Hacker News: ginsider_oaks

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "ai;dr"

ginsider_oaks — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:33:14 +0000

> Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

from the preface of SICP.

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years"

ginsider_oaks — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:45:39 +0000

would it be better if they didn't skip the hard part? (i.e. if they re-designed it from first principles) does something being hard to do make it more virtuous?

would it be better if they didn't have fun coding it? is something worse if it was fun to make?

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "xAI joins SpaceX"

ginsider_oaks — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 23:40:55 +0000

lawnmower

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

ginsider_oaks — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 23:32:21 +0000

or even better:

  :'<,'>s/^/> /

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "Xubuntu.org Might Be Compromised"

ginsider_oaks — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 18:33:41 +0000

if you use ublock origin you should be OK, it warns you when you try to access lubuntu.net

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "Boardgame.io: an engine for creating turn-based games using JavaScript"

ginsider_oaks — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:42:11 +0000

I remember someone making a card game GALGA [1] in Haskell and compiling a high-level "rules" DSL to a low-level "animation" DSL and "primitive" DSL for handling animations and state changes respectively.

[1] https://roganmurley.com/2021/12/11/free-monads.html

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "Why flying insects gather at artificial light"

ginsider_oaks — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 12:21:24 +0000

funnily my friend just discovered that you can split it into thirds a few day ago and now does it whenever he eats a banana

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "Thinking in an array language"

ginsider_oaks — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 17:34:20 +0000

list languages and array languages are quite different. in LISP, the lists are heterogeneous i.e. each element can contain different types, which is also how you can e.g. make a tree out of lists in LISP. typically in array languages all elements are the same, and you use operations that apply to the whole array e.g. one operation for summing the array rather than a loop.

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "Amazon's Alexa Telling Users That 2020 Election Was Rigged"

ginsider_oaks — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 15:51:00 +0000

> Most of them shouldn't have a right to vote in the first place [in my opinion].

> > These are simply more opinions [...]

> > > No, not opinions. Demonstrable facts.

you're going to have to explain this one to me

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "Nobody cares about your blog"

ginsider_oaks — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 12:26:06 +0000

The point is that the first list is a series of (flawed) reasons that the author, and probably many others, have been discouraged from blogging.

And even if you know they're flawed, it can still get in your head and discourage you, so the author provides a different list of reasons to still blog in spite of that. It's not meant as proving/disproving any of the points, but simply as motivation to keep going.

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "Attempto Controlled English"

ginsider_oaks — Mon, 15 May 2023 10:52:43 +0000

Lojban[1] is a constructed language which is (or tries to be) syntactically unambiguous. Of course even fewer people speak Lojban than Esperanto, but there's still a sizable community.

[1]: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill"

ginsider_oaks — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 20:32:56 +0000

just give me the NSA putting backdoors in my chips rather than this two-faced nonsense.

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "The year of C++ successor languages"

ginsider_oaks — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:54:09 +0000

Sure, just make the fields of the struct private and you can make a public constructor:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/mod/struct_visibil...

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "The year of C++ successor languages"

ginsider_oaks — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:46:16 +0000

They're not conflating.

mgaunard says:

> The alternative that the parent said was making all of your state be a union > with some kind of error, and making sure all accesses handle the fact the > variable might be in a erroneous state.

This is exactly what `Result` is in Rust. While I haven't used Rust, it seems that panics are generally discouraged and only used as a last resort whereas exceptions are more commonly used in C++ and Java.

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "What does copyright say about generative models?"

ginsider_oaks — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 13:53:11 +0000

What is stopping someone from publishing SNKRX to a site like itch.io and selling it for 1€ instead? And if nothing is stopping it, why hasn't someone done it yet (that I know of).

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "What does copyright say about generative models?"

ginsider_oaks — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 00:45:45 +0000

I'd like to present a counterexample: SNKRX[1]. It costs 3€ and is under the MIT license, you can find it on github[2].

It sold >100,000 units[3], and AFAIK no one's massively undercut the author. I guess he's kind of undercutting himself by making it available on github, but I bet most people would rather pay 3€ and have nice steam features than download and compile a game off a site they likely don't know.

And yes, I do realize he's still the copyright holder for SNKRX, but he's not really enforcing it with a permissive license like MIT.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/915310/SNKRX/

[2]: https://github.com/a327ex/SNKRX

[3]: https://www.a327ex.com/posts/2022/

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "The rabbit hole of adding grain to digital photos"

ginsider_oaks — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 03:37:08 +0000

Are noise and procedurally generated textures mutually exclusive?

The Wikipedia article for gradient noise[1] says:

> Gradient noise is a type of noise commonly used as a > procedural texture primitive in computer graphics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_noise

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "Color of text on monochrome terminals with green-on-black and amber-on-black?"

ginsider_oaks — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 13:04:27 +0000

it sounds like the danish word for carrot: "gulerod" which translates to "yellow root".

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot"

ginsider_oaks — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 21:27:05 +0000

the actual copying isn't a problem, it's distribution. if i buy access to a PDF i'm not going to get in trouble for duplicating the file unless i send it to someone else.

when someone uploads their copyrighted text to a web page they are distributing it to whoever visits that page. the browser is just the medium.

New comment by ginsider_oaks in "I put my whole life into a single database"

ginsider_oaks — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 14:47:29 +0000

Wow, I do something similar, however it is much more limited in scope (and all on pen & paper for now). I also share the author's last name.