Hacker News: __d

New comment by __d in "Y Combinator's Ankit Gupta faces backlash over H-1B comments"

__d — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:59:44 +0000

Until very recently, that was a pretty common view. Countries generally want unconstrained exports, while limiting competitive imports.

New comment by __d in "Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history"

__d — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:58:07 +0000

Do you see that changing as parts are designed for additive manufacturing? Things that basically cannot be made another way, but have strength, weight, and even functional benefits over a traditionally made part?

I’m thinking of say cooling channels built into walls of rocket combustion chambers, or car brake/axle assemblies, and some of the „organic“ designs that are lighter and stronger than a cast/machined part.

New comment by __d in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

__d — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:01:03 +0000

Sure. But … so was Linux, or Firefox, or GNOME or KDE, etc.

Even RISC-V itself was adopted by volunteers and supported by toolchains, and then kernels, and applications.

The amount of work is less a problem than the motivation. And motivation really just depends on recognizing that the status quo sucks, but is fixable.

New comment by __d in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

__d — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:57:15 +0000

And yet, new ISAs arise fairly regularly, for various reasons. RISC-V itself succeeded largely because it is gratis, I think.

New comment by __d in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

__d — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:54:19 +0000

Err … RISC-V is an ISA without a fab?

New comment by __d in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

__d — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 23:19:17 +0000

So … use RISC-V as the strawman, and create a community-based RISC-6 that doesn’t have these weaknesses? Better to get in now before it becomes too solidly entrenched.

New comment by __d in "Tim King, AmigaDOS developer, has died"

__d — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:33:26 +0000

I used Perihelion’s Helios on Transputers for several years. It was a cool system, and gets far less credit than it deserves. Plan9 and Helios were independently developed but have a lot in common.

New comment by __d in "I hate packaging my software for Linux"

__d — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:05:42 +0000

Historically, there was a large population of FOSS prior to Linux, and its distributions (starting with HJ Lu, SLS, Slackware, etc) were mostly just uniform packaging and easy installation. This wasn’t entirely new: commercial Unix had packaging mechanisms, but lacked the motivation for gratis distribution.

Prior to Linux, autotools was a standardization that made installation easy across the many commercial Unix variants.

That’s now moved on. There are dozens of packaging and distribution formats, none of which is universally applicable (as the OP says). And users’ expectations have moved well beyond the autotools invocation.

It’d be great for both end users and application developers for a universal solution to emerge, but there’s no sign of it happening.

New comment by __d in "Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)"

__d — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 23:02:09 +0000

You’re forgetting blame: if an on-prem system has an issue, that’s 100% on you. If AWS/GCP/Azure has an outage, that’s just bad luck, and everyone else suffers too.

New comment by __d in "Devtools must be open source"

__d — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 02:09:21 +0000

But the "actual thing" is presumably software too? Why is it any different to a dev tool? All software is now more-or-less available for the token cost, given a specification of what is required.

It's not just FOSS: the era of commercial software is equally over. Why pay for something that leaves you dependent on a third party for bug fixes or new features? Vibe it up yourself, and pay for only what you need, when you need it.

New comment by __d in "Devtools must be open source"

__d — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 02:05:08 +0000

I don't know about the long term, but the medium term looks like "Claude, make a replacement for , with the same functionality and user experience."

New comment by __d in "LLMs reward expertise"

__d — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 23:00:23 +0000

Code generation (by compiler) has one major difference: it's deterministic.

New comment by __d in "Hooray for the Sockets Interface"

__d — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:35:02 +0000

The Plan9 network API is an interesting successor to all of STREAMS, streams, and sockets.

New comment by __d in "Malleable Computing, Emacs, and You"

__d — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:54:08 +0000

There’s an interesting middle ground: not fully malleable software, where the end user has full customisation ability but requires full programming skill, but eg the Unix tool model where prebuilt utilities can be composed with a simple syntax.

Pre-existing (or importable) ELisp functions are kinda similar, just a slightly higher level of user skill.

New comment by __d in "The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley"

__d — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 04:27:13 +0000

That's not what Glynne said. The whole justification for Starlink was to create demand for Falcon.

New comment by __d in "The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley"

__d — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:12:12 +0000

Falcon9 has basically no market: the only thing that keeps it flying is Starlink.

The whole AI/orbital datacentres/launch thing is a giant grift.

New comment by __d in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

__d — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:24:19 +0000

I think this is an important point.

A time when a take-home, closed-book test, relying on the honesty and integrity of the students, was viable seems completely unrealistic now. I assume there were always some who cheated, but I can imagine that it was sufficiently socially unacceptable that many didn't.

That seems like a very different world.

New comment by __d in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

__d — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:13:14 +0000

The same logic applies.

At least where I live, universities used to run entrance exams. They didn't care about high school grades, or even if you'd ever been to high school: if you passed the entrance exam, you could enroll.

New comment by __d in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

__d — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:05:01 +0000

At my child's high school, phones are "off and away all day", and the punishment for being caught with a phone in your pocket (or hands) is pretty severe.

During an exam, it's an instant zero mark, on top of the after-school detention (the punishments escalate to suspension and expulsion for repeat offenses).

New comment by __d in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

__d — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:59:46 +0000

I'm hopeless at pure cursive writing. My default writing is a joined-up-ish kind of printing. Writing using it works really well for retaining information for me.