Hacker News: amszmidt

New comment by amszmidt in "Archaeologists Are Reconstructing the 'Invisible' Technologies of the Stone Age"

amszmidt — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:50:47 +0000

You take short fibers, and twist and splice them together to get longer fibers. And you repeat until you get the desired length, or thickness...

Lots of videos of how to make it on the Internets using nettle, or some other plant (flax is still used to make clothes today though through industry methods).

New comment by amszmidt in "Autism is genetic – and why this information matters now"

amszmidt — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 06:04:56 +0000

There are ways to predict a child’s height as an adult that are very accurate.

Most countries track growth curves, and ask parents about what their height is to correlate data with. One can also use bone age assessment.

New comment by amszmidt in "Indirect Calling of Nested Functions on GCC Without Executable Stack"

amszmidt — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 19:49:37 +0000

Don’t think TeX ever did that, that was a “simple” Pascal program.

Lisp Machines though.. updating the operating system was by loading bunch of compiled files that replaced currently loaded functions in memory.

Then again, Lisp Machines where very proud of self modification — the CADR had a fun feature where it could modify the next instruction depending on things…

How the world has changed.

New comment by amszmidt in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

amszmidt — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:46:33 +0000

You need to go back a few more hundreds of years, hunk is an old term that just means "small piece of something larger".

It has been in common usage in computing since long before 1985 .. for a really interesting and obscure way hunk has been used:

https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/hunks.html

New comment by amszmidt in "Iceberg Collapses and Flips over in Ilulissat, Greenland (July 25, 2026) [video]"

amszmidt — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:21:22 +0000

How cold is cold? :-)

Water below ”sea” level tends to stay around -1C (salt water) to 4C. Below that, water becomes ice…

Ambient temperature can drop to -40C … internally these ice blocks hoover around -10C.

New comment by amszmidt in "Frame – Linux X server in Assembly"

amszmidt — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 20:10:39 +0000

Only because the X Window System is very heavily documented, e.g., in the excellent "The Definitive Guides to the X Window System Series".

New comment by amszmidt in "How Has Roman Concrete Lasted for Millennia? 1,900-Year-Old Latrine Offers Clues"

amszmidt — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:24:08 +0000

The key here is “based on Portland cement”, which is generally has water repellent added to it making it water proof.

Normal cement, concrete .. Is a different story.

New comment by amszmidt in "EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors"

amszmidt — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 19:22:56 +0000

Would love to see some statistics on that.

New comment by amszmidt in "Chaosnet (1981)"

amszmidt — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:23:07 +0000

It is also capable of doing it over the wire.

New comment by amszmidt in "Even more batteries included with Emacs"

amszmidt — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:33:06 +0000

Fun fact. DIRED pre-dates EMACS.

DIRED on ITS is also similar enough to today’s DIRED.

New comment by amszmidt in "Roman Letters"

amszmidt — Sun, 17 May 2026 11:06:16 +0000

But it is. There is a link to the original text at the bottom of the translation.

New comment by amszmidt in "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"

amszmidt — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:41:07 +0000

The details of lexical scope where defined in Algol 60 (1960), nearly 2 decades before Rabbit (1978).

People did know how to implement things back then, and TeX is a great example of that. It is just our definitions have changed over the years of what we consider better.

New comment by amszmidt in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

amszmidt — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:43:22 +0000

This a common thing shared with the Nordics. The English term would be “meteorological spring”.

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A5r_i_Sverige

The definition would certainly work in English countries, seeing it is just 0 to 10 degrees Celsius average over the course of a week (and after 15th of February).

New comment by amszmidt in "Spanish legislation as a Git repo"

amszmidt — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:43:31 +0000

Would be nice if someone did it with Swedens laws too!

New comment by amszmidt in "Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns"

amszmidt — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 07:25:09 +0000

In Sweden, you're allowed to film/photograph in public without the need for any consent.

There is (in general) no expectation of privacy in public in Europe. How you can use the material though, is a different matter ...

New comment by amszmidt in "Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)"

amszmidt — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 12:18:49 +0000

Not if it is an alias.

New comment by amszmidt in "Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)"

amszmidt — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 12:16:41 +0000

It was suggested by Tom Lord (RIP), who used it heavily long before he wrote GNU Arch.

File names or directories starting with a comma where considered “junk”, and ones with a plus sign I think where considered “precious”.

New comment by amszmidt in "FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub"

amszmidt — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 22:02:24 +0000

Thanks for the link; sadly none of the links to the repo can be viewed to see what exactly occurred.

To those downvoting, curious why? Many of the links are not viewable, since GitHub hides them, so any discussion becomes quite tricky.

New comment by amszmidt in "FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub"

amszmidt — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 21:40:58 +0000

Incorporating compatible code, under different license is perfectly OK and each work can have different license, while the whole combined work is under the terms of another.

I'm honestly quite confused what FFmpeg is objecting to here, if ILoveRockchip wrote code, under a compatible license (which Apache 2.0 is wrt. LGPLv2+ which FFmpeg is licensed under) -- then that seems perfectly fine.

The repository in question is of course gone. Is it that ILoveRockchip claims that they wrote code that was written FFmpeg? That is bad, and unrelated to any license terms, or license compatibility ... just outright plagiarism.

New comment by amszmidt in "The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models"

amszmidt — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:44:05 +0000

I think maybe you're mixing up distribution and running a program, at least taking your initial comment into account, "if you train/run/use a model, it must be open source".