Hacker News: bluGill

New comment by bluGill in "Choose Boring Technology (2015)"

bluGill — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:57:42 +0000

Python is fast for tiny programs. However if you have more than one team it isn't tiny. One developer can make something not tiny in a few weeks. For large programs a compiler that checks syntax, and ideally types before you run a comprehensive test suite ( which probably isn't comprehensive enough) is nearly mandatory to be maintainable. Otherwise you can never be sure you adjusted everything when you need to change an API.

New comment by bluGill in "Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf"

bluGill — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:51:08 +0000

Fortunately we live in a classical liberal society which is very strong on ethics. Capitalism is just a side effect of the freedom message.

New comment by bluGill in "Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf"

bluGill — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:45:56 +0000

Correct. Capitalism is one of many different systems that degraded the environment. By contrast nothing else has really advanced humans. Arguably capitalism is the first system to see environmental problems and try to solve them.

New comment by bluGill in "Happy 45th Birthday to the IBM PC and Model F/XT"

bluGill — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:41:18 +0000

Atari ultimately won. USB was designed by the same people who did Atari's serial bus using lessons learned, and thus is a direct descendant. Meanwhile most competes don't have slots, though high end will have a few.

New comment by bluGill in "Bike Bureau: Report Bike Lane Obstructions"

bluGill — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:05:34 +0000

Please do so. If nobody complains the police think nobody cares and ignore it. When people complain that is when things change

New comment by bluGill in "How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story"

bluGill — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 23:34:15 +0000

It is a little of both. An interview is to short to know of someone is good. So if someone you trust vouches that is more useful than anything an interview can say. Maybe you could find someone better but odds are you find someone worse.

More that the person giving the reference is putting their reputation in the reference.

New comment by bluGill in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

bluGill — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:03:46 +0000

It was there, and growing for decades. Pre Facebook it was a small niche but don't blame Facebook, that is mostly coincidence

New comment by bluGill in "To save C, we must save ABI (2022)"

bluGill — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:43:41 +0000

They faced much slower computers with very limited memory. They couldn't afford the tricks that today are minimal cost.

New comment by bluGill in "The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life"

bluGill — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:37:14 +0000

Lineotype they use lead letters. They use an alloy. There was a lot of lead, but there's also other metals in it because lead is too soft to be useful in a press. The alloy had the interest stream property that it has very low shrinkage when it cooled.

New comment by bluGill in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

bluGill — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:31:25 +0000

But CA cannot stop IL from demanding someone be sent to IL courts if they think an IL law was broken.

New comment by bluGill in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

bluGill — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:44:00 +0000

Oh, I agree they could. Question is, is it worth the bother? the lawyers are the only ones who win if you tried anything.

New comment by bluGill in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

bluGill — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:42:21 +0000

They can stop you from doing any work on the project. They can even fine or jail you for work done after the law takes affect that the international committee doesn't allow. Which is to say you can be forced to stop work.

Though if you don't live in IL it is unclear how this affects you.

New comment by bluGill in "The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons"

bluGill — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:40:25 +0000

Us manufacturing is larger than ever and still growing. It is mostly automated though so Tht number of people who work in manufacturing is shrinking. Still the expertise is still there and they do hire people all the time.

New comment by bluGill in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

bluGill — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:34:18 +0000

Is it really worth getting a lawyer? Even of you win what is the gain?

New comment by bluGill in "Why Addresses Have Numbers"

bluGill — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:14:12 +0000

You can figure it out close enough without looking it up.

New comment by bluGill in "Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's"

bluGill — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:01:49 +0000

The article doesn't give enough information to answer your question. It isn't on me it is on the reporter's who shouldn't allow a handwave like that to pass without question. There are far to many cases of people hacking statistics in the world to accept that.

New comment by bluGill in "Why Addresses Have Numbers"

bluGill — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:43:05 +0000

Another page that gets "cute" with javascript and in turn is unreadable because of it. (not technically unreadable, but waiting for the test to appear gets in the way to reading to the point where it isn't worth your time).

New comment by bluGill in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

bluGill — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:38:30 +0000

My last experience with lisp was assignments in college which are too small to count as anything more than a toy problem.

For real world code in other languages I've worked with the complexity of the problems demands so much code that the REPL cannot keep up.

New comment by bluGill in "Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's"

bluGill — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:36:59 +0000

It needs more statistical analysis than I have the background to do. However all signs look to another variation of the replication crisis, which is more an more my default assumption when I see an observational study.

New comment by bluGill in "Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's"

bluGill — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:16:16 +0000

A large part of accounting is knowledge that we cannot control for it.