Hacker News: gatestone

New comment by gatestone in "What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks"

gatestone — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:34:07 +0000

I find this interesting as a technology, as a business process, and above all as a system for managing trust on a global scale across different jurisdictions. In a sense, the credit card system accomplishes something that even the UN, international law, Interpol and military mights cannot do: it enables individuals to enter into trustworthy global agreements with minimal effort and risk, and at very low transaction costs.

New comment by gatestone in "Parallel Parentheses Matching"

gatestone — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:16:50 +0000

Reminds me of Thinking Machines and Danny Hillis. See chapter "Parsing a Regular Language" in "DATA PARALLEL ALGORITHMS" <https://rsim.cs.illinois.edu/arch/qual_papers/systems/3.pdf>.

New comment by gatestone in "TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP"

gatestone — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 06:36:15 +0000

In Plan 9 you did have a real (synthetic) /net, and could do that and more from any program. You could even mount /net from another machine via 9P protocol and have an instant VPN...

9front lets you play with that on Linux.

Some Plan 9 like /net things are visible in Go libraries... (Rob Pike legacy)

New comment by gatestone in "πFS"

gatestone — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:16:10 +0000

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1817064/bbp-formula...

New comment by gatestone in "A Letter from Dijkstra on APL (1982)"

gatestone — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:09:50 +0000

Reminds me when Russ Cox (Go, Google, Bell Labs) used Rob Pike's APL like Ivy to solve 2021 Advent of code puzzles:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apljk/comments/uccbd6/russ_cox_solv...

New comment by gatestone in "Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975"

gatestone — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:19:43 +0000

I am especially fond of this article inventing LLMs as Markov chains.

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-11/page/n129/...

New comment by gatestone in "We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack"

gatestone — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 08:29:28 +0000

Who ever invented the idea that you can embed Javasript to picture files?

New comment by gatestone in "The input stack on Linux: An end-to-end architecture overview"

gatestone — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 10:48:47 +0000

Someone else can explain, how me pressing "a" gets to light some LEDs on my screen, and what happens in the output part of the data flow.

New comment by gatestone in "Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come"

gatestone — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 11:49:49 +0000

No one mentioned Upspin? A global file namespace (URL, but better...) and protocol to isolate public data users from private governance and storage, by gurus like Rob Pike. https://github.com/upspin/upspin

New comment by gatestone in ""Europe Is Jailing People for Online Speech," by Prof. Yascha Mounk"

gatestone — Tue, 13 May 2025 09:23:21 +0000

At least in Finland the jail sentences have been related to extreme widely published antisemitism. Fines have been given for other sorts of hate speech.

If the U.S. wants this to be allowed, it is your business. But it is ours to decide, if we want to allow nazis synmpathy newspapers advocating killing of the jew. Generally, the americans are lost in their arrogance here, as always.

New comment by gatestone in "Nevermind, an album on major chords"

gatestone — Mon, 05 May 2025 14:00:32 +0000

I don't think there has been a rock album ever since, that would have been so big, popular, revolutionary and generation defining. I guess some genius must have been there.

New comment by gatestone in "EUCLEAK Side-Channel Attack on the YubiKey 5 Series"

gatestone — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 11:59:06 +0000

Can you explain me, why do you need to be online to extract the private key? Can't you just steal the token, input the nonces offline, and meter timing? Then, crunch out the private key, and only then, if needed, phish the password?

New comment by gatestone in "A floating solar-powered device produces clean water and clean fuel"

gatestone — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 08:36:25 +0000

If this is inefficient, what are you comparing to? What is the best way to purify water or produce hydrogen with solar energy? Is there a good way? Certainly producing electricity first can't be the most affordable way?

New comment by gatestone in "Banging errors in Go"

gatestone — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 10:19:51 +0000

Designing better error handling in Go is an ongoing work. Proposols are being considered. Personally I don't see a big problem in real life Go code bases.

Note that there is kind of a philosophical cul-de-sac here. If you understand and expect your "errors" (= exceptional situations that prevent the program to do what we thought the user wanted) you can handle them, and they become part of your program normal logic.

If you don't understand or ainticipate your errors, or choose to neglect situations that are not really rare or are really dangerous, no amount of special language constructs will save your users.

https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf...

New comment by gatestone in "Banging errors in Go"

gatestone — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 06:29:36 +0000

If you browse random Go code from https://pkg.go.dev/ you will have a hard time finding that hypothetical case where most of your code is error handling chores. The problem is artificial.

New comment by gatestone in "On Learning to Program with LLMs"

gatestone — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 09:40:45 +0000

They are also pretty good in teaching you human languages. There is a saying that the best way to learn a new language is to fall in love with someone who speaks it. ChatGPT speaks them all. Start with "Show me some simple phrases in Chinese and in English..."

New comment by gatestone in "Are any words the same in all languages?"

gatestone — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 12:13:19 +0000

"Kiosk" is pretty universal, Persian originally.

New comment by gatestone in "Demystifying burnout – A deep dive into its symptoms and remedies"

gatestone — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 05:18:25 +0000

Burnout at work is easy. Burnout in life is harder.

New comment by gatestone in "Copilot under fire as dev claims it emits 'large chunks of my copyrighted code'"

gatestone — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 12:19:20 +0000

How is this problem different from DALL-E and such? Is the copyright legislation ready for all this, and when will there be established interpretations of law?

New comment by gatestone in "Surprising result while transpiling C to Go"

gatestone — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 13:48:13 +0000

That’s a myth. Go read some random Go. Trivial functions often do nothing but call a couple of other functions, check errors and return. But non-trivial functions use relatively less lines for error handling.