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jdnier

2,539 karma · joined January 8, 2009

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/dniergarth; my proof: https://keybase.io/dniergarth/sigs/oRsRM5sXVul2CqX_mAu0Yk641sbmqV4lEiW3IfgVivg ]
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jdnier··on Creepy Crawlies
I really enjoyed the writing style in this article.

And the bot progression from "alter user agent" to "change IP addresses" to providers having to ban whole subnets, whole ASNs, and realizing "proxy SDK monetization" is a thing mirrors threat actor progression from the time before LLMs.

jdnier··on Fable and the end of the free lunch
I asked Fable to transcribe three short lines of Korean-language text in a small image. It suspected the image might contain song lyrics and refused. Haiku transcribed it with no issue.
jdnier··on Taffy: A flexible, high-performance, cross-platform UI layout library
There are Python bindings via the stretchable library.

https://github.com/mortencombat/stretchable

jdnier··on The Mojo language (by Modular, now Qualcomm) is now open-source
You can read a lot more about it here: https://mojolang.org/docs/vision/
jdnier··on Antiqua–Fraktur dispute
Seriously, wow.
jdnier··on Mojo 1.0
See their in-depth vision doc here:

https://mojolang.org/nightly/docs/vision/

jdnier··on Scientists discover Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability on the surface of the Sun
Check out the last video on the page. It zooms in and you get a sense of just how much resolution there is.
jdnier··on PostgreSQL's MVCC is bad. So is everyone else's
Really, don't use LLM for polish; that's what wrecks it imho. People write idiosyncratically and that's a good thing. That's your voice.
jdnier··on PostgreSQL's MVCC is bad. So is everyone else's
Tells like "load-bearing" and "real", for example.

"the heap's simplicity is load-bearing: once..."

"It's a real thing"

"It's a real trade-off"

"The design buys real things"

"it comes down to a real design choice"

"That's a real critique"

jdnier··on The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth
And about Volume 5...

> Syntactic Algorithms, in preparation.

9. Lexical scanning (includes also string search and data compression)

10. Parsing techniques

jdnier··on The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth
From Future Plans...

> And after Volumes 1--5 are done, God willing, I plan to publish Volume 6 (the theory of context-free languages) and Volume 7 (Compiler techniques), but only if the things I want to say about those topics are still relevant and still haven't been said. Volumes 1--5 represent the central core of computer programming for sequential machines; the subjects of Volumes 6 and 7 are important but more specialized.

jdnier··on The Ü Programming Language
"Ü programming language" brings up the Github docs with Google, as does "U programming language", although this HN post comes up second.

On a Mac "Ü" is typed "option-u shift-u".

jdnier··on The Ü Programming Language
Some more resources from that post:

> See examples (https://github.com/Panzerschrek/U-00DC-Sprache/tree/master/s...) to get a general idea what Ü is and how it looks like and feels. Read the documentation (https://panzerschrek.github.io/U-00DC-Sprache-site/docs/en/c...) for more details. If you have some questions about the specific mechanism providing safety, read the corresponding chapter (https://panzerschrek.github.io/U-00DC-Sprache-site/docs/en/r...). If some topic isn't clear for you after reading the documentation, contact me and I can answer your questions.

jdnier··on The Ü Programming Language
There was a "Show HN: Ü Programming Language" from the author last October.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45769161

jdnier··on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded during a static fire test
That "Another angle" truly is spectacular.
jdnier··on Opaque Types in Python
Just fyi, the author is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyph_Lefkowitz, creator of Twisted.
jdnier··on Quack: The DuckDB Client-Server Protocol
The parent reads more like "it works in practice but does it work in theory?" The innovations that have come out of the DuckDB team seem to always focus on "in practice" instead of focusing on how things are supposed to (or are expected to) be done.
jdnier··on Previously unknown verses by Empedocles found on papyrus
Looking more carefully at the original image (http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Emp...) I can see the mapping of letterforms you made. Thanks for that!
jdnier··on Previously unknown verses by Empedocles found on papyrus
Not understanding Greek, I ran that through Google Translate (Greek -> English) just to see what it might say.

> AND THIS … THE MAJOR … BUT THE BOTH … ARE MEANING … PEUSIS PAN GAR SEEMS.. OBVIOUS.. SPECTRA … OF SONGS SO … MAJOR … AND THEREFORE … NOT EVEN EARS .. NO LANGUAGE

What form of Greek would that be? (I don't know much more than "ancient Greek" vs "modern Greek".)

jdnier··on GitHub Monaspace Case Study
Finally, a bracket I can enjoy (that doesn't involve basketball).
jdnier··on Claude's Cycles [pdf]
> I think Claude Shannon’s spirit is probably proud to know that his name is now being associated with such advances. Hats off to Claude!

I didn't realize Claude was named after Claude Shannon!

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

jdnier··on Fran Sans – font inspired by San Francisco light rail displays
I had not heard of Glyphs, the tool the author used. I used to use Fontographer long ago.

https://glyphsapp.com/learn/recommendation:get-started

It's a great article!

jdnier··on 650GB of Data (Delta Lake on S3). Polars vs. DuckDB vs. Daft vs. Spark
DuckDb has a new "DuckLake" catalog format that would be another candidate to test. https://ducklake.select/
jdnier··on Use DuckDB-WASM to query TB of data in browser
Yesterday there was a somewhat similar DuckDB post, "Frozen DuckLakes for Multi-User, Serverless Data Access". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45702831
jdnier··on SQL Anti-Patterns
Looking up the etymology of "sargeable", I found this StackOverflow answer: https://dba.stackexchange.com/a/217983

And Google explains "The term 'sargable' is a portmanteau of "Search ARGument ABLE," formed by combining the words from a SQL database context."

jdnier··on You can't parse XML with regex. Let's do it anyways
If you want to do this rigorously, I suggest you read Robert D. Cameron's excellent paper "REX: XML Shallow Parsing with Regular Expressions" (1998).

https://www2.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/REX.html

jdnier··on 2025 Nikon Small World in Motion Competition Winners
That must be for "Dissolution and crystallization of cobalt, copper and sodium chlorides". It's quite something to watch!

https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2025-small-world-i...

jdnier··on Examples from The LaTeX Companion book (3rd edition)
> should buy the books

Yes I totally will, err..., oh my, ebook for $91.99, paperback for $127.99. What's going on with these prices? These aren't college textbooks. I'm glad to hear about the 3rd edition but the cost gives me pause.

jdnier··on Newly Discovered Origami Patterns Put the Bloom on the Fold
The paper they've submitted goes into a lot more detail. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2025.029...
jdnier··on Dyna – Logic Programming for Machine Learning
And it has a Python wrapper, https://github.com/argolab/dyna3/tree/master/dyna_python_mod....
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