Hacker News: aardvark179

New comment by aardvark179 in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

aardvark179 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:52:03 +0000

It depends a lot on where you were brought up, and the language you were exposed to. My first association would be a very Yorkshire, “Thou knowest,” rather than the king james.

New comment by aardvark179 in "Rebasing in Magit"

aardvark179 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:15:50 +0000

cF is the command you want for this.

New comment by aardvark179 in "The stagnancy of publishing and the disappearance of the midlist"

aardvark179 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:33:39 +0000

I recommend actual human reviewers who you can stick with over time and who do not just say that a book is good or bad but something about why. Those don’t have to be professional reviewers, they can just be people you know or follow who talk about what they read.

Looking at award shortlists and nomination lists is also a good filter providing you know a little about the award (I wouldn’t go to the Clarke Award shortlist for mil sf stuff, for example).

New comment by aardvark179 in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

aardvark179 — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:53:34 +0000

iPhone—hold down 0 and ° should be on the pop up.

New comment by aardvark179 in "Postgres Is Your Friend. ORM Is Not"

aardvark179 — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:31:57 +0000

It’s been swinging for at least 30 years, Toplink came out in 1994, and I have worked on systems that were written half a decade earlier that contained things we’d all call ORMs.

New comment by aardvark179 in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

aardvark179 — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 19:55:56 +0000

That is superbly done. I can go further back than some here, 1300 is fine, 1200 I can mange okay, but 1100 takes real effort.

New comment by aardvark179 in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

aardvark179 — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 19:50:29 +0000

Orthography is probably the biggest stumbling block going back to the 1500s or 1400s , but that’s really because the rest of the language has changed in vocabulary and style, but is still understandable. If you think the 1200 or 1100 entry are mostly orthographical changes then you are missing the interesting bits.

New comment by aardvark179 in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

aardvark179 — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 19:33:50 +0000

Having interpreted for a guy speaking with a broad Glaswegian accent on the east coast main line, I can totally believe this.

New comment by aardvark179 in "Games Workshop bans staff from using AI"

aardvark179 — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:17:51 +0000

I believe the lore appropriate term is Abominable Intelligences.

New comment by aardvark179 in "The year of the 3D printed miniature and other lies we tell ourselves"

aardvark179 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 23:34:29 +0000

Obviously there isn’t any of that in Warhammer, at least not officially. Even a pretty niche thing for them is probably at a scale where resin casting would make more sense (assuming they aren’t going to sell or license out STL files). There is a decent unofficial scene around alternative weapons load outs and such like, but it’s not going to destroy GW any time soon.

New comment by aardvark179 in "JavaScript engines zoo – Compare every JavaScript engine"

aardvark179 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 20:02:59 +0000

You need more than a simple sandbox for what you describe. You also need to avoid infinite loops or other constructs from causing a DoS or similar, and if you are doing this with the intention of interacting with some other parts of a system then you need to think about how that interaction works and whether there is a way to execute something outside of that sandbox.

Even if you go with something backed by a full time team there is still going to be a chance you have to deal with a security issue in a hurry, maybe in the run up to Christmas. That is just going to come with the territory and if you don’t want to deal with that then you probably need to think about whether you really need a sandbox that can execute untrusted code.

New comment by aardvark179 in "C –> Java != Java –> LLM"

aardvark179 — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 22:07:40 +0000

Smalltalk, Lisp, and other image based languages allowed this. I would not recommend it beyond a very restricted idea of patching.

New comment by aardvark179 in "Reverse Engineering US Airline's PNR System and Accessing All Reservations"

aardvark179 — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 22:41:38 +0000

Confirmation codes are not sufficient on their own, they cycle through them relatively quickly so they have to be combined with things like the passengers family name to actually identify the booking.

New comment by aardvark179 in "Leaving Intel"

aardvark179 — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 12:00:26 +0000

Calling them AI flamegraphs is really naming them after the workload they are likely to be used on. If you want to make workloads more efficient it’s useful to know where they are spending their time.

New comment by aardvark179 in "I see a future in jj"

aardvark179 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 05:25:33 +0000

Crucially you can also select a region within a chunk and perform those commands, so it’s easy to untangle changes.

New comment by aardvark179 in "How functional programming shaped and twisted front end development"

aardvark179 — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 15:23:13 +0000

There are often a couple of barriers to this.

Firstly, you can’t break what is already there, so any evolution of the general platform often has to make wider guarantees than a single framework.

Adopting ideas from any single framework too quickly may put you in a worse position. A framework can evolve and choose when to break compatibility, a language or platform standard has a tougher job in that regard.

Some things that front end frameworks have settled on are now being looked at for standardisation, but I’m personally still wary about changing something like the ecmascript for. It would be an easier call if there were a standard library which simply needed an implementation, but we aren’t quite there yet.

New comment by aardvark179 in "ML on Apple ][+"

aardvark179 — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 19:05:55 +0000

I thought this was going to be about the programming language, and I was wondering how they managed to implement it on a machine that small.

New comment by aardvark179 in "VLT observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS II"

aardvark179 — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 19:26:57 +0000

Our techniques have improved.

New comment by aardvark179 in "Project to formalise a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in the Lean theorem prover"

aardvark179 — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 21:01:11 +0000

Thank you. I saw the headline and was thinking things had progress surprisingly quickly.

New comment by aardvark179 in "8x19 Text Mode Font Origins"

aardvark179 — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 16:41:07 +0000

The reason for it in terminals is much more directly linked to the IBM punched card format.