Hacker News: acegopher

New comment by acegopher in "Flies keep landing on North Sea oil rigs"

acegopher — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 19:21:03 +0000

I've read the Bobiverse series too :-). Maybe the question then is, do intelligent species have the will to invest the capital and labor required when there is no payoff in those decision-makers lifetimes? I think there are individuals who do, but I think it's an open question if societies can.

New comment by acegopher in "Flies keep landing on North Sea oil rigs"

acegopher — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:28:39 +0000

I wonder if the "generational problem" is a potential reason for the Fermi Paradox. If it is extremely difficult for a species to expend resources on multi-generational projects, then the species horizon is only that which can be spanned in some fraction of a lifetime of that species.

New comment by acegopher in "Marissa Mayer will close her old AI startup, sell assets to her new AI startup"

acegopher — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 17:17:33 +0000

And when it's offered for free once, it's then a race to the bottom. People in general don't understand the value of curation nor quality, especially when it comes to information. So it's hard for well-curated high quality information to remain because it costs money to make it.

New comment by acegopher in "The American Nations regions across North America"

acegopher — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:58:22 +0000

No, it's not in the text at the original link, however, yes, there is a link to the full article in the blurb with the how: https://www.nationhoodlab.org/the-american-nations-regions-a...

New comment by acegopher in "How RSS beat Microsoft"

acegopher — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 18:14:13 +0000

We started with a Betamax player. I think one underappreciated reason for VHS's win was that you could put a movie on one VHS tape, whereas the Betamax required two (at least at the time it mattered). And in an era of movie rental stores, that made a difference. Both in terms of logistics, but also in terms of the consumer having to load a new tape halfway through a movie.

New comment by acegopher in "19% of California houses are owned by investors"

acegopher — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 19:40:49 +0000

http://archive.today/tq9Vw

New comment by acegopher in "Omarchy, a Linux Distribution by DHH"

acegopher — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:34:03 +0000

Out of the box Linux Mint, Debian or Fedora Gnome or KDE is similarly "just works". A lot has changed since 2007 Linux.

New comment by acegopher in "The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save the World"

acegopher — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 00:59:06 +0000

And you couldn't fit a whole movie on a single Betamax tape. That alone was a reason for VHS's acendancy.

New comment by acegopher in "Machine Code Isn't Scary"

acegopher — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 17:12:35 +0000

> the entire Amiga hardware and operating system was written to make assembly coding convenient

I am curious what specific examples do you have of the HW and OS being made/written to make ASM convenient?

New comment by acegopher in "CERN scientists find evidence of quantum entanglement in sheep"

acegopher — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 13:26:09 +0000

Is it just me who 15 years ago laughed at the first big April Fools jokes by companies online, but now just cringes when I see headlines like this?

New comment by acegopher in "The hallucinatory thoughts of the dying mind"

acegopher — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 23:12:09 +0000

It's more common than you think, and it's called "terminal lucidity": https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/terminal-luci...

New comment by acegopher in "Simple CPU Design"

acegopher — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 18:19:43 +0000

I pay for kagi.com and they seem to be fighting that battle. I also frequent their "small web" (https://blog.kagi.com/small-web) initiative.

New comment by acegopher in "Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon"

acegopher — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:21:34 +0000

because the crypto bros love him

New comment by acegopher in "Why do regexes use `$` and `^` as line anchors? (2024)"

acegopher — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 19:29:01 +0000

At least for ^ I was always told that the ADM3a terminal keyboard had a HOME key with ~ and ^ on it, which is why ~ means "home directory", and ^ means "home of the line".

New comment by acegopher in "It's time to make computing personal again"

acegopher — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:03:25 +0000

Where do left-tech activists tend to hang out? I would be interested in joining...

New comment by acegopher in "Combining 15s interval whole-sky-camera photos to form a 4y spanning keogram"

acegopher — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 20:56:58 +0000

I did much the same thing (and much more) 10 years ago. I used a RPi as well as a Canon point-and-shot out my window. My pics were 1 per minute.

Here is a link to the keogram section (I didn't know the term), but watch the whole video, I did a bunch of other art:

https://youtu.be/Mfo4hVc71Qw?si=3YKojggkTj2xehAB&t=2334

New comment by acegopher in "Principles of Educational Programming Language Design"

acegopher — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 15:22:01 +0000

That's a great concept. That was part of the premise of Smalltalk and Oberon, for example. How are you extending Lua to accomplish that goal?

New comment by acegopher in "The FORTH code for Chipwits is released in the game's 40th anniversary"

acegopher — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 19:23:29 +0000

Thank you! This is wonderful.

New comment by acegopher in "The FORTH code for Chipwits is released in the game's 40th anniversary"

acegopher — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 14:09:56 +0000

Do you have any texts/websites/papers that would allow one (me) to learn about "deeply rudimentary Lisp" and how to create one? I am especially interested in learning why 4 general-purpose registers are important and other lower-level details like that.

New comment by acegopher in "Hi Google, please stop pooping the bed: a desperate plea from the indie web"

acegopher — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 15:17:28 +0000

Ohhhh... I didn't know you could blacklist, thanks!