Hacker News: bear8642

New comment by bear8642 in "My 1992 view of the problems of computer programming in 1992"

bear8642 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:00:57 +0000

> In the middle 70s it was COBOL, when COBOL'74 came out it became king of in-house programming for IBM

I thought IBM were still focused on APL in the 70s…

New comment by bear8642 in "Semiconductor Lifeline Keeps Fighter Jets in the Air"

bear8642 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 23:26:03 +0000

> "[Phoenix] repackages off-the-shelf semiconductors into devices that are virtually identical to the phased-out chips."

I'm slightly surprised that _virtually_ identical chips are allowed. I expected truly identical chips to be required…

New comment by bear8642 in "Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity"

bear8642 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 23:31:16 +0000

Thanks for sharing that!

New comment by bear8642 in "Mythical Man Month"

bear8642 — Sun, 10 May 2026 01:48:03 +0000

> AI is not delivering 10x shareholder value, anywhere.

A bit facetious, but I'd expect Nvidia and the like providing the "AI equipment" to have a 10× share value at least…

New comment by bear8642 in "A Letter from Dijkstra on APL (1982)"

bear8642 — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:46:59 +0000

How so?

I'm struggling to see how Roger's manipulation of the expressions without executing each line validates Dijkstra's point...

New comment by bear8642 in "War on Raze"

bear8642 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:54:35 +0000

For a smaller example, try the J Incunabulum[0] various explanations are available [1][2]

It's been discussed here before too.

[0] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum [1] https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... [2] https://tony-zorman.com/posts/j-incunabulum.html

New comment by bear8642 in "AWS engineer reports PostgreSQL perf halved by Linux 7.0, fix may not be easy"

bear8642 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:32:52 +0000

> I'd argue a 50% hit to performance [...] is ... quite the regression

Indeed! Especially if said regression happens to impact anything trade/market related...

New comment by bear8642 in "Big-Endian Testing with QEMU"

bear8642 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:11:59 +0000

> daily drivers (ppc64le, Apple silicon)

How come you're running ppc64le as a daily driver?

New comment by bear8642 in "Big-Endian Testing with QEMU"

bear8642 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:23:54 +0000

> the only relevant big-endian architecture is s390x

The adjacent POWER architecture is also still relevant - but as you say, they too can afford a support contract.

New comment by bear8642 in "Smalltalk's Browser: Unbeatable, yet Not Enough"

bear8642 — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:11:40 +0000

oh, thanks! I didn't know that Prolog was still used commercially.

New comment by bear8642 in "Smalltalk's Browser: Unbeatable, yet Not Enough"

bear8642 — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:09:16 +0000

Likely because whilst it didn't work out commercially, the ideas smalltalk, prolog and other more esoteric languages (forth, apl) focus on are themselves very interesting.

New comment by bear8642 in "The Saddest Moment (2013) [pdf]"

bear8642 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:34:20 +0000

> Humans trust. Their systems should too.

And indeed as Thompson showed, you've got to trust at some point...

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/R209/Reflections-Trus...

New comment by bear8642 in "Sins of the Children"

bear8642 — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 20:21:35 +0000

> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by

I feel this is one of the reasons I liked Fire upon the Deep with the group mind based Tines

New comment by bear8642 in "NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power"

bear8642 — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 23:35:02 +0000

Cool story - thanks for sharing it!

New comment by bear8642 in "JVM exceptions are weird: a decompiler perspective"

bear8642 — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 23:43:09 +0000

This is exceedingly nasty. Well Done!

New comment by bear8642 in "An Algebraic Language for the Manipulation of Symbolic Expressions (1958) [pdf]"

bear8642 — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 00:59:36 +0000

more the names then the functions themselves

New comment by bear8642 in "Vectorizing for Fun and Performance"

bear8642 — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 11:49:31 +0000

They sort of did with the Cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)

New comment by bear8642 in ""Learn APL" Notes"

bear8642 — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 22:15:16 +0000

huh, can you not use the Xkb APL symbols file?

I thought that compose definitions as well as the shifted layout…

New comment by bear8642 in "Zoo of array languages"

bear8642 — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 17:37:50 +0000

Right, thank you!

I recognised the " as rank but got confused by the _ reading https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/under, it seemed to be 'rank negative' and didn't see what that did.

> second nature once you internalize J, but so so foreign until you do.

Indeed!

New comment by bear8642 in "Zoo of array languages"

bear8642 — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 21:52:11 +0000

> Vs=: 4r3p1"_ * ] ^ 3:

What's the "_ for?