Hacker News: dasyatidprime

New comment by dasyatidprime in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

dasyatidprime — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:18:16 +0000

That doesn't follow. I'm pretty sure they're talking about the effect of nominal wage stickiness: you're not constantly renegotiating your rate, so when there's fluctuations in relative value, it matters what unit the original number is denominated in. Compare with the case of a US expat being paid a steady salary in USD and converting to the local currency to make purchases, if you want an example with a similar mechanic but very different intuitive feel and practicalities.

(I'm not sure they're right about the overall effect though.)

New comment by dasyatidprime in "Queryable Executables"

dasyatidprime — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:56:05 +0000

A single SQLite ‘connection’ can be ATTACHed to multiple database files (which appear as separate prefixed schemata, but you can do things like joins across them) and it seems to work properly if some are read-only and some are not!

New comment by dasyatidprime in "Show HN: Port Zero – How I learned to stop worrying and love PORT=0"

dasyatidprime — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 03:49:30 +0000

For those interested in the history of alternatives to port numbers: Chaosnet[1] in LispM/ITS times used names for describing which service was being requested. On the TCP side, a spec for requesting services by name has existed since 1988: TCPMUX[2], using a short initial handshake after connecting to port 1. Just never caught on AFAIK.

[1] https://chaosnet.net/protocol#application_layer [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1078

New comment by dasyatidprime in "git's –end-of-options Flag"

dasyatidprime — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:15:45 +0000

TeX uses -- (double hyphen) for producing an en dash and --- (triple hyphen) for an em dash, and that's pretty darn longstanding and well-established. And FWIW, the English writing conventions that I learned use em dashes as punctuation without an adjoining space—like this—but allow en dashes surrounded by spaces as an alternative – like this – so I frequently see spaced double hyphen used as the ASCII equivalent of dash punctuation and interpret it as the latter. I've never personally heard of double hyphen for em specifically, only either as en specifically or as a sort of ambiguous whatever-dash.

New comment by dasyatidprime in "Which streaming service was that on again?"

dasyatidprime — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:17:21 +0000

There is an ISBN URN namespace, but I don't know whether anyone maps it to anything. https://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-formal/isbn

New comment by dasyatidprime in "The Fedora project grapples with change"

dasyatidprime — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:59:27 +0000

I don't have experience with the Fedora version specifically, but forum/email bridges tend to run into problems with differing expectations of the medium. This is even more true if it's not clear from the beginning that other users are experiencing the same conversation completely differently. For a viscerally annoying example, imagine someone posting “bump” to a mailing list.

New comment by dasyatidprime in "Just Let Me Write Digits"

dasyatidprime — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 06:14:53 +0000

I use a layout with an AZERTY-style shifted digit row for coding (and for everything else). A quick check of one C++ codebase I've been working with shows ~20× as many instances of digit-row symbols as digits (18× for QWERTY digit-row symbols, 27× for those in my layout), though C++ is unusually symbol-heavy. A couple of ECMAScript repositories show 3× or 10×. On some Common Lisp, digit-row symbols are 5× as common as digits for my layout and 22× for QWERTY (almost entirely because QWERTY parentheses are terrible). I don't expect to see a lot of code where numeric literals are more common than type modifiers and operators and such… most of the times numbers are being manipulated in code, they're not being typed in directly as digits but going through comparisons and arithmetic and such, and that's symbols.

New comment by dasyatidprime in "Emacs appearances in pop culture"

dasyatidprime — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:13:43 +0000

FWIW, the common utility library Serapeum offers ‘op’ which it claims is from GOO, which is quite similar as a short positional function utility macro without being a reader macro that has more potential for character clashes: (op (> _ 0)). (But don't let that stop you from recreating it if you wanted to do so for educational purposes!)

New comment by dasyatidprime in "Emacs appearances in pop culture"

dasyatidprime — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:32:08 +0000

That's the source! That's the one I remembered but couldn't find! Thank you.

New comment by dasyatidprime in "Emacs appearances in pop culture"

dasyatidprime — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:26:55 +0000

Having skimmed the article, I think he's correct about the most common use of macros (by far the single most common type of macro I write in CL is a body-to-lambda transformation, though being able to tweak the sugar makes a difference too), but then I think he kinda equivocates in implications between “80% of the usage” and “80% of the impact”. I also think Ruby DSLs cover a big chunk of that last gap (and it sounds like you might agree with me). Part of the classic Lisp Curse is that easy access to advanced metaprogramming indirectly increases social fragmentation, but part of the Blub Curse is that lack of access to advanced features causes people to have to solve the same dumb problems over and over again, so you lose efficiency and create different fragmentation. Having fancier metaprogramming functionality require a bunch of rigamarole but be possible to work through when you need it might plausibly hit a sweet spot in the middle there.

New comment by dasyatidprime in "Emacs appearances in pop culture"

dasyatidprime — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:05:29 +0000

Notably, Yukihiro Matsumoto took substantial inspiration from Lisp while designing the Ruby language. You can see historical Lisp terminology in the Ruby interpreter sources (at least last I checked, which was a long time ago), like the use of “Q” to refer to a dynamically typed datum that can be stored in a cell.

(Hah, I just looked around a bit more, and Wikipedia cites an archived mailing list message that I don't remember seeing before: https://web.archive.org/web/20181027195101/http://blade.naga... I remember at some point Emacs Lisp specifically being cited as an inspiration, but I might be confabulating that, I didn't find a source for it.)

