Hacker News: chillpenguin

New comment by chillpenguin in "Mastering Dyalog APL"

chillpenguin — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:23:40 +0000

I basically feel the same way. In a way it is very liberating. All of those esoteric languages that were on my ever-growing todo list are now things I can let go of. Ultimately we have to ask ourselves how we want to spend our time, and now it is much harder to justify spending countless hours studying one programming language after another. We still can, of course, but we are now more "free" to do other things instead.

It's sort of sad, but really I think it is a weight off my shoulders.

New comment by chillpenguin in "macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal"

chillpenguin — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:18:41 +0000

I'm glad to find out it's not just me! My homelab has a lot of domains on .home.arpa, and I was getting issues related to this.

New comment by chillpenguin in "Welcome (back) to Macintosh"

chillpenguin — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:40:26 +0000

I'm glad I'm not the only one. What keeps me on mac, however, is the hardware seems so much better than the alternatives. I'd love a macbook quality linux laptop.

New comment by chillpenguin in "The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]"

chillpenguin — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 16:49:41 +0000

Smalltalk was the lisp machine of the future. Of course, now even Smalltalk is a thing of the past.

New comment by chillpenguin in "Show HN: A toy version of Wireshark (student project)"

chillpenguin — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 16:41:01 +0000

Why are all of the comments about the name? The author literally said this is a toy project for educational purposes... There are thousands of projects on github. This isn't even the only other project named "vanta" on github (I just checked and there is an animation library for javascript called vanta). So, seriously, who cares?

If OP was an actual company, that would be different. But this is quite literally a toy project.

Anyway, congrats OP! Your project looks really cool.

New comment by chillpenguin in "You can choose tools that make you happy"

chillpenguin — Thu, 29 May 2025 19:14:13 +0000

This article is insulting. It is trying to paint the picture that all of us who go against the mainstream are deluding ourselves if we think it is anything more than the digital equivalent of wearing a leather jacket.

Very often mainstream stuff really is actually worse than obscure stuff. I don't have to explain this to the HN crowd, I'm sure.

The article is pretentious (which is ironic since it is arguing for adopting mainstream technology).

New comment by chillpenguin in "Show HN: Wetlands – a lightweight Python library for managing Conda environments"

chillpenguin — Wed, 28 May 2025 16:12:06 +0000

The fact that this exists shows that there is a serious problem in the python ecosystem. I'm sure it solves a real problem, so I'm not knocking the author. It's more of a "state of our industry" problem.

New comment by chillpenguin in "Plain Vanilla Web"

chillpenguin — Sun, 11 May 2025 23:36:02 +0000

shoutout to Mithril! Has always been an under-appreciated gem.

New comment by chillpenguin in "Effects of lifestyle changes on cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's (2024)"

chillpenguin — Wed, 07 May 2025 01:35:29 +0000

From the abstract: "Evidence links lifestyle factors with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We report the first randomized, controlled clinical trial to determine if intensive lifestyle changes may beneficially affect the progression of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or early dementia due to AD."

Effects of lifestyle changes on cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's (2024)

chillpenguin — Wed, 07 May 2025 01:35:29 +0000

Article URL: https://alzres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13195-024-01482-z

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43911399

Points: 11

# Comments: 3

New comment by chillpenguin in "C Plus Prolog"

chillpenguin — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 15:59:12 +0000

I took that as hyperbole. Hard to tell how intentional it was, whether it was a joke or not... But yeah, obviously it is not true at all.

New comment by chillpenguin in "The features of Python's help() function"

chillpenguin — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 04:01:25 +0000

Smalltalk, by far, is the best in this category.

New comment by chillpenguin in "Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design"

chillpenguin — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:27:06 +0000

Here is a whole course, with videos and links to slides and readings.

https://github.com/margaretstorey/EmseUvic2020

New comment by chillpenguin in "Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design"

chillpenguin — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 04:47:34 +0000

I agree. I once attempted this on a javascript project (a personal project, not at work), after reading about APL/J/K people and their philosophy. My constraint was: I should never have to scroll. I also aimed to have as few files as possible.

The result was surprisingly pleasant, and it changed how I feel about this sort of thing. I think the Clean Code approach makes a lot of sense when you are working on a big project that contains lots of code that other people wrote, and you rely on IDE features like jumping to definition, etc. But if you can write code that fits on one screen without scrolling, something special happens. It's like all the negative aspects of terse code suddenly vanish and you get something way simpler and overall easier to work with and understand. But you really have to work to get it to that point. A middle ground (terse code but still spread out over lots of files, lots of scrolling) would be the worst of both worlds.

New comment by chillpenguin in "Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design"

chillpenguin — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 02:03:51 +0000

"john ousterhout's book is the only book on how to write software that has any actual evidence behind it."

This is false and hopefully no one takes you seriously when they read that. There are books about empirical methods for software engineering, for example, which actually seek to find real evidence for software engineering techniques. See Greg Wilson's work, for example.

There are lots of other architecture/design books that use real world systems as examples. "Evidence" is definitely lacking in our field, but you can find it if you try.

New comment by chillpenguin in "The legacy of lies in Alzheimer's science"

chillpenguin — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 03:31:36 +0000

There are also studies showing a plant-based diet can reverse Alzheimer's symptoms as well. It has to do with atherosclerosis.

New comment by chillpenguin in "Today I learned that bash has hashmaps (2024)"

chillpenguin — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 21:03:27 +0000

I see that kind of thing all the time. Usually it is about static types. People think that dynamic languages aren't "serious", or something. It is laughable that these people still make up a significant amount of comments, here in 2024.

New comment by chillpenguin in "We all took the DVD boom era for granted"

chillpenguin — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 03:01:32 +0000

It's true. Streaming services are really a downgrade in this respect. I don't get why they don't include the same sort of bonus content that DVDs had.

New comment by chillpenguin in "Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger"

chillpenguin — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 16:18:11 +0000

This is how I interpreted it as well. The others seem to be arguing due to a misunderstanding of what was said/meant.

New comment by chillpenguin in "Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?"

chillpenguin — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 01:02:06 +0000

There's something about it where it doesn't feel quite right when using the mouse as a GUI app. Compare it to something like Sublime Text. I can't quite describe it exactly. It just feels off. It feels like you are supposed to use the keyboard shortcuts to navigate around, and the mouse is sort of bolted on secondarily or something. So I would try to make it feel more like a modern GUI app, where using the mouse feels right.