Hacker News Reader

rudolfwinestockon Transinistria, the Area Between Moldova and Ukraine

The (in)famous hacker & troll, weev, lives in Transnistria, at the moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#After_prison

A Hacker News regular, technomancy (the same guy behind the Atreus keyboard), has contributed a great deal to the Fennel language. https://builds.sr.ht/~technomancy/fennel-lang.org

I'd like to see him visit this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=technomancy

rudolfwinestockon Where Have All the Domestic Graduate Students Gone?

There aren't enough domestic grad students because word has trickled down that that is a slow road to the poor house.

Between age discrimination and collusion to keep programmer salaries down, the message has gone out that only the coolest and most well-connected nerds shall be allowed to make a good living.

rudolfwinestockon Rogue planets could outnumber the stars

No. Being ordinary matter, these objects occlude light. If there were enough of them to make up for dark matter, or even a large fraction of it, then we wouldn't be able to see much past our galaxy.

rudolfwinestockon VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment

Related: The MGR Window System https://hack.org/mc/mgr/

“MGR provides each client window with: curses-like terminal control functions, graphics primitives such as line and circle drawing; facilities for manipulating bitmaps, fonts, icons, and pop-up menus; commands to reshape and position windows; and a message passing facility enabling client programs to rendezvous and exchange messages.”

Essentially, each window was a souped up ASCII terminal with extra escape sequences which implemented primitive graphics. It competed with X-Windows on low-end workstations during the 1980s.

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18742611

rudolfwinestockon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2020)

  Location: East Coast of Florida
  Remote: Yes (preferred)
  Willing to Relocate: Yes
  Technologies: WordPress, React, JavaScript, Bare HTML & CSS
  Resume/CV: Available On Request
  Email: rudolf <at> winestockwebdesign <dot> com

rudolfwinestockon Racket News – Issue 31

Related: The Racket Stories news aggregator focuses on the Racket programming language, including news such as the original post.

https://racket-stories.com/

rudolfwinestockon The Olognion – Exquisite tech news

To save people the effort of clicking the link: it's satire.

It's as though The Babylon Bee or The Onion were to focus on tech and startup news.

rudolfwinestockon What’s new in HTML6

How about the ability to include HTML code that's in another file or link? I'm surprised that such a basic modularity mechanism still isn't in the HTML standard.

rudolfwinestockon The Era of the Trident Engine

I thought of the Trident missile, as well.

Anyone who's either a member of the Baby Boom or Generation X will bear witness to the Cold War for most of the rest of this century.

rudolfwinestockon The Greatest Keyboard of All Time Reborn (2018) [video]

For a moment, I thought that they were talking about this project:

https://kono.store/products/input-club-symbolic-keyboard

For those too lazy to click, it's a project to resurrect the Space Cadet Keyboard. It's still in the planning stages.

rudolfwinestockon Online hate speech could be contained like a computer virus, say researchers

If “hate speech” has a computable signature, then not-“hate speech” also has a computable signature.

Therefore, we can expect all kinds of bad actors to take advantage of that.

Sooner or later, Internet outrage mobs will form around vulnerable people whose speech wasn't not-“hate speech” enough.

I'm sure that plenty of people, around here, can dream up some more nightmare scenarios.

rudolfwinestockon Show HN: NanoArgMode – A Macro System for Nano

This uses LuaJIT to extend the Nano text editor. Under “Limitations,” the author states that

> The macro system can only effect the open buffer, it can't modify nano's default behaviours. It cannot move the active cursor.

> This turns it into a text-manipulation system, rather than a self-modifying system like you might find in vim and emacs.

An example of a text editor that is extensible in Lua from the ground up is Textadept.

https://foicica.com/textadept/

By the way, it's nice to see projects hosted on Sourcehut get some attention on Hacker News.

rudolfwinestockon Sherlock: Find usernames across social networks

Here's another: https://knowem.com/

rudolfwinestockon Novelty and Heresy

The best source which I've read that corrects the myths behind the Galileo affair was written by science-fiction author Michael F. Flynn.

The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown

https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

rudolfwinestockon Spain jails Catalan separatist leaders, protesters take to streets

In this regard, the late Jerry Pournelle had this to say about the Vietnam War. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/mail-new-technology...

I recall in a debate with Allard Lowenstein back in those days, he said “Jerry, you want to win this and get out. I just want to get out. But your friends there “—indicating the Secretary of Defense —“want to lose it and stay in.” I admit to being silenced. I didn’t have the minutes to give a lecture on how to win a war of attrition when it is part of a strategy of containment, and I am not sure I understood the situation that well in 1968 anyway.

rudolfwinestockon 3D animation with sound in 64 bytes of assembler

Here's another 64-byte demo by the same hacker.

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78044

I saw it discussed on Lobsters.

https://lobste.rs/s/lpnlyd/tiny_64_bytes_ms_dos_ray_tracer

rudolfwinestockon IBM introduces z15 mainframe

That's because, ultimately, mainframes and embedded computers are the only natural computer platforms. I expounded on this at length (yes, this is a self-plug).

http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...

