Hacker News: baud9600

New comment by baud9600 in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

baud9600 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:52:01 +0000

At Redmond, there was also the Patterns & Practices group (P&P) that tried to make sense of the dev products, and built extra libraries “to show customers how to use them”. They followed the bouncing ball of the frameworks releases from the main development teams. It suggests that it wasn’t clear exactly how you’d use the main products: so P&P said, ‘try it like this.’ I also think the article didn’t say much about MS in the web era. The company survived webdev IMO, but it definitely wasn’t the leader

New comment by baud9600 in "Everything old is new again: memory optimization"

baud9600 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:54:36 +0000

Strange days we live in. Python and C++? What about a line of bash:

tr -s '[:space:]' '\n' < file.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

I’d like to know the memory profile of this. The bottleneck is obviously sort which buffers everything in memory. So if we replace this with awk using a hash map to keep count of unique words, then it’s a much smaller data set in memory:

tr -s '[:space:]' '\n' < file.txt | awk '{c[$0]++} END{for(w in c) print c[w], w}' | sort -rn

I’m guessing this will beat Python and C++?

New comment by baud9600 in "Regex Blaster"

baud9600 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:36:41 +0000

Does not render correctly on iOS (mobile Safari)? It’s a fixed Desktop view and you can’t pinch to zoom as needed. It takes effort to prevent mobile users like this! Do others get this experience?

New comment by baud9600 in "Process-Based Concurrency: Why Beam and OTP Keep Being Right"

baud9600 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:31:02 +0000

Once you were familiar with occam you could see deadlocks in code very quickly. It was a productive way to build scaled concurrent systems. At the time we laughed at the idea of using C for the same task

New comment by baud9600 in "Process-Based Concurrency: Why Beam and OTP Keep Being Right"

baud9600 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:26:57 +0000

Very interesting. Reading this made me think of occam on the transputer: concurrent lightweight processes, message passing, dedicated memory! I spent some happy years in that world. Perhaps I should look at BEAM and see what work comes along?

New comment by baud9600 in "Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet"

baud9600 — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 02:03:48 +0000

Mobile Safari only does this for sites that implement dark themes (and when you have dark mode enabled in iOS). But many sites don’t have these themes. The Noir extension seems to fix the problem for now. There is a reader mode that can go dark but it’s manual, per article

New comment by baud9600 in "Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet"

baud9600 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:46:46 +0000

I added the “Noir” extension to mobile Safari, now I automatically get dark mode on all websites including Hacker News.

New comment by baud9600 in "ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering"

baud9600 — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 21:59:24 +0000

This is such a great article!

I found myself thinking, “I wonder if some of this could be used to playback video on old 8-bit machines?” But they’re so underpowered…

New comment by baud9600 in "East Germany balloon escape"

baud9600 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 22:03:26 +0000

In Eastern Europe in 1979, those were big sums of money. What an extraordinary story

New comment by baud9600 in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

baud9600 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:04:57 +0000

I’m loving the comments here. But I confess I exoected a ‘social technology’ solution to the problem!! Like “casserole” in the UK, which connects people in a neighbourhood with others who need food and a visit. You make a casserole and take it round. I’ve not seen this in person but it seems like a great application of tech to help ward off loneliness… You could easily extend this to “dog friends” or “cat friends”, where you’re connected with someone who’d like you to visit them and bring your dog or cat for an introduction and a pat

New comment by baud9600 in "Action was the best 8-bit programming language"

baud9600 — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 14:20:00 +0000

I wrote sound-sampling software for Atari using Action! and Mac/65 by OSS, using my own DAC+ADC hardware (8-bit of course). They were fast tools, it was very productive.