hanslub42

Thanks for the summary! This looks more doable than I thought....

On Polarhome, I used QNX, SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and OSX. Having those running under qemu would be quite the challenge.

Until now, I have used qemu (or rather qemu-system-aarch64 in combination with binfmt-misc) on Linux to emulate e.g a Raspberry pi running on arm64. This works very well, but for e.g. Solaris or HP-UX there is the extra hurdle of getting hold of bootable media that will not freak out in the unfamiliar surroundings of a qemu virtual machine.

I have never tried, and it is possible that I overestimate the difficulty...

> nobody needs or wants a unix shell account in this day and age

I do. But I do not need just any Unix shell account, I need old and weird ones! I develop and maintain a portable utility (rlwrap) that is aimed at users of older software, who are often also using older or even obsolete systems.

For years, I used Polarhome (http://www.polarhome.com/) as a "dinosaur zoo" of obsolete systems (thans, Zoltan!) For every new release, building it on a creaky Solaris or HP-UX machine would expose a few bugs.

Because older systems are being replaced by (much more uniform) newer ones, there is a diminishing need for such extreme portability. This is also the reason that Polarhome closed in 2022.

In spite of this, testing on many different systems improves general code quality, even for users of mainstream systems like linux, BSD or OSX.

Of course, I could setup a couple of virtual machines, but that is a lot of hassle, especially for machines with uncommon processor architectures.

All the heavy lifting is done by the comments. For example: theorem dof_gt_one_inconsistent (dof : Nat) (h : dof > 1) dof ≠ 1 (in Basic.lean) is the well-known fact that any number > 1 is unequal to 1.

But the comment states: DOF > 1 implies potential inconsistency. Inconsistency of what? Lean doesn't know, or care....

My first PC (in 1993) ran on Linux (0.99). As it didn't have a sound card I used the PC speaker as one. It sounded very tinny but speech was understandable enough. Even in the newest kernels there is a driver (https://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/SND_PCSP.html) that exposes the speaker as an ALSA device. For sentimental reasons I will enable it next time I compile my kernel, though I don't expect much: the PC speaker is even more of an afterthought now than it was 33 years ago, and may even be a piezoelectric "buzzer" instead of a speaker with a coil and a paper cone.

This would be a good place to remember Moses Schönfinkel, who invented Combinatory Logic as a student of David Hilbert at Göttingen in 1920. His life was tragic: after his return to his native Russia he became mentally ill, and he died in Moscow in poverty. According to Wikipedia, "His papers were burned by his neighbors for heating".

For me, with a STEM background (and, I, suspect for many people here) the science episodes were never the most informative (though I would still learn a great deal about the history of the subject)

I'm not sure whether someone with a background in arts or history would say the same about the other episodes.

For those who want something entirely outside the STEM-heavy HN sphere of interest, there is another great BBC podcast about social science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Allowed

Janson created more than just the Moomin stories. Check out her murals: https://tovejansson.com/gallery/murals/. I don't see much darkness there... (there is even a small Mumintroll in "Party in the City", in front of the woman smoking a cigarette, a self-portrait of Janson)

In 1942, Heisenberg became the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Theoretical Phiysics, where research into nuclear physics was conducted (on a small scale) and a Uranmaschine (small experimental reactor) was built. At that point, Heisenberg indeed didn't believe anymore in the possibility of building a fission bomb. But a year before that, Heisenberg had told Niels Bohr that he believed that such a weapon was possible. So, you're right: although there was an "atomic weapons program" in Germany, it became an "atomic energy program" quite early on, and that happened before Heisenberg became a leading figure in it. The Allies came to know this only after 1945.

There also was a "German Physics" movement that tried to discredit relativity theory and quantum mechanics as essentially Jewish. Heisenberg was called a "white Jew" in a SS periodical. The movement didn't have much success, and Heisenberg eventually became the leader of the (unsuccessful) German effort to develop an atomic bomb.

On X11:

   xsel -o -b | xsel -i -b

A humble vegetable flowering so spectacularly was bound to get the attention of H.C. Andersen, who was always interested in ugly ducklings, like himself, turning out to be beautiful and noble swans after all. From his story "Gartneren og Herskabet" ("The Gardener and the Noble Family"):

One day the gardener brought a large crystal bowl; in it floated a water-lily leaf upon which was laid a beautiful blue flower as big as a sunflower.

"The lotus of Hindustan!" exclaimed the family. [...]

"We have been looking for it in vain," they said. "We have been in the greenhouses and round about the flower garden!"

"Oh, no, it's not there," said the gardener. "It is only a common flower from the vegetable garden; but, look, isn't it beautiful! It looks like a blue cactus, and yet it is only the flower of the artichoke!"

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27851857

I have in front of me a reprint of Pellegrino Artusi's famous "la Scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene" (1891). It has a recipe for "Pizza alla napoletana" (recipe #609) which is a shortcrust filled with a cream of "ricotta, sweet almonds, sugar, lemon peel or vanilla, milk", about which he comments "... a me sembra che questo riesca un dolce di gusto squisito" - a dessert of exquisite taste.

He mentions two other pizze: "Pizza a libretti" and "Pizza gravida", both of them sweet. "Our" pizza is completely absent.

It is intriguing that the above 19th century "pizza" recipe is called alla napoletana given that Wikipedia states that "... modern pizza evolved from similar flatbread dishes in Naples, Italy, in the 18th or early 19th century."

How it all came to pass: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm-paste64.html

It mentions one of my pet peeves with bracketed paste:

(Although most terminal emulators are designed to emulate xterm) ... there are no terminfo/termcap capabilities for the feature. Vim's variables assume that a termcap description might provide different values (omitting the “t_” prefix), but other editors simply use hard-coded strings

For example, the readline library just checks whether $TERM == 'dumb' and outputs the control codes if not (provided enable-bracketed-paste is set, of course) . Can anyone help me understand why there is no terminfo entry like setbp=\E[?2004h and unsetbp=\E[?2004l ?

