Hacker News: bolangi

New comment by bolangi in "Book review: Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?"

bolangi — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:24:52 +0000

The Raku language (formerly Perl 6) and its underlying VM has features to support parallel programming, concurrency and asynchrony, designed to make common cases relatively easy to code and avoid pitfalls.

Jonathan Worthington, the author of the VM and these features, has given an excellent presentation on the concepts and their implementation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpqnNCx7wVY

New comment by bolangi in "TXR: An Original, New Programming Language for Convenient Data Munging"

bolangi — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In short, a lispy language now mature, first released in 2009.

New comment by bolangi in "Version control second coming"

bolangi — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 05:40:24 +0000

Dreaming of "virtual filesystems everywhere". Hmm, sorta sounds like Plan 9.

Great to have an inside view of wrangling technologies for these behemoth data sets.

New comment by bolangi in "Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes"

bolangi — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 02:50:52 +0000

Thanks, this makes me happy.

New comment by bolangi in "Earth's organisms developed via evolution. What if the cosmos did, too?"

bolangi — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:59:44 +0000

I can't find the reference, but there are many integer or near-integer relationships among the planets of our solar system. Such a preponderance that it seems improbable.

New comment by bolangi in "OpenShot 4.0 – Open-source video editor"

bolangi — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 20:56:30 +0000

Nice hacks!

I made a similar script to extract clips from a source, possibly multiple files, and compress the result.

https://metacpan.org/dist/App-fftrim/view/script/fftrim

New comment by bolangi in "Rules of good social skills (2025)"

bolangi — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 22:54:15 +0000

I can't get the article at the moment, but will comment that not everyone has equal experience or comfort with face-to-face communication, what Stephen Porges calls the "social engagement mechanism". Some people can feel intimidated by the gaze of others.

The foundation of American improv theater came out of socializing games developed by Neva Boyd at Hull House in Chicago and her student Viola Spolin, published in Spolin's book, Improvisation for the Theater. These games rely on attuning to the faces of others and what they say and do. One's spontaneous, untutored reactions are the source of creativity and fun.

I will testify here that the social engagement practices in improv games have done more for me in being able to spontaneously respond and connect with others than decades of (otherwise valuable) therapy and growth practices.

New comment by bolangi in "This Hi-Fi Tape Recorder Changed Radio Forever"

bolangi — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 08:18:44 +0000

Long after the company was gone, the Ampex sign remained for years on the West side of 101 somewhere around Redwood City, was finally taken down ten or 20 years ago.

New comment by bolangi in "Teaching Kids Forth"

bolangi — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 02:34:02 +0000

Decker, a hypercard style app, seems to give quick gratification. Looks like an easy and fun way to get started with programming. Was just posted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060856

New comment by bolangi in "Plasma Tunnels Reveal How Dying Satellites Fall to Earth"

bolangi — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:31:44 +0000

Satellites have many chlorinated and florinated chemicals, so being vaporized means introducing large volumes to the upper atmosphere where they can catalyze the destruction of ozone molecules. I'd be interested how the volume compares to other sources of atmospheric halogens. They could hardly match the quantity of refrigerant gases released, but being deposited directly in the upper atmosphere may make them more potent.

New comment by bolangi in "Men's average testosterone levels have halved in last 50 years"

bolangi — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:59:37 +0000

Sperm counts, too, have dropped precipitously.

New comment by bolangi in "How a new DSL may survive in the era of LLMs"

bolangi — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:05:43 +0000

A specific example. Slangify: The Case for DSLs in LLM Workflows.

https://rakujourney.wordpress.com/2026/06/08/slangify-the-ca...

New comment by bolangi in "Why are so many young people getting cancer?"

bolangi — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:14:01 +0000

Some experts weigh in: https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations/he...

New comment by bolangi in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

bolangi — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:32:50 +0000

And an unexpected transient load or heat flux can easily exceed material limits, or materials can have flaws. The ability to qualify the materials, components and processes for aerospace use is an achievement in itself.

New comment by bolangi in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

bolangi — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:20:15 +0000

Not only costing money. Constant AI scraping constitutes a denial-of-service attack that has brought down websites.

New comment by bolangi in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

bolangi — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:23:49 +0000

When war psychosis is not enough....

New comment by bolangi in "What does it mean to “write like you talk”?"

bolangi — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:33:43 +0000

Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski are good examples.

New comment by bolangi in "If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos"

bolangi — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:17:01 +0000

Hah, github can have my crap code. Anyone trained on it will be in for a world of hurt :-)

New comment by bolangi in "Fermented foods shaped human biology"

bolangi — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:31:00 +0000

Japanese eat fermented foods and have a long life expectancy.

New comment by bolangi in "Lazycut: A simple terminal video trimmer using FFmpeg"

bolangi — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:22:32 +0000

FWIW, here's a simple command line utility for joining and trimming the multiple video files produced by a video camera.

https://metacpan.org/dist/App-fftrim/view/script/fftrim