Hacker News: Pinus

New comment by Pinus in "Rescuing old printers with an in-browser Linux VM bridged to WebUSB over USB/IP"

Pinus — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:59:38 +0000

As for the "who would want that", I think the use case for that kind of printer today is slow logging. With a laser printer that outputs a page at a time, if you log one line per day the power fails after 65 days, you lose the 65 lines that was in its memory. The MX-80 can print a line, or even a character if you poke it in the ribs a bit, at a time, so if the power goes away, your printed lines are still there.

New comment by Pinus in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

Pinus — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 06:28:57 +0000

Unfortunately, the plain text does not look good, and does not offer good control of the typesetting. At least, nearly all markdown I see is almost unreadable in its “raw” state. I’d much rather read manually formatted, monospaced, text. That way, you can use asterisks as bullets, as footnote markers and as emphasis markers all at the same time, and anyone who is familiar with normal typographic conventions will understand what is what.

New comment by Pinus in "Why is this program erroneously rejected by three C++ compilers?"

Pinus — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 06:15:42 +0000

I finally got around to it myself. Worked just fine. (VS Code, Github Copilot, Claude Haiku 4.5).

New comment by Pinus in "Why is this program erroneously rejected by three C++ compilers?"

Pinus — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 15:33:45 +0000

If you just toss the image at one of those newfangled AI thingamajigs (Copilot, Claude, whatever) and say "Compile this C++ program", does it work? Someone must have tried it by now – give us a report!

New comment by Pinus in "DBASE on the Kaypro II"

Pinus — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 13:11:22 +0000

Thanks for writing this! I remember reading about dBase II as a kid, and now that I’m (much!) older and actually using some of the databases of today, I have sometimes wondered what those older personal-computer databases looked like.

New comment by Pinus in "Using an engineering notebook"

Pinus — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:08:48 +0000

The problem I always run into when I try something like this, is that I mostly (there are exceptions) use paper as a data processing medium (as opposed to a data recording medium). Most of what I do on paper is messy, half-baked, wrong, turns out to be a false start, whatever. Once all that is fixed, what is left gets tidied up into some sort of digital form, usually program code. I don’t want all that mess in the capital-N Notebook, but it is hard to know when to switch from backs of envelopes to the Notebook.

I suppose there might be a value in stopping right before the tidying-up stage (or perhaps right after it) and summarise the steps that led up to it (including abandoned approaches, and why) into some sort of document but that, for me, would be a digital file somewhere, not paper.

New comment by Pinus in "What's up with all those equals signs anyway?"

Pinus — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 11:25:06 +0000

As far as I can remember, most mail servers were fairly sane about that sort of thing, even back in the 90’s when this stuff was introduced. However, there were always these more or less motivated fears about some server somewhere running on some ancient IBM hardware using EBCDIC encoding and truncating everything to 72 characters because its model of the world was based on punched cards. So standards were written to handle all those bizarre systems. And I am sure that there is someone on HN who actually used one of those servers...

New comment by Pinus in "Is It Time for a Nordic Nuke?"

Pinus — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 17:45:40 +0000

From what I have understood, a significant part of the reason why Sweden scrapped its nuke program last time around, was that we found out that nukes pose more questions than they answer. Obviously, you need the nukes themselves, and a reliable delivery mechanism. Neither are cheap. Preferably, you want second-strike capability, which is kind of tricky. And you want some way of balancing things so that the enemy does not take a chance on that second-strike capability and nuke you first anyway. Then you need something to use them for. At the time, the targets would probably have been ports in the Baltic states, then (involuntary) parts of the Soviet union and likely starting points for the hypothetical Soviet invasion fleet. Could we really stomach the idea of killing a few thousand Estonian civilians, probably not too happy about being used as stepping stones by the Soviets? For most military targets, there are better weapons.

Of course, it has later been argued that by entering into various more or less hidden agreements with the US, we made ourselves nuclear targets anyway, with no formal guarantees whatsoever to show for it...