Also, here's a fun paragraph from the opening comments of quail.el (lightly reformatted):

> [There was an input method for Mule 2.3 called ‘Tamago’ from the Japanese ‘TAkusan MAtasete GOmen-nasai’, or ‘Sorry for having you wait so long’; this couldn't be included in Emacs 20. ‘Tamago’ is Japanese for ‘egg’ (implicitly a hen's egg). Handa-san made a smaller and simpler system; the smaller quail egg is also eaten in Japan. Maybe others will be egged on to write more sorts of input methods.]

New comment by dasyatidprime in "Ear Training Practice"

dasyatidprime — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:56:20 +0000

> So what I usually do is compile a list of melodic hooks from popular songs my students enjoy. Every so often, we’ll play them and let the student try to pick them out on the piano or their instrument of choice.

As someone who had ongoing formal musical training from childhood through university, I can attest that multiple teachers used a similar technique, focusing on finding a group of commonly-heard melodies such that the first intervals encountered in them cover as much of the set as possible.

Haven't tried the game yet, but looking forward to checking it out later to see if I can offer it to some of my friends who want to learn music better!

New comment by dasyatidprime in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

dasyatidprime — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:28:14 +0000

The copyright to the Outlook binary isn't owned by the users either, even if they're running it on local hardware. The Opus 4.8 weights are (we assume) the same between users, but the conversation/tooling state is not shared between them by default. I prefer to route around this construction myself, since I do think there's some ontological slippery-slope potential, but from a lexical perspective I think “my” is a perfectly defensible abbreviation in context.

New comment by dasyatidprime in "The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games"

dasyatidprime — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:21:48 +0000

> it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages

This is drifting some from the original specific topic toward the broader conflict, but, not for everyone involved, surely? Will the audience run your server binary, under normal circumstances? Or will they say “Wow, you couldn't even be bothered to put up some basic servers for free? Jeez, you're saying I have to set up a whole account somewhere else and pay them just so I can have a multiplayer game, or set up weird-looking technical shit on my computer that might expose me to hackers? Nobody else asks me to do this, what is this bullshit”? Of course there are intermediary options here (one of which I describe below), but those don't necessarily let you do the “we didn't want to be in the hosting business” plan straightforwardly, so you might still have to take on a lot of the fixed planning costs.

The incentive gradient among consumers tilting so hard in the direction of indefinite active support becoming table stakes seems to be a core part of the vicious cycle here. “I shouldn't have to set stuff up” implicitly cedes control; if they're not doing the coordination, then someone is, and that someone gets hidden responsibility and power without compensation or effective voice, which is an unstable combination by default. This is a similar issue to what happens with convenient, centralized, subsidized social media and chat platforms.

Minecraft is actually an interesting borderline case here: the player license authentication and name/appearance binding is all centralized, and that could suddenly go away and leave everyone in the dark, but individual world servers can be run independently and there are a number of third-party hosting businesses based on this. Microsoft later felt compelled to offer Realms as a first-party means of setup, but IIRC those do take a recurring fee so it's not in the same unstable zone. But then we have a separate issue where, as far as I can dimly tell, a lot of people started expecting “game companies do the work to keep us safe on Their Platform” as, again, table stakes, and so they implemented non-repudiable digital signatures in chat to allow people on non-centrally-hosted servers to still report each other's chat messages to central moderation, which I must assume is another ongoing cost. (In the modded world there are mods that strip this.)

New comment by dasyatidprime in "SANA-WM, a 2.6B open-source world model for 1-minute 720p video"

dasyatidprime — Sun, 17 May 2026 11:30:31 +0000

Most of the problem with browning is the physics: it requires temperatures well above boiling, but the default microwave absorber is water which will tend to saturate around boiling temp. But physical cookware design can be used to make it work: the article I linked prominently describes the use of a browning skillet with a tin oxide coating on the bottom that can safely absorb large amounts of microwave radiation and get hot enough to brown foods.

So partly due to that, I think if you wanted to do full robotic cookery with a microwave beyond the TV-dinner stage you'd still need control over the other objects rather than just switching the magnetron. Stirring for even heat distribution is another thing.

And then it's separately interesting how, in a really skew way, “deliver heat using RF energy” came back from a different angle with the rise of induction stoves!

New comment by dasyatidprime in "SANA-WM, a 2.6B open-source world model for 1-minute 720p video"

dasyatidprime — Sat, 16 May 2026 23:47:17 +0000

You might both be interested in https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/my-journey-to-the-microwav... regarding the history of microwave cooking (not mine). The microwave oven wasn't known destined to be relegated to lowbrow cookery from the beginning, even if that's how it turned out from our perspective, and some of the more advanced techniques developed for it fell out of use.

New comment by dasyatidprime in "My Favorite Bugs: Invalid Surrogate Pairs"

dasyatidprime — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:24:58 +0000

That's called CESU-8. https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr26/tr26-4.html

New comment by dasyatidprime in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

dasyatidprime — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:04:05 +0000

Not what anyone was talking about. Training corpus ≠ inference engine.

New comment by dasyatidprime in "Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES"

dasyatidprime — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:17:36 +0000

The dependency cycle is actually the functional mechanism of the code, because they subvert the dedup mechanism in the package manager using a random generation trick. Each recursive copy of the dependencies takes up a little bit more space, which ultimately gets converted to the spaces inserted into the original datum; the caller is expected to adjust the cache settings to signal the desired amount. That's also why if you're using left-justify to process strings, Yarn is recommended for best compatibility. /joke

New comment by dasyatidprime in "Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES"

dasyatidprime — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:08:15 +0000

The tag list at the top of the page includes “satire”.