Hacker News: colomon

New comment by colomon in "Getting back into C programming for CP/M"

colomon — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 12:23:43 +0000

Forth! I was programming in those days myself (though only a little bit on CP/M), and was getting surprised that many people here seemed to think the only alternatives were C or assembly. I learned to program in Basic, then learned some assembly, and finally discovered Forth circa 1984. It was perfectly suited to developing on 8-bit machines -- about as powerful as C, trivial to compile, easy to drop into assembly if you needed to optimize a low-level function.

If I remember correctly, I didn't learn C until 1989, when I was working on 16-bit machines...

New comment by colomon in "A Git story: Not so fun this time"

colomon — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 19:32:05 +0000

People started paying me to develop software in 1986. First time I ever used version control software was 1996. It was TERRIBLE. Two years later I left to start my own software company, but my experience with it to that point was so bad I went without version control the first few years. Around 2002 I started using CVS (or RCS? long time ago!) and quickly switched to Subversion. After learning git to work on Raku circa 2009, I switched my main $WORK repo to git in maybe 2012. Every repo I've created since then has been in git, but I still haven't moved all my svn repos over to git.

New comment by colomon in "Do not taunt happy fun branch predictor (2023)"

colomon — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 11:47:38 +0000

I don't remember the exact numbers, but I remember seeing a CAD file that was not working well a few years ago, and it turned out the coordinate system set up for the part was roughly equivalent to building a part the size of a man's fist but measuring it from the center of the Earth (in meters) while putting the part in Earth orbit.

New comment by colomon in "Apple Silicon MacBook batteries can't be replaced under warranty by third party"

colomon — Fri, 31 May 2024 13:10:58 +0000

AppleCare+ is usually 48-hours downtime in my experience, and that's with the need to ship the laptop to and from the repair center.

New comment by colomon in "The Genius of Ella Fitzgerald"

colomon — Fri, 31 May 2024 12:47:12 +0000

I've listened quite a lot to her Rodgers and Hart songbook, and the idea she doesn't understand what she's singing never once entered my mind.

New comment by colomon in "Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses"

colomon — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 22:31:03 +0000

First span of the Blue Water Bridge (Port Huron to Sarnia) built 1938, doing just fine as far as I know. (Drove over it a couple of weekends ago.) Second span was 1997.

New comment by colomon in "HP CEO Makes Up a Whole Lot of Bullshit to Defend Crippling Printers"

colomon — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 22:24:11 +0000

Was just looking at buying a new printer a few minutes ago. Do people have recommendations for printers free of all this HP-style nonsense?

New comment by colomon in "Recoil – Retro Computer Image Library"

colomon — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 14:34:58 +0000

Ugh, now I'm torn between wild urges to write a Raku backend for Fusion or port my C++ libraries to Fusion, neither of which is anything like a sensible project in the short term. (Possibly any term.)

New comment by colomon in "America’s Obsession with Weight-Loss Drugs Is Affecting the Economy of Denmark"

colomon — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 13:09:57 +0000

That "not changing habits" thing has nothing to do with Ozempic. Based on my experience with the drug (taken six months for type 2 diabetes), you won't lose any weight at all on it UNLESS you change your habits. What the drug does is make it easier for you to change your habits!

New comment by colomon in "Ask HN: Are you using Raku? Pros / cons?"

colomon — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 12:24:05 +0000

I've been actively using Raku for work for 13 years now. (Okay, we didn't call it Raku yet at the beginning.)

Pros: - Wonderfully expressive and powerful - The best glue language I've ever worked with - Indented heredocs (I think Perl 5 has this now? But Raku's had it for a decade, and it's made a number of my scripts vastly more readable than their Perl 5 equivalents.) - Great community that responds quickly to questions

Cons: - Every few years one of the platforms I've got it running on gets far enough behind that the module manager stops working with it, and I've got to install a fresh version on that platform

Most recently, on Saturday I wrote a script to valgrind a batch of files whose name starts with a string you provide, carefully recording any valgrind errors detected. 37 lines of clean code, easy to write, and hugely useful for my current project. Have had it running more or less continually for the last 24 hours...

