Hacker News: compyman

New comment by compyman in "Borges Labyrinth in Venice reopens to the public"

compyman — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:48:50 +0000

I am taking this as a reference to "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...

New comment by compyman in "We need a federation of forges"

compyman — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:28:51 +0000

Reading that - I'm really not sure that AT Protocol has a much better story there either.

(as I understand it) the data has to live in a PDS, PDS are keyed by accounts, so you are similarly stymied for collaborative projects? I guess AT Proto is still a real work in progress so maybe that story has improved since the last time I checked it out.

New comment by compyman in "AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel"

compyman — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 20:25:17 +0000

You might be being too pedantic :)

https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html It's a specific GPL license (as opposed to GPL 2.0-later)

New comment by compyman in "Emacs-libgterm: Terminal emulator for Emacs using libghostty-vt"

compyman — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:32:15 +0000

What did you need to fix! And what did you need KKP for? are you running emacs in eat?

New comment by compyman in "Emacs-libgterm: Terminal emulator for Emacs using libghostty-vt"

compyman — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:40:50 +0000

You might be sort of interested in the Emulate-A-Terminal (EAT) package: https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat which provides a very fast terminal emulator entirely in emacs lisp.

New comment by compyman in "How ancient people saw themselves"

compyman — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 14:00:53 +0000

This is a very flat view - the Roman empire is born in a period of civil war, and after a relatively brief period of peace in the imperial core starts imploding and rebuilding itself in different configurations.

The art and culture was very often echoing an imagined past of yeoman landholders + citizens.(very similar to the invocation of 'Real America' today). And their foundation myth imagines that they are a continuation of the trojan civilization.

For everyone who was not at the top of the imperial hierarchy it's pretty easy to imagine that they thought civilization could be improved! Aristotle writes a defense of slavery - which implies that someone was attacking the institution. It's not a big leap to think that enslaved people could picture a world where they weren't enslaved, or that women could imagine having political/civil/property rights.

I think maybe something you are getting at is that those structures felt indestructible at the time, that in christianity associating the end of the roman empire with the apocalypse. Needless to say we aren't posting this in latin.

New comment by compyman in "Abstraction, not syntax"

compyman — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 21:09:14 +0000

I also think that a lot of the problems with yaml specifically are overblown, but this post is actually not about that!

It is specifically saying the same problem exists in JSON/YAML/TOML, etc, which is that all these configuration languages don't have any real means of abstraction, and ultimately aren't expressive enough do to the job we require of them.

as soon as you are templating config files with other configs, I agree, I have sorely felt this limitation with helm charts

New comment by compyman in "Kid gamers to adult gamblers? Investigation of childhood gaming and YA gambling"

compyman — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 14:31:09 +0000

I think this might underestimate how gambling + kids games can reinforce destructive behavior.

There are lots of similar tools that casino owners/game designers/sports betting apps/social media/&c use to build addiction into their products, all while offloading responsibility onto individual consumers.

A really interesting study of this is the book 'Addiction by Design' by Natasha Dow Schüll examines this in the context of slot machines/video poker/casino games, but you can see the same process at work basically wherever you look.

New comment by compyman in "RaptorCast: Designing a Messaging Layer"

compyman — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 19:19:18 +0000

It seems very similar to an earlier paxos optimization called 'pig paxos' https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3448016.3452834

New comment by compyman in "What the hell is a target triple?"

compyman — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 19:10:18 +0000

I think the meaning is that the idea that compilers can only compile for their host machine is an ananchronism, since that was historically the case but is no longer true.

New comment by compyman in "What if your website had business hours? (2022)"

compyman — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 21:01:37 +0000

I guess they are willing to take that risk to fulfil their religious obligations - If you aren't allowed to do business it doesn't really matter if that business is online or in the store.

But I think that if you are familiar with B&H this wouldn't really be a surprise and it's pretty rare that you find yourself unexpectedly needing a new SLR on saturday morning in my experience

New comment by compyman in "Dwarf Fortress Wins “Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year” at Dice Awards"

compyman — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 23:13:43 +0000

I think this really underrates the 15 years of work that has gone into creating interlocking systems to generate geography, civilizations, people, artifacts, emotions, poetry, &c, &c. Especially because you can see, often, what specific historical events or personal events are impacting your dwarfs frame by frame.

So on the contrary I DF is an example of how creative & human generative algorithms can be, you can't get anything as rich as DF with LLMs (currently at least, I guess)

New comment by compyman in "Half of Japan's LDP lawmakers had ties with Unification Church"

compyman — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 19:10:50 +0000

This really misstates an important point - the Unification Church is not "believed to be behind" the assassination, it was a man holding a grudge against the Church. Pretty much the opposite meaning. I don't think this comment is useful for discussion.

New comment by compyman in "How you could have come up with Paxos yourself"

compyman — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 14:18:23 +0000

I think it's interesting that Lamport chose this style for Paxos Made Simple[0] Which iteratively goes through a process of proposing a solution for a problem (proposal 0: accept the first value the acceptor comes across) and then reveals the problem with it, and amends the proposal to fix the problem

[0] https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf

New comment by compyman in "An Archive of a Different Type"

compyman — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 13:47:49 +0000

It's a pun! :)

New comment by compyman in "Barbecue: America's Most Political Food"

compyman — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 15:54:24 +0000

The specific event (i.e. having a barbecue) is a direct descendant from the Caribbean practice. It actually goes over this in the article, along with a very brief description of how barbecues have been used a political events since the founding of the country.

New comment by compyman in "Barbecue: America's Most Political Food"

compyman — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 15:42:13 +0000

Regional BBQ joints are afraid customers will forget their white supremacist past?

New comment by compyman in "Functional Geometry"

compyman — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 14:38:37 +0000

In a similar vein, on of my professors is describing stringed instruments in scheme (based on the picture language) http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~mairson/Papers/ICFP062-mairson.p...