Hacker News: incanus77

New comment by incanus77 in "I keep bouncing off the Scheme language"

incanus77 — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:02:13 +0000

I've been trying to learn Scheme lately by way of schemesh[1], which strikes me as a very clever integration of Scheme into a shell. My favorite parts are that you mix Scheme and shell using () or {} directly, as well as shebang right into one or the other fully as the default when needed.

[1] https://github.com/cosmos72/schemesh

New comment by incanus77 in "The two oldest printing presses"

incanus77 — Wed, 20 May 2026 05:04:55 +0000

I visited this museum in Antwerp in late 2023 as part of a trip there and to the Amsterdam area. The museum is fantastic and fascinating. You can also operate a real printing press, inking it and turning the crank, taking home your print. We have it framed on the wall. It's not as "good" as the ones you can buy there, as the inking is not even, but we made it from blank paper, which is pretty special.

One of the highlights of the museum was the foundry, where they made type. As in, hired people to design fonts and create the lead type to print with them. Folks like, you know, Garamond.

New comment by incanus77 in "Magical Realism: “Northern Exposure” 25 Years Later (2015)"

incanus77 — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:17:48 +0000

Rosyln.

New comment by incanus77 in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

incanus77 — Sat, 16 May 2026 20:52:42 +0000

You're right, ever since we developed trucks, trains, and ships that run on pure atmospheric air, we haven't had to worry about pesky price fluctuations on every physical object that we buy or sell!

New comment by incanus77 in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

incanus77 — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:32:44 +0000

AI is pretty good at pulling from the body of existing solutions of what the right thing to do is.

New comment by incanus77 in "Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics"

incanus77 — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:34:29 +0000

It is when you use a CRT instead of a flat panel.

New comment by incanus77 in "Ti-84 Evo"

incanus77 — Sat, 02 May 2026 04:20:38 +0000

I collect as well:

  HP-35 (1972, first scientific, first in space) - in leather case
  TI-30 (1976, first low-cost scientific)
  HP-12C (1981, financial, c. 2000 remanufacture)
  HP-15C (1982, advanced scientific) - in leather slipcase
  HP-16C (1982, computer programming) - in leather slipcase with manual
  TI-30 SLR (1982, TI’s first solar-powered scientific)
  HP-17B II (1990, financial)
  TI-85 (1992, TI’s first with link port)
  TI-82 (1993)
  TI-92 (1995, TI’s first with computer algebra system)

I use the HP-16C pretty regularly when I'm working on network protocol programming. I have good apps that do it, but there's something about having the calculator right in front of my keyboard rest and turning to it that I like more. In a pinch or outside the house I'll use JPRN instead.

https://github.com/zathras/jrpn

New comment by incanus77 in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

incanus77 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 23:00:09 +0000

I'm 17722 and also felt late. I was a holdout on Subversion and was resistant to Git in general since SVN still worked fine and had good tooling, but eventually some client work moved to Git and thus eventually Github.

New comment by incanus77 in "Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0"

incanus77 — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:37:06 +0000

I’m curious, broadly, what is involved with this. I just got encrypted (LUKS) BTRFS root going on my two Asahi machines and it wasn’t _terrible_… but also definitely not easy.

New comment by incanus77 in "Flickr: The first and last great photo platform"

incanus77 — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 02:00:01 +0000

I signed up in 2004. It was part of a wave of hot new platforms, all of which it seems Yahoo! was acquiring (except YouTube, which went to Google). We used it at work as well (political consultancy) to host photos for applications, making great use of their excellent API. The idea of getting your photos back out again via a sane API with multiple sizes including thumbnails handled for you was pretty wild.

New comment by incanus77 in "Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor"

incanus77 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 17:04:55 +0000

Niri introduced scroll-based window management to me and it instantly clicked. I'm very happy to see a full-on Niri per-workspace emulation mode in OmniWM[1] for the Mac, recently and thankfully made compatible with Sequoia. It immediately became my main window manager.

[1] https://github.com/BarutSRB/OmniWM

New comment by incanus77 in "SDF Public Access Unix System"

incanus77 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:04:02 +0000

I recently joined ICM and was in Seattle (from Portland) for another event and pinged him about maybe, possibly getting let in to see things on a random Saturday — I’d stay out of the way, not touch anything, and at least see what’s going on there. Despite him preparing for the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, he spent an hour and a half with me, showing me around the place in detail. We booted up micros, we looked through books, we talked about decades of UNIX history, and we even played Spacewar on original hardware. What a generous curator.

New comment by incanus77 in "Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin"

incanus77 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:47:34 +0000

The oldest coin in my collection is an 1838 large cent, which my dad says he found as a kid in a crack in the sidewalk. He was born more than 100 years after that date.

New comment by incanus77 in "Mario and Earendil"

incanus77 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:42:48 +0000

Fair.

New comment by incanus77 in "Mario and Earendil"

incanus77 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:20:50 +0000

> First things first: I think you should read Mario’s post.

And from that:

> Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies. Quite the opposite. They are basically well-meaning hippies in my book, who think software, and specifically AI, should serve humans, not the other way around.

So, somewhat hopeful? I'm not sure I can take any more of this grossness.

New comment by incanus77 in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

incanus77 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:57:04 +0000

Have you tried creating a Google account without a mobile phone number from a public computer? Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Ok, so assuming he doesn’t want to spend $500+ for a mobile phone, he’s looking at an Android. Then, when he logs into a Google account, Google hoovers up his location, his associated credit card (if he has one, what if he does not and does not want one?), and countless other personal metadata at the very least that will likely never go away. Even if he does suddenly go from no smartphone to being a savvy personal steward of his digital privacy, you can bet that Google is scrambling to capture as much as possible, at all times, about its users’ personal lives and data.

  - If he doesn’t want a Google account, /just/ create a new one
  - If he doesn’t have a credit card, /just/ use a family member’s
  - If he has Parkinson’s and can’t use touch input, /just/ have a friend do it
  - etc.

The question is not whether these obstacles can be overcome (trivially, by “normals”). The question is whether we want these to be the default requirements for basic participation in society. And it’s a completely legitimate question.

New comment by incanus77 in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

incanus77 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:05:05 +0000

Is then logging into your Google account (if you have one) also without cost and tradeoffs?

New comment by incanus77 in "Intuiting Pratt Parsing"

incanus77 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:38:42 +0000

Love Picol, and love this! When I first revisited Tcl, I was a bit miffed about needing [expr] but now really appreciate both it and the normal Tcl syntax.

New comment by incanus77 in "Ghostmoon.app – A Swiss Army Knife for your macOS menu bar"

incanus77 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:40:32 +0000

A similar app in this space that I discovered recently is Supercharge.

https://sindresorhus.com/supercharge

I was skeptical that I’d find it useful since I can do all of these shell commands and such, but one feature I like is being able to effectively pare the feature set down to just what you need, making for a small but very useful menu.

New comment by incanus77 in "Tracy Kidder has died"

incanus77 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:10:47 +0000

In case it's not clear, 'Halt and Catch Fire' was more or less based on Kidder's Pulitzer-winning 'Soul of a New Machine'.