Hacker News: dcassett

New comment by dcassett in "Show HN: Interactive Common Lisp: An Enhanced REPL"

dcassett — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:10:04 +0000

Thanks for troubleshooting my installation issue as well as fixing all of my other issues!

How best to report website data breach?

dcassett — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 04:32:30 +0000

I discovered a US website that claims to have gone out of business but exposes personal info (health insurance claim forms) of many individuals across multiple cities in a specific state.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333643

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by dcassett in "Show HN: Interactive Common Lisp: An Enhanced REPL"

dcassett — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:22:12 +0000

Perhaps because I'm still on Debian 12 (or more likely I did something wrong), I had trouble getting it working by compiling the icl/ocicl sources with sbcl. It complained "Failed to connect to Slynk after 10 seconds". I tried running a Slynk server in sbcl, but icl froze up, and the server said "slynk:close-connection: end of file on #. Then I tried running a swank server, and got the icl prompt (good), but then tab completion invoked the debugger: "Package SLYNK does not exist". Finally, I ran the swank server after first running "(asdf:load-system :slynk)" and everything seems to work.

One thing I immediately miss (that rlwrap provides) are the keyboard functions such as reverse-search-history (usually mapped to C-r) and history-search-backward (have this mapped to M-p). History recall only seems possible with the up arrow.

Also, be in for some surprises if you try to paste some lisp code into the REPL, especially if there are long lines. The interaction is apparently meant for a human typing, not pasting.

New comment by dcassett in "Unusual circuits in the Intel 386's standard cell logic"

dcassett — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 12:54:36 +0000

> Espresso PLA minimizer

You can still find the software for Espresso (I ran it a few years ago):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espresso_heuristic_logic_minim...

New comment by dcassett in "Unusual circuits in the Intel 386's standard cell logic"

dcassett — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 12:36:00 +0000

> (Note 4) But to write a value into the latch, the switch is enabled and its output overpowers the weak inverter.

This implementation is sometimes called a "jam latch" (the new value is "jammed" into the inverter loop).

New comment by dcassett in "Unusual circuits in the Intel 386's standard cell logic"

dcassett — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 12:16:53 +0000

> However, the 386 uses a different approach—CMOS switches—that avoids a large AND/OR gate.

Standard cell libraries often implement multiplexers using transmission gates (CMOS switches) with inverters to buffer the input and restore the signal drive. This implementation has the advantage of eliminating static hazards (glitches) in the output that can occur with conventional gates.

New comment by dcassett in "The patent office is about to make bad patents untouchable"

dcassett — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 14:13:11 +0000

The form gives the option to identify as an individual, an organization, or anonymous, and below the selections gives this note: "Note: If you choose to identify as Anonymous, the option to enter your email address for submission confirmation is not available."

New comment by dcassett in "The patent office is about to make bad patents untouchable"

dcassett — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 12:22:36 +0000

As of now the web page indicates "Comment Period Ends: 12 Days"

New comment by dcassett in "Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support"

dcassett — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:45:19 +0000

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/2025.09.23/supportedsi...

New comment by dcassett in "VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025"

dcassett — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 01:54:13 +0000

Have used VLC for at least 20 years. Recently I upgraded an old Dell 9400 laptop that dates from around 2006 to Debian Bookworm (the end of the line for the 32-bit machines). It has a nice 1600x1200 display, but the Nvidia Graphics (Geforce Go 7900 GS) is poorly supported and mpv now requires --hwdec=no, making 720p videos barely playable. VLC now uses a fraction of the CPU as mpv does for video, which makes even 1080p videos playable. For some reason VLC chokes at the beginning of every video (tries to play before everything is ready), but by pausing the video and backing up to time zero it plays perfectly. All of this to say that VLC has saved the day as it frequently has over the years.

New comment by dcassett in "Dillo, a multi-platform graphical web browser"

dcassett — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 23:05:15 +0000

Dillo was included in the historic Damn Small Linux [1], a 50MB distro.

