Hacker News: bolangi

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

New comment by bolangi in "Willingness to look stupid"

bolangi — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 05:01:30 +0000

Definitely needed to succeed in theater and take risks in life.

New comment by bolangi in "Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging"

bolangi — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:26:03 +0000

For a screening procedure recommended as a mass conducted preventative measure in otherwise healthy people, harms must be regulated to a better standard than "doesn't happen often". The study that I read of was about serious issue occuring something like one in 120 procedures. It was done at Kaiser. Next time you're enjoying a sausage, take a moment to look at the sausage skins. If I understand correctly, our intestinal walls are quite thin, and even the colon vulnerable.

New comment by bolangi in "Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)"

bolangi — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:38:45 +0000

There are legitimate questions if physical constants are constant everywhere in the universe, and also whether they are constant over time. Just because we conceive something "should" be a certain way doesn't make it true. The zero and negative numbers were also weird yet valid. How is the structure of mathematics different from fundamental constants, which we also cannot prove are invariant.

New comment by bolangi in "Perlsecret – Perl secret operators and constants"

bolangi — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 22:41:33 +0000

After first experiences with linux shell scripting, sed, awk, and C in 1990s, I found perl a welcome refuge. Way more featureful than DOS .bat files or BASIC! Its capabilities (perl + cpan) have always well exceeded my need for CS goodness. People do complain about the syntax, oddly, without mentioning the numerous ways perl was designed to make common tasks easy to do. The "use strict" pragma, and early adoption of testing culture are two examples where perl led the programming community. With the continued maturing of the language and ecosystem, I can only smile at the naysayers and wish them happiness whatever the language.

New comment by bolangi in "Scientists unlock brain's natural clean-up system for new treatments for stroke"

bolangi — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 09:03:41 +0000

Mainstream science has poo-poohed for years any notion that Oriental medicine practices for facilitating lymph flow have any utility. Nice to hear they're back on the allopathic table.

New comment by bolangi in "The rise of industrial software"

bolangi — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 09:40:35 +0000

This thought-provoking essay does not consider one crucial aspect of software: the cost of a user developing a facility with a given software product. Historically monopolistic software producers can force these costs to be borne because the user has no alternative to upgrading to the latest version of, for example, Windows, or gmail, or the latest version of the github GUI. A signficant portion of the open source / free software movement is software providing stable interfaces (including for the user) so that resources otherwise spent on compulsory retraining to use the latest version of something proprietary, can be invested in configuring existing resources to better suit the user's problem domain. For example, programs like mutt or vim, or my latest discovery, talon.

New comment by bolangi in "Quality of drinking water varies significantly by airline"

bolangi — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 03:19:37 +0000

An inlaw who worked as a stewardess (back when they were called "stewardesses") on international routes for many years always carried her own water.

New comment by bolangi in "Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need"

bolangi — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 18:25:40 +0000

Good morning. An expanding plethora of buttons, tabs, menus requires geometrical memory that may have nothing directly to do with the function in question. The first GUIs were designed that functions be "discoverable," however the size of haystacks in which these discoverable functions hide has grown exponentially, adding cognitive overhead, and increasing the length of apprenticeship needed to master the application.

A slick-looking GUI is a kind of ad for the app. As author of an accessible, terminal-based DAW app, I contrast remembering an incantation like 'add-track' or 'list-buses' with hunting around. These incantations can have shorter abbreviations, such 'lb' for list buses, and 'help bus' or 'h bus' to be sufficiently discoverable, easier for both implementer and user. And then to have hotkeys to bump plugin parameters +/- 1/10/100 etc. Probably I'm pissing into the wind to think the majority of users will ever choose this -- and GUIs do provide amazing facilities for many purposes -- but we do have a huge array of choices on linux, including this plethora of music creation and production apps. That is a big success, IMO.