Hacker News: drwoland

New comment by drwoland in "BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English"

drwoland — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 07:24:39 +0000

To be clear, I don't think the library would actually be used to accomplish this task. Rather I suspect a tounge in cheek reaction to years of tedious spelling adjustment disguised as urgent feature requests.

New comment by drwoland in "BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English"

drwoland — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 07:17:07 +0000

As a programmer working in the UK I've never been asked to rewrite something into British English. I have been instructed to convert some old codebase to American spellings to "avoid confusion". Probably about 6 times in 20 years of professional programming and usually by some product manager based in San José following an acquisition. This is why the library exists I expect.

New comment by drwoland in "Prusti: Static Analyzer for Rust"

drwoland — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 15:14:16 +0000

When I worked on a big c++ codebase I found them essential for both ci/cd systems and actively debugging an issue. The valgrind suite of tools like cachegrind are very useful for both troubleshooting as well as classic static analysis and I heartily recommend investing some time in learning valgrind if you're writing c/c++ code for a platform valgrind runs on.

On the other hand commercial tools have been more of a mixed blessing but that is probably because every time ive seen them deployed the budget hasnt included sufficient engineering time, training or prof services to cut down huge numbers of false positives.

New comment by drwoland in "Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams"

drwoland — Tue, 31 May 2022 17:50:15 +0000

I think it's better than slacks sidebar threaded reply. It also has better code blocks, less irritating pop up magic and no bots nagging you to fill in credentials all the time.

New comment by drwoland in "Assassination of Boris Nemtsov"

drwoland — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 11:50:57 +0000

The only source for that claim as far as I can tell is conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen's book https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Madsen_(journalist) . So it's probably nonsense.

New comment by drwoland in "Ancient bees found in Blenheim palace estate"

drwoland — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 10:44:10 +0000

I think the thing I found most fascinating was the fact that the hives were small (~= 5000 bees) and had multiple queens, with one swarm having 9!

Ancient bees found in Blenheim palace estate

drwoland — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 07:24:57 +0000

Article URL: https://oxnatbees.wordpress.com/2021/07/23/onbg-meeting-july-2021-blenheim-wild-bees/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29137277

Points: 141

# Comments: 23

New comment by drwoland in "Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations"

drwoland — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 14:36:33 +0000

Do you have a source for the guardian editorial policy being pro the toppling of Gaddafi's regime in Libya? The Guardian is far from perfect but generally they were and are against military intervention by the UK.

New comment by drwoland in "Modernize your Bash Scripts by adding GUI"

drwoland — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 07:27:04 +0000

This reminds me, a company I worked at used a bash script + zenity to automate the programming of devices using open-jtag. It worked pretty well and let the workers (skilled mostly in soldering and electronics assembly) do the programming and flashing of a fairly involved embedded device. We eventually ended up replacing it with a local web-app but the zenity version was fast to write and good enough that the quick and dirty prototype survived for several years.

My pitch for zenity would be - "Need a prototype gui for users that struggle in the console? Consider zenity."

New comment by drwoland in "U.S. tech stocks are now worth more than the entire European stock market"

drwoland — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 17:26:05 +0000

The sad thing is, at least in the UK start ups are often headquartered in the US to make it easy to chase valley VCs.

New comment by drwoland in "Larry Wall's Perl 6 Release Talk [video]"

drwoland — Sat, 14 Nov 2015 10:30:55 +0000

I have to work with a legacy Perl codebase most weeks and I've been ignoring Perl 6 because upgrading our interpreter version is difficult for a bunch of reasons to boring to go into.

I'd been naively holding out a hope that Perl 6 would improve things so I clicked on the Perl 6 for Perl 5 programmers link from perl6.org.

They added code block interpolation to strings:

  #!/usr/bin/env perl6
  my $number = 3;
  say( "{ $number * 4 }" ); # prints 12