Hacker News: 1wd

New comment by 1wd in "A love letter to the CSV format (2024)"

1wd — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 11:07:35 +0000

Only if the Windows Regional Settings List Separators happens to be "comma", which is not the case in most of Europe (even in regions that use the decimal point) so only CSV files with SEP=, as the first line work reliably with Excel.

New comment by 1wd in "Firefox moves to GitHub"

1wd — Tue, 13 May 2025 09:18:08 +0000

heptapod is GitLab with Mercurial support.

New comment by 1wd in "The earliest versions of the first C compiler known to exist"

1wd — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 15:57:31 +0000

Oberon?

New comment by 1wd in "Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth"

1wd — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 15:58:56 +0000

Does anyone predict economy/population/... by simulating individual people based on real census information? Monte carlo simulation of major events (births, death, ...) based on known statistics based on age, economic background, location, education, profession, etc.? It seems there are not that many people that this would be computationally infeasible, and states and companies have plenty of data to feed into such systems. Is it not needed because other alternatives give better results, or is it already being done?

New comment by 1wd in "The Third Atomic Bomb"

1wd — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 07:17:37 +0000

Feynman has an interesting story about critical mass:

> Los Alamos was going to make the bomb, but at Oak Ridge they were trying to separate the isotopes of uranium ... he saw them wheeling a tank carboy of water, green water - which is uranium nitrate solution. He says, “Uh, you're going to handle it like that when it's purified too? Is that what you're going to do?" They said, “Sure -- why not?" "Won't it explode?" he says. Huh! Explode?" ... he noticed certain boxes in big lots in a room, but he didn't notice a lot of boxes in another room on the other side of the same wall ... what you would have to do to fix this. It's rather easy. You put cadmium in solutions to absorb the neutrons in the water, and you separate the boxes so they are not too dense ...

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos....

New comment by 1wd in "Scientists have 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale"

1wd — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 00:22:24 +0000

Paper linked above https://peerj.com/articles/16349/ links to .wav sound files in the Data Availability section https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.ht76hd... and 20 minute .mp4 files https://zenodo.org/records/8247515 (and R code in a PDF) and a "Timeline of Interaction" PDF. Seems that's the closest to a "transcript".

New comment by 1wd in "Bjarne Stroustrup: Think seriously about “safety”... [pdf]"

1wd — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 10:28:05 +0000

The quoted document has two similar sentences, one on page 3 includes Rust, one on page 5 does not:

> Examples of memory safe language include C#, Go, Java®, Ruby™, Rust®, and Swift®.

> Some examples of memory safe languages are C#, Go, Java, Ruby™, and Swift®.

https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/10/2003112742/-1/-1/0/CSI...

Stroustrup quotes the second one without Rust.

New comment by 1wd in "Single-file scripts that download their dependencies"

1wd — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 15:19:18 +0000

pipx might get this ability: https://github.com/pypa/pipx/pull/916

New comment by 1wd in "French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo"

1wd — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 17:16:45 +0000

At least since the 2018 "Blood Moon" eclipse

https://imgur.com/gallery/2tzJh9O

https://twitter.com/JanCastenmiller/status/10229494886028820...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/28/space-statio...

https://tineye.com/search/d719f24d68e9175cab643a8997dd24e285...

New comment by 1wd in "Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs"

1wd — Sat, 16 Jul 2022 05:31:32 +0000

WPF is now open source (MIT licensed [1]), and its XAML control templates provide _as data_ a full declarative description of how a native Windows control is supposed to look like (in multiple Windows themes like Aero for Win7, Aero2 for Win10, Luna + Royale for WinXP, and Classic for Win95 look and feel [2]).

This includes everything like the exact colors and gradient stops and animation timing and vector shapes and accessibility behavior etc. of buttons and scrollbars and everything. Example: [3]

I wonder what one could learn / achieve trying to "port WPF to rust" / implement a XAML control template renderer in Rust. If you can "simply" parse and interpret those XAML files do you instantly get a native-like GUI that supports the exact look and feel of these different Windows themes? (on any OS!)

Somehow I think it is not realized how amazing that is!

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/main/LICENSE.TXT [2] https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/tree/main/src/Microsoft.DotNet... [3] https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/main/src/Microsoft.DotNet...

New comment by 1wd in "Decompiler Explorer"

1wd — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 17:11:24 +0000

Thanks. I had tried Reko and your description matches my impression.

I hoped to try hunt down the DOS Tetris easter egg described on the original authors website. https://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm

The executable is linked in the image.

I managed to decipher some functions (video memory pointers were actually kind of helpful) but didn't get far.

New comment by 1wd in "Decompiler Explorer"

1wd — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 10:03:46 +0000

Are there any decompilers for old x86 DOS com files?

New comment by 1wd in "A tool to render and upscale Sierra adventure game background images"

1wd — Sun, 29 May 2022 07:17:55 +0000

"EGA to VGA transformation" like it was done for games like Indy3 would be nice. http://www.superrune.com/tutorials/indy3_ega.php (Even though some people still prefer the EGA version.)

New comment by 1wd in "Supporting half-precision floats is annoying"

1wd — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 14:49:20 +0000

What are the reasons for changing the allocation of bits in bf16 vs. f16? Why are there no (few?) similar alternative allocation schemes for f32 and f64? Was IEEE's choice perfect for f32 / f64? How did they know? Why not for f16?

Does any hardware offer "configurable" bit allocation like f16[e=4,m=11]?

New comment by 1wd in "Any Encoding, Ever – ztd.text and Unicode for C++"

1wd — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 05:48:04 +0000

Python 3 by default still opens text files using the legacy locale encoding.

New comment by 1wd in "Voxel Space: Comanche's terrain rendering in less than 20 lines of code (2020)"

1wd — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 17:54:22 +0000

Adding the tilting is a tiny tweak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945633

New comment by 1wd in "Voxel Space: Comanche's terrain rendering in less than 20 lines of code (2020)"

1wd — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 11:57:35 +0000

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21944573

New comment by 1wd in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade EGA/VGA Comparison"

1wd — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 23:14:26 +0000

Exactly right. I specifically remember someone excitedly telling me at the time that the VGA Indiana Jones "is completely photo-realistic!"

New comment by 1wd in "Arrow v1.0: After 8 years, even better dates and times for Python"

1wd — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 08:22:57 +0000

It still does not parse all ISO 8601 format strings: "ISO 8601, RFC 3339 and datetime.isoformat() are three slightly different and in some senses incompatible datetime serialization formats" https://bugs.python.org/issue35829 For example it rejects typical strings produced by Javascript using Z instead of +00:00 as the timezone suffix.

New comment by 1wd in "Show HN: 3D Meshes of Signed Distance Functions in Python"

1wd — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 06:57:15 +0000

Nice! Do you have any plans to publish to PyPI? Is there an API to access numpy array containing the evaluated SDF volume?