A skillet will work, but results in a very uneven roast (which you may like, but I didn't)

I started with a popcorn roaster I bought second-hand for €10. Those work already surprisingly well, but will spread chaff (the thin membrane around the bean) around the house.

Then I graduated to a simple roaster (aorund €100) , which basically does the same thing (blowing hot air upwards through the beans) but with a chaff filter, and allows for larger batches.

Now I use the Gene Café, which stil uses the same principle (hot air) but has a rotating drum and lets you regulate the temperature.

Most roasters have a timer, but I never use it, it is important to stay around and look at (and smell) the beans. The whole process takes at most 20 minutes.

Googling for "best home coffee roaster" will tell you all you need to know, and then some.

After buying a decent espresso machine (or whichever method you prefer) and grinder, the thing that will improve your coffee immeasurably is home roasting (like I started to do 15 years ago, and never looked back)

It is not difficult (although I occasionally over- or underroast a batch) and great fun. Green beans keep for a long time (at least a year) so it is easy to buy in bulk, which is cheaper. Also, I'm never out of coffee....

I have been using Gentoo forever (actually since around 2005). It has always worked well for me, documentation is great (though I always take a look at the Arch documentation as well), it is extremely stable (even though I run the "unstable" version (~amd64)

Th only thing that sometimes requires a bit of elbow grease is the update process (emerge @world) which can throw up large lists of "blockers", especially when some major component changes (like say the transition from python2 to python3). "eselect news" gives ample warning beforehand.

This is the reason I never advise new linux users to use it, but I also don't see myself using any different distribution.

Uranium (both U238 and U235) is an alpha-emitter. Alpha particles travel at most a few centimeters in air.

The article mentions the Futurist Cookbook. Wikipedia has more info about it [1], including a link to the freely available Italian text. There is an English translation [2], but that one is not free.

In a sense, espresso coffee is the ultimate Futurist hot drink: made with electricity, high-pressure water and stainless steel, giving energy and the will to perform great deeds. It is no coincidence that it became popular in Fascist Italy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_cooking [2] https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/21/futurist-cookbook-...

Knoware (pun intended, probably), my first Internet provider, back in 1993, had a 9600 baud connection to the Internet, shared by all his customers. When I phoned the guy (late, as he worked at night and slept during the day) to get a login, his first question was: do you have a Mac? There was no TCP/IP stack for Windows back then (Trumpet Winsock only came out in 1994, and was not a Microsoft product). He had heard of linux, said that it probably would work, but I would be on my own.

Fast forward to 1995: Windows 95 still didn't have TCP/IP (that only came with service pack 1). MSN was clearly intended as a Windows Internet, to eclipse and make irrelevant the existing one, leaving Mac and linux outside in the cold.

Of course, the local pizza guy would have to pay to be on it. Win-win for Microsoft.

I actually stayed there one night. Cozy little place (I mean, a 747 makes a big airplane, but a rather small hotel)

I slept in one of the motors, if remember well. Quite small, I had to climb into my bed (like in a bunk bed, but the lower bed was part of the actual room)

I'm really horrible at hardware, so...

> I've been meaning to write a tremendous header for compiler & compiler version identification.

I doubt whether a "OS zoo" would be of great help for this - many old OSes can run a modern gcc; it is the system calls and terminal/pty/streams behaviours that can be very different (QNX is a great example of this)

Moreover (cf. the great musl preprocessor debate (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31067059) - for me as a "portable programmer" this kind of macro is rather less useful (though sometimes useful as a quick fix) than testing for individual features, as that will make the program compile and work on future, or unknown ancient architectures/compilers (at least in theory....)

This may be the appropriate place to gratefully mention Polarhome (http://www.polarhome.com/), that for many years managed a "dinosaur zoo" of ageing Unix systems, on which one could buy a login for a nominal fee. Very convenient for me as developer of a portable Unix utility (rlwrap) - it allowed me to spot many portability problems (often real bugs that manifested themselves only on certain systems).

Sadly, Polarhome has thrown in the towel. Does anyone know of something comparable, i.e. not only a public access Unix system, but one that offers a range of Unices?

In many cases (mine included), SAD is not so much about how much light we get, but about when: I manage my sleep/wake cycle by getting a good dose of light in the morning (I do my morning E-mails with a nice strong blueish LED-lamp next to my monitor) and dimming/reddening my screens in the evening.

It is not even the level of darkness outside, but the direction of the level change: I need my lamp from October to January (or when I have a gig in Norway in the winter) but already at the start of February I feel the light coming back, even though it is as dark outside as at the end of November

So, in summary: it is more about the timing of the light than the amount (but YMMV, of course)

A regional cuisine can be largely vegetarian even if 0.0% of the people in the region are vegetarian. I eat meat, even though my personal cuisine is largely vegetarian: I cook a lot of vegetarian dishes, even though I enjoy a bit of meat every now and then. My non-vegetarian food is amazing, but so are my veggie dishes.

Why are most answers pretending that the choice is between meat and plant-based fake meat? For millennia, people have been eating plant proteins straight from the plant, like chickpeas and lentils. The glorious south-Indian cuisine is largely vegetarian and doesn't need any fake meat. The Catholic practice of fasting during Fridays and Lent has resulted in many delicious Mediterranean recipes without meat (or even fish), again, without any "meat substitutes".

Possibly, but this would not answer the question of the origin of northern (mitochondrial) DNA in the local mice populations. (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25394749/)