it is not a microkernel. There is at least one effort implementing v6 unix in rust. That would probably meet your minimum requirements!

bakulon Secret Hand Gestures in Paintings (2019)

Note that "mudras" have significant meanings in Hinduism, Jainism & Buddhism. Mudras used in Indian dances convey feelings or elements of story etc. Also used in yoga. And mudras are not just hand gestures but also facial expressions, eye movements and so on.

Though there does not seem to be any connection of mudras with European paintings. There were cultural links between India and the Greco-Roman world in 2nd-1st century BCE around the time of Indo-Greek kingdom (northwest of the current India) but seems unlikely that would have such an influence centuries later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudra

bakulon Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/S on FreeBSD [pdf]

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o-HcG8QxPc

bakulon Vulture shortage threatens Zoroastrian burial rites

Low fertility rates (like in most well to do communities), interfaith marriages (if you marry a non-parsi and your kids are not considered parsi), aging population, migration out of India.