Hacker News: __d

New comment by __d in "We Still Use Paper"

__d — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 12:26:48 +0000

If like to point out that word processors existed well before DOS, and that DOS itself didn’t exist until many years into the personal computer revolution.

To this day there are people who still use Wordstar, for instance.

New comment by __d in "Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men"

__d — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 04:11:10 +0000

You claimed that Russia invaded because its leader felt his hand was forced. You have offered no explanation of how it was "forced" to invade a sovereign neighbor.

I contend that it chose to invade because its leader wants to integrate Ukraine into the Russian Federation, and offered this as evidence of that desire. I think that contradicts your statement as to the true rationale for the invasion.

New comment by __d in "Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men"

__d — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:41:50 +0000

AI has been a thing for decades

New comment by __d in "Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men"

__d — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:38:14 +0000

You really should read Putin's 2021 essay on why Ukraine should be Russian

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Ru...

New comment by __d in "The economic folly of free buses"

__d — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 05:49:54 +0000

https://archive.is/fEnhV

New comment by __d in "European Alternatives"

__d — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 19:29:18 +0000

Yes.

The US is choosing to leverage its position without much concern for those consequences right now. The rest of the world is busy routing around that, and the leverage is slowly reducing.

It will take time: the US was a key member of the world economy. But there’s frequent new reminders of why it’s necessary.

New comment by __d in "European Alternatives"

__d — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 10:56:39 +0000

Tariff European products. Cut off access to payment networks. Stop sharing satellite imagery.

There’s a lot of things the rest of the world has no or bad backups for.

New comment by __d in "European Alternatives"

__d — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 10:53:56 +0000

Freedom Fries redux

New comment by __d in "What Sun got wrong"

__d — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:26:37 +0000

For sure. But Sun had great engineers, and it was a feature that I'd argue was visibly existential at the time.

New comment by __d in "Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived"

__d — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 22:02:41 +0000

An IDE, form designer, language, runtime, and database engine.

People used it to write business applications. Like Microsoft Access, or Visual Basic.

It started as a competitor to dBase II/III called FoxBase, and then Microsoft bought it.

New comment by __d in "What Sun got wrong"

__d — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:26:42 +0000

Yes, Kerberos is a direct import, although extended quite a bit. AD is a lot more than Hesiod, but AFS is a lot more than SMB. Zephyr didn't make it over.

There was an opportunity to build out graphical management tools, but NIS+ kinda got in the way, and the politics of commercial Unix in general didn't help.

New comment by __d in "What Sun got wrong"

__d — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 08:22:58 +0000

> Failure to respond to Active Directory

Sun did really well in the academic workstation market, converting the old "VAX and a sea of terminals" into a "sea of Sun workstations".

X11, YP/NIS and NFS worked pretty well for a while, but then Microsoft came out with NT and AD, and Sun failed to respond. Like, ever. I think this was perhaps the worst software mistake Sun made.

New comment by __d in "What Sun got wrong"

__d — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 08:17:30 +0000

ytalk!

New comment by __d in "German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol"

__d — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:54:32 +0000

UML was phase two of OMG. It originally developed CORBA.

New comment by __d in "German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol"

__d — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:49:29 +0000

For a long time, std::endl demonstrated that you were a proper C++ programmer, not some neckbeard C apologist. It wasn’t until C++ had „won“ that it became acceptable to use \n again.

New comment by __d in "Most people prefer traditional architecture"

__d — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:28:09 +0000

I painted my house blue and orange in protest at the boring colour choices most people make.

No one else on my street has followed my lead though.

I think some of it is because people are obsessed with treating housing as an investment, and so anything outside the norm is a financial risk.

New comment by __d in "Australia 'on the same page' as Canada as it seeks deeper EU alliance"

__d — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:52:21 +0000

AN AU-EU free trade agreement has been negotiated, with the deal agreed in March 2026. It’s now making its way through both sides‘ political processes.

https://commission.europa.eu/topics/trade/eu-australia-trade...

https://www.austrade.gov.au/en/how-we-can-help-you/australia...

New comment by __d in "How to buy a good car for $1000"

__d — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 02:06:08 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by __d in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

__d — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 02:46:54 +0000

So, let’s quantify things: what’s the chance they’re right? And what’s the cost of that chance happens?

New comment by __d in "How AI is breaking the British state"

__d — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:41:26 +0000

So it’s not implausible that the “justice” system is automated, using AI, to enable it to cope with the deluge of claims.

This mirrors the current increases in open source pull requests and CVEs driven by low-effort AI-aided submissions.