Hacker News: Hemospectrum

New comment by Hemospectrum in "APL is more French than English"

Hemospectrum — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:28:14 +0000

> What’s happened, of course, with FORTRAN is that it has become the lingua franca of the computing world. It is the one language that everybody understands to some level of detail — it is on every computer, in every country, made by every manufacturer — and one could learn to use FORTRAN reading books at every level of complexity, written in every language on the surface of the earth. It is universal, like the air we breathe, and I don’t think it’s going to be displaced for a long time to come.

"I met a traveler from an antique land..."

New comment by Hemospectrum in "The Lobster Programming Language"

Hemospectrum — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:37:30 +0000

I suddenly understand part of why experienced programmers seem to find Rust so much more difficult than those who are just beginning to learn. Years of C++ trauma taught them to ignore the content of the error messages. It doesn't matter how well they're written if the programmer refuses to read.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Malm Whale"

Hemospectrum — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 07:29:11 +0000

The Anglo-Saxon migrations made England English, and then the waves of Viking invasions littered North Germanic vocabulary all over it. You can see it in doublets like skirt/shirt that aren't in other West Germanic languages.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address"

Hemospectrum — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 23:40:16 +0000

Great when it works. Too many senders will only deliver to widely used hosts, and silently fail for anything outside their tiny allowlist.

Note that I'm not even talking about trying to send email FROM a self-hosted account, but trying to get someone else to send email TO such an account.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Rue: Higher level than Rust, lower level than Go"

Hemospectrum — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 20:22:38 +0000

Rather than downvoting you, I will speak up to say I don't see what you're seeing. Spaces around hyphens, yeah, sure, but LLMs prefer em dashes, and even that is unreliable, because it's borrowed from habits that real humans have had for many years.

For me, the more important indicator is the content. I see reports of personal experience, and thoughts that are not completely explained (because the reader is expected to draw the rest of the owl). I don't see smugly over-the-top piles of adjectives filling in for an inability to make critiques of any substance. I don't see wacky asides amounting to argumentum ad lapidem, accomplishing nothing beyond insulting readers who disagree with a baseless assertion.

I think it's likely you have drawn a false positive.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Linux Kernel Rust Code Sees Its First CVE Vulnerability"

Hemospectrum — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:05:31 +0000

It is not obvious to those who refuse to understand, and who preemptively reject case studies on the grounds that the numbers are surely fabricated.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing"

Hemospectrum — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:58:34 +0000

> If we took the same approach to other engineering, we'd be constantly tearing down houses and rebuilding them just because we have better nails now. It sure would keep a lot of builders employed though.

This is almost exactly what happens in some countries.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Blender 5.0"

Hemospectrum — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 17:39:04 +0000

Intel Macs were always a second class citizen for Blender. There was a lot you couldn't do because the GPU drivers just didn't allow it.

They actually announced they were dropping support in February. Nobody noticed or cared.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Türkiye will not sell rare earth elements to the USA"

Hemospectrum — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 17:06:17 +0000

Looking forward to my next long flight where I can watch movies about Bharatna Jones.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Just use a button"

Hemospectrum — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 20:24:09 +0000

...Except on websites that override this to make those links open in the current tab, or just silently fail.

On the modern web, the menu is more reliable.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Study: MRI contrast agent causes harmful metal buildup in some patients"

Hemospectrum — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 00:10:27 +0000

> Does that cause any symptoms?

Tinnitus.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Servo v0.0.1"

Hemospectrum — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 19:07:10 +0000

> Servo has been in development for a decade

I was curious how you arrived at that figure so I checked the dates. Servo began in 2012 as a Mozilla skunkworks project, died off in 2020, and was revived in late 2023. If you simply subtract the "dead" period, sure, it doesn't look like it was going anywhere fast, but that's ignoring the multiple major changes in direction and the 5+ years during which Servo development was fully subordinate to Firefox development. It only became a fully independent browser development effort after the project was revived by Igalia.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?"

Hemospectrum — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 15:42:43 +0000

From your link, emphasis mine:

> permits the operator of a motor vehicle to turn such vehicle right at a red stop light after stopping

Quoting GP, emphasis again mine:

> the driver glanced to his left and without stopping or looking in my direction, turned right across my path

The driver turned without stopping. That is explicitly and clearly illegal throughout the US.

This is one of those rules drivers are supposed to be trained on (and tested on) before being given a license, but it doesn't seem to stick.

The Wikipedia article notes that allowing turn-on-red became widespread in response to fuel scarcity. Fuel efficiency is dramatically higher in modern vehicles. Maybe it's time to repeal it after all.

If only there was public interest in public safety...

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Top Programming Languages 2025"

Hemospectrum — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 04:12:45 +0000

I would be surprised to see it high in the rankings before it establishes certain backward compatibility guarantees.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Four-year wedding crasher mystery solved"

Hemospectrum — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 19:18:11 +0000

Are you perhaps referring to this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33229793

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Lisp interpreter with GC in <750 lines of Odin (and <500 lines of C)"

Hemospectrum — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 01:52:03 +0000

You mean a borrow checker? That exists, but not for Odin.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "The road that killed Legend Jenkins was working as designed"

Hemospectrum — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 19:40:50 +0000

Outright impossible. You see, the US is far more spread out than Europe. You need only look at a map to notice the insurmountable geographic barriers that prevent a Subway from being built closer to an apartment building. It simply can't be done.

Wait, sorry, that's trains. You're talking about sandwiches. Let me check my notes...

New comment by Hemospectrum in "OpenAI Burns the Boats"

Hemospectrum — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 20:30:45 +0000

The citation is right there in the article:

> source: i made it up

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Job growth has slowed sharply; the question is why"

Hemospectrum — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 20:34:07 +0000

Rent can continue to go up as long as there is room (literally physical space) in whatever housing is still on the market. Ten years ago you might have been able to afford your own apartment. Now you need three roommates. Soon you'll need seven, and then fifteen, and that can just keep going up as long as that number of bodies can be crammed into the same lodgings.

New comment by Hemospectrum in "Coffee-shop pitch change helped founder unlock traction for laptop campers"

Hemospectrum — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:45:22 +0000

This already sounds like every independent coffee shop I've been to in the continental US.