Hacker News: elch

New comment by elch in "How I leared what a decoupling capacitor is for, the hard way"

elch — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:06:48 +0000

But he tries to quantify this interference. Anyway Animats's comment is the one that points IMHO to the most likely cause of the observed waveforms.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931024

PS Now that I’ve taken a closer look, this is even sillier than I first thought.

He’s hunting for 50 MHz ghost signals by connecting his PCB to a breadboard using (crappy) wires that are at least 10 cm long. And he’s connecting the scope probe to the breadboard (or those breadboard wires).

And if I’m not mistaken, he doesn’t even bother to connect the ground lead of the probe.

New comment by elch in "How I leared what a decoupling capacitor is for, the hard way"

elch — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:21:19 +0000

1.5 Vpp ripple measured on a 40 MHz scope - when the waveform is 50 MHz according to him...

New comment by elch in "How I leared what a decoupling capacitor is for, the hard way"

elch — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:18:52 +0000

I guess he also believes that 50 MHz or so signals can be measured reliably on a 40 MHz (on paper at least) scope.

New comment by elch in "Dillo Browser Release 3.3.0"

elch — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:32:20 +0000

Very possible. I was too lazy to investigate.

BTW Thanks for all fixes, especially this one https://bug.dillo-browser.org/511/. Dillo (3.2.0) crashed quite often on my system because of this bug. I hope I will compile and test the new release soon.

New comment by elch in "Dillo Browser Release 3.3.0"

elch — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:19:04 +0000

I meant browsing HN with Dillo. And it is not Dillo's fault. Other not "mainstream" browsers have the same problem.

New comment by elch in "Dillo Browser Release 3.3.0"

elch — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 18:58:55 +0000

It’s a shame that in my case trying to use Dillo here (HN) keeps returning 429, something that doesn’t happen with "full‑size" browsers (JS?).

New comment by elch in "Math Is Hard – OpenBSD Stories"

elch — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:40:38 +0000

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/microfiche/vms-source-list...

New comment by elch in "APL is more French than English"

elch — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:37:00 +0000

(1978)

New comment by elch in "Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)"

elch — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:09:47 +0000

Did you mean the C authors?

New comment by elch in "UK total wind generation record beaten today"

elch — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:56:06 +0000

Meanwhile the average EE prices for business in USD/kWh:

UK: 0.442 USA: 0.148 India: 0.124 China: 0.097 Russia: 0.096

New comment by elch in "Tony Hoare has died"

elch — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:14:13 +0000

He (Lawson) can only point to his paper from 1967 and the fact that in 1964 he was asked to join PL/I team due to his earlier published works on linked lists.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/363332.363344

PS He didn't mention it in his recollections [1], but 1978 paper The Early History and Characteristics of PL/I [2] claims that a paper was produced in October 1965.

[1] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/960118.808389

New comment by elch in "Tony Hoare has died"

elch — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:08:37 +0000

Pity you didn't look a little further, where there was more syntax and semantics... The concept of a high-level language is, of course, relative, but if, for example, someone considers Forth to be an HLL, then imho, the language/formalism from the book about the Kiev machine was definitely one, and it was described in more detail by its chief architect, Katherine Yushchenko, in a book from 1963: https://it-history.lib.ru/TEXTS/Adresnoe-programmirovanie_EY...

If you are still interested, you can look at page 35, where there are several examples, including finding the GCD.

New comment by elch in "Tony Hoare has died"

elch — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:55:34 +0000

If we start playing the "who was first" game, then for the Soviet machine Kiev (Kyiv), an "address language" with a "prime operation" was created in 1957-59.

The prime operation and address mapping.

The prime operation defines a certain single‑argument function. Its symbol (a prime mark) is written above and to the left of the argument: 'a = b where a is the argument and b is the result of the operation. This is read as: "prime a equals b" (or "b is the contents of a"). The argument a is called an address, and the function value b is called the contents of the address. The prime function ' defines a mapping from the set of addresses A to the set of contents B, which we will call an address mapping.

Page 36, chapter III https://torba.infoua.net/files/kateryna-yushchenko/Vychislit...

New comment by elch in "On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]"

elch — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:24:43 +0000

The original paper is probably behind a paywall. But you can have a look at an excerpt (chapter 2) from the book Virtual Machines (2006) by Iain D. Craig.

https://beckassets.blob.core.windows.net/product/readingsamp...

And there's the chapter 7 in the Richard's book (1979): https://archive.org/details/richards1979bcpl/page/n131/mode/...

You will find much more information and references at the software preservation site.

https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/BCPL/

New comment by elch in "On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]"

elch — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 09:07:43 +0000

You had commented before I created a new account, so I will just add that I have never seen Wirth claim that he or his colleagues at ETH were the originators of the idea. Moreover, this idea was already used in Wirth’s “first” language, namely Euler, which he published in 1965 while at Stanford. An even earlier example may be Schorre’s META‑II from 1964 (UCLA).

Regarding the popular opinion here that Pascal was created for educational purposes (only) - implicitly meaning not for building real, large-scale software - Wirth considered these two characteristics equivalent, and in his view one was a necessary condition for the other.

From the summary/abstract of his original publication about Pascal (The Programming Language Pascal) written in 1970 and published in Acta Informatica in 1971:

In view of its intended usage both as a convenient basis to teach programming and as an efficient tool to write large programs, emphasis was placed on keeping the number of fundamental concepts reasonably small, on a simple and systematic language structure, and on efficient implementability.