Long story, short: We will really have to watch out for our privacy because those two remaining platforms give The Management(tm) an irresistible temptation to stomp on us.

rudolfwinestockon The Amiga Smart File System

This was introduced four years after Commodore went bankrupt. Not even Lisp Machine hackers have the dedication of Amiga hackers.

rudolfwinestockon Uber And Lyft take more from drivers than they say: survey

Think on how much cheaper rides are with Uber, Lyft, or any similar service, compared with an ordinary taxi cab. The reason for that is that you're splitting the fare with a venture capitalist.

The reason why VCs were willing to do that was that they anticipated that Uber (in particular) would monopolize ride-sharing. After that, they intended to replace the drivers (who are still the most expensive part of the ride) with self-driving cars. I spoke with a Google employee, about two years ago, who told me that everyone in the self-driving business hoped to have some big advances ready by 2021.

Turns out that autonomous vehicles are a lot harder than anticipated, so the ride-share companies have had to pivot. That explains Uber Eats.

As sketchy as Uber has been, I have no sympathy for the traditional taxi cab companies. They refused to adapt in the face of a new situation staring them in the face. The New York City medallion-owners just expected to continue farming from the cab drivers with zero effort. Parasites.

I spoke with a guy who had recently come to America and needed a ride. His friends couldn't drive him, for some reason, so they tried to arrange a cab. While they bickered, trying to find a cab company phone number, this guy downloaded the Uber app, punched in his credit card info, and his ride showed up before his friends had finished finding a cab company.

Nevertheless, Uber is a sketchy company and desperately needs regulation.

rudolfwinestockon A Critique of Pure Learning: What Neural Networks Can Learn from Animal Brains

Wasn't the original point of "neural networks" to imitate biological brains?

rudolfwinestockon Tonedeaf at the Top

The difference is only etymological. Both words mean "right conduct."

The word "morals" comes from Latin (mos, moris). The word "ethics" comes from Greek. Since, for a long time, the liturgical language of the West was Latin, we associate the word "morals" with religion, while we associate the word "ethics" with secular philosophy. Manuals on moral theology in the Greek Orthodox Church use the word "ethics" because that is their language.

In short, their connotations may be different, but their definitions are the same.

rudolfwinestockon Google's Civil War

I stand corrected.

rudolfwinestockon Google's Civil War

Bill Gates & Paul Allen originally founded Microsoft in Albuquerqe, New Mexico, in order to be reasonably close to Los Alamos because they wanted to get military contracts.

rudolfwinestockon Vendors must start adding physical on/off switches to devices that can spy on us

Janie Crane: “An off switch?”

Metrocop: “She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!”

—Max Headroom, season 1, episode 6, “The Blanks” https://www.maxheadroom.com/index.php?title=Episode_ABC.1.6:...

rudolfwinestockon Emacs 26.2 Released

Did you hear about Vim when it showed up on Fred Fish disks?

By the way, I like your user name. How odd that I remember that command.

rudolfwinestockon AT&T 1993 “You Will” Ads [video]

One Usenet signature[0] that I saw during the mid-1990s was "Have you ever taken credit for something that hasn't even been invented yet? You will."

[0] Yes, I'm dating myself.

rudolfwinestockon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2019)

Location: Vero Beach, FL

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: Yes

Technologies: HTML5+CSS3+ECMAScript6, AngularJS, React

Resume/CV: On Request

Email: rudolf@winestockwebdesign.com

rudolfwinestockon How the CIA Trains Spies to Hide in Plain Sight

Reminder: Any CIA or MI6 agent who lasted more than a week in the Soviet Union had diplomatic cover. The NKVD and KGB caught all of our deep cover agents within days; in some cases within hours.

The United States excels at sigint and aerial/orbital recon, but the Russians have been top-notch at humint for a long time.

rudolfwinestockon Turtletoy

This reminds me of a story of how Logo was implemented on 8-bit microcomputers.

Leigh Klotz was the man who ported MIT Logo to the Apple ][ and then the Commodore 64. According to him “The Commodore 64 CPU 6510 has a bidirectional parallel port at location 0 and 1, taking up 2 of the 256 "page zero" locations, which are the only ones you can indirect through. When I ported MIT Logo from the Apple II, there were lots of places that dereferenced nil without checking, and those caused crashes. Commodore gave me a chip they fabbed in qty 12 yield that brought out the I/D decide status as a pin, and we used a Nicolet-Paratronica logic analyzer to feed the address and data bus to a Pet running a BASIC disassembler. I could then set a breakpoint in-circuit to see the 256 instructions prior to or after the errant memory access, so I could go put on guard code...”

I got it from Jamie Zawinski's weblog. Be forewarned. Following the link from Hacker News will lead to an unsavory image. Just copy & paste it, instead.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/11/weird-machines/#comment-192...