New comment by Pinus in "Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence"

Pinus — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:34:55 +0000

Obviously, it has to eventually build and run if there’s to be any point to it, but is it necessary that every, or even any, step along the way builds and runs? I imagine some sort of iterative set-up where one component generates code, more or less "intelligently", and others check it against the C, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and what-have-you specs, and the whole thing iterates until all the checking components are happy. The components can’t be completely separate, of course, they’d have to be more or less intermingled or convergence would be very slow (like when lcamtuf had his fuzzer generate a JPEG out of an empty file), but isn’t that basically what (large) neural networks are; tangled messes of interconnected functions that do things in ways too complicated for anyone to bother figuring out?

New comment by Pinus in "Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence"

Pinus — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:06:53 +0000

I haven’t studied the project that this is a comment on, but: The article notices that something that compiles, runs, and renders a trivial HTML page might be a good starting point, and I would certainly agree with that when it’s humans writing the code. But is it the only way? Instead of maintaining “builds and runs” as a constant and varying what it does, can it make sense to have “a decent-sized subset of browser functionality” as a constant and varying the “builds and runs” bit? (Admittedly, that bit does not seem to be converging here, but I’m curious in more general terms.)

New comment by Pinus in "The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up"

Pinus — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:28:18 +0000

We _have_ standardized on Earth circumferences for length, only we divide by 40 million to make the numbers more sane, and got the measurement slightly wrong!

New comment by Pinus in "Learn LaTeX in 30 Minutes"

Pinus — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 11:19:05 +0000

You take a language designed around the limitations of 1970’s computers and the absence of limitations of Donald Knuth’s brain, and then you build a document system on top of that. What could possibly go wrong? =)

New comment by Pinus in "Can you take an ox to Oxford?"

Pinus — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 12:01:22 +0000

Meanwhile, Cambridge has, or at least had a few years ago, at least one combined pedestrian/cattle tunnel (there was a fence down the middle!) under a major road.

New comment by Pinus in "'Calvin and Hobbes' at 40"

Pinus — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 14:00:01 +0000

If you want something to hang on your wall, an original strip is coming up for auction in Stockholm more or less as I write. The bid is currently at over 1 MSEK (100kUSD)... https://auctionet.com/sv/events/891-the-modern-art-design-sa...

New comment by Pinus in "NaN, the not-a-number number that isn't NaN"

Pinus — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 19:15:10 +0000

For the built-in float type in Python, the behaviour is a bit funny:

    >>> nan=float('nan')
    >>> a=[nan]
    >>> nan in a
    True
    >>> any(nan==x for x in a)
    False

(Because the `in` operator assumes that identity implies equality...)

New comment by Pinus in "How to Enter a City Like a King"

Pinus — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 16:25:28 +0000

I thought there was something about the king of the UK having to ask permission to enter the City of London, but apparently that is a misunderstanding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation#Tem...). Pity, it would have been a good story of even monarchy bowing to finance! =)

New comment by Pinus in "Scheme Reports at Fifty"

Pinus — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 12:44:27 +0000

I thought "this feels like Univers" when I saw the text. A quick check, and it turned out to be URW Classic Sans, a font that I had not heard about, but which is apparently a Univers clone. (Not to be confused with URW Classico, which is more like Optima. I also wonder how it relates to U001, another URW clone of Univers... just different names? U001 comes, or used to come at least, with GhostPCL under a non-commercial licence.)

New comment by Pinus in "MAML – A new configuration language"

Pinus — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 05:56:40 +0000

My IT department blocks me from seeing this page. I suppose they wish to preserve my sanity, by shielding me from yet another config-language spec. =)

New comment by Pinus in ""Your" vs. "My" in user interfaces"

Pinus — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 06:23:00 +0000

This gets extra fun when you have a product which is actually named "My Card" (which, of course, is a bad idea to begin with, but...). Is it "Your My Card" or "My My Card"?

French web sites seem to have lost the plot completely. Buttons are sometimes imperative, sometimes infinitive, sometimes first-person present ("J’en profite!"), and probably others...

New comment by Pinus in "Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?"

Pinus — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 06:32:23 +0000

I’m planning a trip to France right now, and it seems like half the websites in that country (for example, ratp.fr for Paris public transport info) require me to check a CloudFlare checkbox to promise that I am a human. And of those that don’t, quite a few just plain lock me out...