[1] https://damnsmalllinux.org/old-index.html

New comment by dcassett in "Scripts I wrote that I use all the time"

dcassett — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 21:37:24 +0000

Apologies, mistook for NATO. Maybe the alphabet is for fonts :)

New comment by dcassett in "Scripts I wrote that I use all the time"

dcassett — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 02:05:23 +0000

I find that I like working with the directory stack and having a shortened version of the directory stack in the title bar, e.g. by modifying the stock Debian .bashrc

  # If this is an xterm set the title to the directory stack
  case "$TERM" in
  xterm*|rxvt*)
      if [ -x ~/bin/shorten-ds.pl ]; then
    PS1="\[\e]0;\$(dirs -v | ~/bin/shorten-ds.pl)\a\]$PS1"
      else
    PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:   \w\a\]$PS1"
      fi
      ;;
  \*)
      ;;
  esac

The script shorten_ds.pl takes e.g.

  0  /var/log/apt
  1  ~/Downloads
  2  ~

and shortens it to:

  0:apt 1:Downloads 2:~

  #!/usr/bin/perl -w
  use strict;
  my @lines;
  while (<>) {
    chomp;
    s%^ (\d+)  %$1:%;
    s%:.*/([^/]+)$%:$1%;
    push @lines, $_
  }
  print join ' ', @lines;

That coupled with functions that take 'u 2' as shorthand for 'pushd +2' and 'o 2' for 'popd +2' make for easy manipulation of the directory stack:

  u() {
    if [[ $1 =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
      pushd "+$1"
    else
      pushd "$@"
    fi
  }

  o() {
    if [[ $1 =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
      popd "+$1"
    else
      popd "$@" # lazy way to cause an error
    fi
  }

New comment by dcassett in "Scripts I wrote that I use all the time"

dcassett — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 01:27:38 +0000

I've found the NATO alphabet fairly common at call centers, with globalization being a factor.

New comment by dcassett in "Scripts I wrote that I use all the time"

dcassett — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:47:23 +0000

For me it's when I call customer service or support on the phone, and either give them an account #, or confirm a temporary password that I have been verbally given.

New comment by dcassett in "Notes on Geiger Counters"

dcassett — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 16:11:02 +0000

Have an old Victoreen Geiger counter and have seen some interesting things: - Munich: Chernobyl (obvious high background radiation) - Arizona: Fukushima (noticeably higher background radiation)

Also, my wife had a test requiring an injection of a radioisotope and the meter was moving (many counts per second) when placed within several feet of her. So an EDC motive might be to monitor whether a colleague got such an injection and decided to come to the workplace.

New comment by dcassett in "Nvidia buys $5B in Intel"

dcassett — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 01:07:00 +0000

> Paulsbo

You probably meant Poulsbo (US15W) chipset

New comment by dcassett in "What medieval people got right about learning (2019)"

dcassett — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 16:26:46 +0000

That was at UT Austin, where Dr. Roth was a professor. Another thing about that course - the problems that were given by the TAs for the 90% proficiency checks seemed pretty challenging and weren't in the book. You really had to know your material, yet there were no big surprises.

New comment by dcassett in "What medieval people got right about learning (2019)"

dcassett — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 16:00:52 +0000

I had such a self-paced course in the '70s based on the book "Fundamentals of Logic Design" by Charles Roth, Jr. It should be noted that the book was specifically written for self-paced study, and as such acted as a sort of tutor by carefully laying out a sequence of reading short segments, answering short questions about the material, then doing more involved problems. I found this course to be very effective and motivating for me, especially given the undergraduate class sizes.

New comment by dcassett in "Intel CEO Letter to Employees"

dcassett — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 02:00:01 +0000

True except for their GMA500 graphics [1]

[1] https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/Very-poor-Linux-supp...

Disclaimer: I own a netbook and spent a very long time researching getting it to work with Linux