Hacker News: dented42

New comment by dented42 in "GitHub Stacked PRs"

dented42 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:41:12 +0000

I definitely miss Darcs. I still use it very occasionally, but only with very small repos.

New comment by dented42 in "Herbie: Automatically improve imprecise floating point formulas"

dented42 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 04:29:10 +0000

Did you read what this does? Because I get the feeling you didn’t…

This isn’t a library, you don’t include in your application, and it doesn’t try to replace an understanding of floating point issues on the programmers part.

Is this comment written by AI?

New comment by dented42 in "LFortran compiles fpm"

dented42 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:20:25 +0000

I guess when you’ve been calling it that before everyone else you’re allowed. Sort of how Common Lisp calls threads ‘processes’.

New comment by dented42 in "From Noise to Image – interactive guide to diffusion"

dented42 — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 10:11:46 +0000

Ha, I was going to say the exact opposite. My first thought was that the website was broken.

New comment by dented42 in "The Om Programming Language"

dented42 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:06:04 +0000

To be fair, the examples are extremely easy to overlook. They are also, to put it delicately, not the most helpful.

New comment by dented42 in "I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer"

dented42 — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 08:00:40 +0000

That feels fundamentally broken. How can you expect an organisation to respond appropriately if you don’t provide them any kind of proof?

New comment by dented42 in "HackMyClaw"

dented42 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:41:07 +0000

Well my first testing of the waters was classified as a misdirected love letter.

New comment by dented42 in "TextMaze"

dented42 — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:33:01 +0000

It looks like there’s a download link that contains the source code. Presumably you untar it, follow any necessary build instructions, and then run it.

New comment by dented42 in "Dissecting a C64 Autoboot Program"

dented42 — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 02:37:04 +0000

I love to see modern analysis of these machine!

New comment by dented42 in "Logos Language Guide: Compile English to Rust"

dented42 — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 06:47:28 +0000

Ah. So we’re recreating COBOL in 2026 I see.

New comment by dented42 in "The story of Squeak, a practical Smalltalk written in itself (1997) [pdf]"

dented42 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 03:19:52 +0000

This very much depends on your definition of ‘best’. While your criticisms of the environment are valid, smalltalk is flexible in tangible ways that Java couldn’t match. Java took the OO model of smalltalk and make a bunch compromises that had big negative impacts on the language that are still there today.

Smalltalk was (and still is in some places) successful because of its portability, flexibility, etc. while it hasn’t enjoyed the degree of success as Java, ruby, perl, python, C++, and friends it would be a mistake to call it just a you.

New comment by dented42 in "Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans"

dented42 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 01:34:19 +0000

I can’t be alone in this, but this seems like a supremely terrible idea. I reject whole heartedly the idea that any sizeable portion of one’s code base should specifically /not/ be human interpretable as a design choice.

There’s a chance this is a joke, but even if it is I don’t wanna give the AI tech bros more terrible ideas, they have enough. ;)

New comment by dented42 in "Z2 – Lithographically fabricated IC in a garage fab"

dented42 — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 06:20:03 +0000

It’s heartbreaking.

New comment by dented42 in "Abstract Interpretation in the Toy Optimizer"

dented42 — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 01:28:01 +0000

That kind of feedback is also possible within this framework in theory. It depends on at what level the abstract interpreter is operating. If it’s the source level then it’s easy, but propagating that from an IR to source code is, shall we say, an open question.

New comment by dented42 in "Ecosia: The greenest AI is here"

dented42 — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 02:44:39 +0000

The sheer amount of linear algebra number crunching vs some database lookups is monumental. I don’t see how an LLM could ever be as efficient as a search engine.

New comment by dented42 in "System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4"

dented42 — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 06:09:01 +0000

HyperCard is one of my all time favourite memories of Mac OS.

New comment by dented42 in "Show HN: Kent Dybvig's Scheme Machine in 400 Lines of C (Heap-Memory Model)"

dented42 — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 22:46:37 +0000

What an utterly delightful itty bitty scheme. <3

New comment by dented42 in "Fast Fourier Transforms Part 1: Cooley-Tukey"

dented42 — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 20:16:13 +0000

You’re pulling a quote that disproves your point.

New comment by dented42 in "A brief history of threads and threading"

dented42 — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 02:47:49 +0000

As a native English speaker it likewise took me quite a while to figure out Andy kind of thread they are talking about. ;)

New comment by dented42 in "The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody"

dented42 — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 01:03:30 +0000

This is blatant misinformation. Firstly this has nothing to do with the patriot act, I’m pretty sure the patriot act expired years ago.

But more importantly it doesn’t seem like the government is trying to ban anything, they’re just extending the anti-fraud / anti-money laundering measures enjoyed by the ‘traditional’ financial institutions to the world of cryptocurrency.

Those measures don’t prevent people from doing ‘suspicious’ things, they just treat certain transaction types with more care because of the increased likelihood that they are evidence of a crime.