Hacker News: billfruit

New comment by billfruit in "This game is a single 13 KiB file that runs on Windows, Linux and in the Browser"

billfruit — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 05:24:11 +0000

How are you approaching the development of your single file html apps, is there any examples publicly available, sounds very interesting.

New comment by billfruit in "Design duality and the expression problem (2018)"

billfruit — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 02:34:26 +0000

Are there any recent books that cover this topic of design in the abstract.

New comment by billfruit in "“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)"

billfruit — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 10:48:08 +0000

Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence" by Ivan Bratko, is a reasonable text book on Prolog.

New comment by billfruit in "It's cheaper to buy a new printer every month"

billfruit — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 01:34:41 +0000

This calculation does not apply to modern ,"inktank" printers, which are replenished by buying ink bottles and pouring the liquid ink into the reservoir in the printer. They print considerably more than cartridge based inkjets.

New comment by billfruit in "How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy (2024)"

billfruit — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 14:16:30 +0000

I have a completely opposite perspective to you on this. I find the peanuts very poignantly captures the frailities of the human condition in a humorous manner.

New comment by billfruit in "Short Little Difficult Books"

billfruit — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:47:13 +0000

Both Billy Bud and Bartleby are very focused on the human drama. If you are more interested in the sea rather, I'd suggest Typee and its follow up Omoo.

New comment by billfruit in "Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology"

billfruit — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 16:02:23 +0000

It doesn't seem to be that widely known, any reason why?

New comment by billfruit in "The Pen and the Spade: The Poems of Seamus Heaney"

billfruit — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 15:53:34 +0000

Do you mean John Betjeman?

New comment by billfruit in "Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology"

billfruit — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 02:10:43 +0000

"The Book of Unix Games" by Janice Winsor is the book. Seems hard to find now.

New comment by billfruit in "Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology"

billfruit — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 14:50:11 +0000

There use to be a set of games which were available for SunOS and may be Solaris, including a flight simulator with wired frame graphics, and Sun even had released a book about these games at that time(may be early 1990's).

Are they also covered by these? Anyone remember a flight simulator with wireframe graphics available Unices?

New comment by billfruit in "The Silent Scientist: When Software Research Fails to Reach Its Audience"

billfruit — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 13:18:06 +0000

I feel much of the knowledge and experience in the industry is simply lost because it isn't widely documented and studied. There needs to be detailed histories of major software development projects from the industry, in book form for people to learn from, in the same way as histories of military campaigns and railway projects.

It not widely done, and we end up with mere "Software Archeology", where we have artefacts like code, but the entire human process of why and how it reached that form left unknown.

New comment by billfruit in "Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model"

billfruit — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 09:53:32 +0000

I feel that the last added book in one's list seem to have more influence on the recommendations, which results in a rather similar type of recommendations.

New comment by billfruit in "Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)"

billfruit — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 15:12:35 +0000

But many features, even obscure ones are packaged by default in modern emacs, including I think a pdf viewer.

New comment by billfruit in "Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)"

billfruit — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 09:18:06 +0000

Once we get a modern IDE like PyCharm or Intellij Idea, the auto complete is essentially built in, without needing to deal with installing LSP servers, clients, and their dependencies.

Out of the box, project and context aware auto complete is an essential feature in a modern IDE.

New comment by billfruit in "Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)"

billfruit — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 08:31:58 +0000

While I still use emacs, I find that that despite the "batteries included" narrative about emacs, the things which are not included are causes of major frustration.

Such essential functionality like grep-find and LSP servers which is required for out of the box auto complete are not bundled with emacs. Most modern IDEs/editors have these functionality baked in.

If you install emacs for windows you find that grep-find doesn't work, because it depends on support from environment. A full text search should be built into the editor.

New comment by billfruit in "Beaver-engineered dam in the Czech Republic"

billfruit — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 16:43:35 +0000

From the article :

"Czech conservation authorities praised the beavers for their unexpected yet effective environmental work. Bohumil Fišer, head of the Brdy Protected Landscape Area, stated that the beavers "built the dams without any project documentation and for free", and achieved the desired ecological outcomes "practically overnight"."

New comment by billfruit in "Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)"

billfruit — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 05:42:53 +0000

Is it possible we see the diagram as an svg? I am seeing it only as embedded in the pdf, and really difficult to read .

New comment by billfruit in "Callbacks in C++ using template functors (1994)"

billfruit — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 02:00:27 +0000

As some not into modern c++, how would you get all functionality? Is there any guide or documentation yout could point to?. It is fascinating if all that could be done with just the struct defenition.

New comment by billfruit in "QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system"

billfruit — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 08:38:58 +0000

What about library support/APIs if you want to embedd gis functionality in other applications? Does QGIS provide widgets etc?

New comment by billfruit in "Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos"

billfruit — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 11:47:11 +0000

Can in it do interactive 3d diagrams.