New comment by colomon in "Ask HN: Did studying proof based math topics make you a better programmer?"

colomon — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 23:03:20 +0000

I think the proof mindseet was a huge help to me as a beginning programmer, BUT that was in the context of high school Euclidean geometry, not analysis, around the same time I was first learning a programming language that let you write functions. As I recall (long time ago now!) the two things kind of fed off of each other very nicely.

Then it got a bit of reinforcement in my honors "1st semester calculus but we're proving everything" course.

New comment by colomon in "Refurb weekend: Commodore 128DCR"

colomon — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 22:35:47 +0000

I loved my Commodore 128, but I don't even remember a Commodore 128D being a thing. I suppose at that point I may have been fondly dreaming of the Amiga I would never get.

New comment by colomon in "Lidar Reveals 650-Square-Mile Maya Site Hidden Beneath Guatemalan Rain Forest"

colomon — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 13:16:55 +0000

Ooo, I'll have to look into that. I had a fun couple of days a few years ago comparing Google Maps satellite images from St Clair County, MI with the old maps which showed where the Interurban ran. It was really impressive how much you could still see the routes from above, even though the tracks were torn up 80+ years ago...

New comment by colomon in "Normalization of Deviance (2015)"

colomon — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 11:23:26 +0000

First professional software development I did, we didn't even have hard drives or networking. Luckily I was the only developer and it wasn't a huge problem.

First place I worked with other people, we at least had hard drives. I don't think we had networking on the machines or version control. For sure there was only one or two machines in the office that could reach the Internet. Mostly only one person could work on a file at a time.

When we did get more employees, a LAN, and version control a few years on, the mid-1990s Microsoft version control software was such a piece of junk it mostly amounted to a formal digital system specifying who the one person who could work on a given file was...

New comment by colomon in "Weimar Jazz Database (WJazzD) – The Jazzomat Research Project"

colomon — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 11:57:28 +0000

Weirdly enough, if I cam to believe Discogs got the liner notes faithfully, they're not crediting Jon with singing a solo on "Airegin". I'm still 99% certain Jon sings the last solo in that song. (Interestingly, singing lyrics over his own scat solo from the original Lambert, Hendricks & Ross recording of "Airegin".) For sure it sounds like him, no one other than Manhattan Transfer is credited with vocals on that track, and when they recorded it live they don't even attempt to sing it, replacing it with a sax solo.

New comment by colomon in "Weimar Jazz Database (WJazzD) – The Jazzomat Research Project"

colomon — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 03:05:48 +0000

I was wrong about "Another Night in Tunisia" -- the solo Jon sings starting around 1:40 actually has lyrics. I think the melody scatting for most of the rest of the song is actually Bobby McFerrin.

Oh, there we go, the scat solo starting at 2:30 in "Ray's Rockhouse" is Jon.

New comment by colomon in "Weimar Jazz Database (WJazzD) – The Jazzomat Research Project"

colomon — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:49:08 +0000

He wrote the lyrics for that entire album (Vocalese) and sings on it too -- one of the solos on "Airegin", and a scat solo somewhere else (maybe the Night in Tunisia thing, been a while since I listened).

He also wrote the lyrics for their versions of "Birdland" and "Four Brothers", and maybe four of the tracks on Swing, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not thinking of.

New comment by colomon in "Weimar Jazz Database (WJazzD) – The Jazzomat Research Project"

colomon — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:43:01 +0000

Oh, the blog post there is lovely. Just used the lyrics to sing through "Sing Joy Spring" while listening to the original Clifford Brown recording.

New comment by colomon in "Weimar Jazz Database (WJazzD) – The Jazzomat Research Project"

colomon — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 23:26:57 +0000

"Sing Joy Spring", lyrics by Jon Hendricks. Jon wrote lyrics to dozens (hundreds?) of jazz solos. Was one hell of a singer, too -- check him out singing John Coltrane's solo on "Freddie Freeloader" [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSsT7pcVVpw (third solo is Jon)

New comment by colomon in "Scamp – A self-contained Forth computer"

colomon — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 04:36:29 +0000

Indeed, it's zero now, 15 minutes later.