Hacker News: jdougan

New comment by jdougan in "Math's pedagogical curse – Grant Sanderson [video] (2023)"

jdougan — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 02:03:08 +0000

> most supervisors try to discourage students from writing in this way because there is a delicate art to it that you are unlikely to be able to meet at that career stage.

And it seems to me they will continue to to unlikely to meet it if they don't get any practice at it. Which loops back to being another pedagogical problem.

New comment by jdougan in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

jdougan — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:17:24 +0000

Smalltalk has #reject: which does that. You could, of course, just wrap a not around the test in the closure, but sometimes reject with a well-named predicate is easier to read.

bsnpApproved := tvShows reject: [ :eachShow | eachShow hasNaughtyContent ].

New comment by jdougan in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

jdougan — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 23:33:56 +0000

Ruby inject appears to be derived from Smalltalk #inject:into:

#(1 2 3 4 5 6 7) inject: 10 into: [ :sum :each | sum + each squared ].

or from your example:

someHash := myArray inject: (Dictionary new) into: [ :accumulator :item | ... ].

The way I remember the order is it reflects the assignment you'd do is a while loop, sum := sum + each.

New comment by jdougan in "US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons"

jdougan — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:44:51 +0000

The EMP effect depends on there being atmosphere to generate electrical fields from the bomb gamma flux. Being close enough and line of sight from the atmosphere can be sufficient to generate the effect in the nearby atmosphere. 400km is apparently the optimum height for coverage but not strength. Too far and inverse-square ensures the flux isn't sufficient. So just detonating a bomb "in space" may not do anything depending on the direct path distance to the satellites in question (the bomb gamma flux etc. of course poses its own threat). Look it up, the physics are interesting.

New comment by jdougan in "Apple's Dimensional Drawings"

jdougan — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 06:32:39 +0000

I'd love to see them go back all the way to the Apple I eventually.

New comment by jdougan in "Discontinuation of third level domain registrations for the .name TLD [pdf]"

jdougan — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:59:40 +0000

So, how can we get this unwound, or at least properly compensated?

New comment by jdougan in "DConf 2026 in London"

jdougan — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:03:08 +0000

Smalltalk does something similar. Maybe that syntax would be better for him?

New comment by jdougan in "Blender 5.2 LTS"

jdougan — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:15:31 +0000

And these extensions are for what use cases?

New comment by jdougan in "To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system"

jdougan — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 03:26:53 +0000

I wonder if this could be practical for controlled environment devices like game consoles.

New comment by jdougan in "Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)"

jdougan — Sun, 31 May 2026 06:53:08 +0000

I'm curious as to how time efficient that actually was.

New comment by jdougan in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

jdougan — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:30:07 +0000

Humber encoding?

New comment by jdougan in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

jdougan — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:27:52 +0000

Reminds me of the Xanadu Humber encoding.

New comment by jdougan in "Can we have the day off?"

jdougan — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:08:57 +0000

I was always partial to the “make Wednesday a second weekend” plan. No more hump day and 2 “Fridays”. Of course that is also 2 “Mondays”

New comment by jdougan in "The foundations of a provably secure operating system (PSOS) (1979) [pdf]"

jdougan — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:40:57 +0000

alternate futures where the 33bit versions of the i960 became the processor family of choice.

New comment by jdougan in "The foundations of a provably secure operating system (PSOS) (1979) [pdf]"

jdougan — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:57:13 +0000

If you go through old CS OS texts on the matter, they really didn't have the same understanding of capabilities then as the later object-capabilities (ocap) model would introduce. Typically they would show an access control matrix, note that acls were rows and capabilities columns and note that they are duals of one another. They're the same, acls are easier to manage, done.

OP is arguably the first paper that introduces ocaps. Some of the issues are discussed in "Capability Myths Demolished" https://papers.agoric.com/assets/pdf/papers/capability-myths...

New comment by jdougan in "The foundations of a provably secure operating system (PSOS) (1979) [pdf]"

jdougan — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:53:27 +0000

I'm seeing about 9 comments, all flagged dead. Do you have showdead on?

New comment by jdougan in "The foundations of a provably secure operating system (PSOS) (1979) [pdf]"

jdougan — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:39:20 +0000

At a guess, looking at his history, it's AI slop. Basic facts appear correct though.

New comment by jdougan in "dBase: 1979-2026"

jdougan — Wed, 13 May 2026 10:16:48 +0000

In some of the draft versions of ASCII the positions currently taken by underscore and caret were left arrow and up arrow respectively. As late as 1985 I used terminals (LanparScope) the supported the older draft.

New comment by jdougan in "Up in Smoke"

jdougan — Wed, 13 May 2026 09:59:19 +0000

Being a full-time writer has always been a tough gig unless it is attached to an institution (but that can corrupt the writing). I'm not sure why anyone would think it wasn't tough. The author/poet/painter starving in a garret was a well known stereotype. Just like most of the arts there is a supply and demand imbalance; lots (claim to) want to write, only a few will actually write to completion, and only a few of those will have written something someone else wants to read. And that's before the traditional publishing funnel.

On the other hand, I've known writers who make it work. Larry Correia has a lot of useful thoughts about it, he used to be an accountant before he got into writing and brings those skills to his analysis.

eg. "Analyzing My Royalties" https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02/08/analyzing-my-roya... he breaks down how the system works. Claims to be making Doctor/Lawyer level money as of 2022.

I would like to see an analysis including "non-traditional" publishing options, and how different kinds of writing sell. I suspect genre fiction is different from "literary" from non-fiction, etc.

New comment by jdougan in "Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era"

jdougan — Wed, 13 May 2026 08:25:32 +0000

Nothing new under the sun. "Put that there" demo, 1982.

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/put-that-there-voice-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo