Hacker News: jfk13

Tom Lehrer, mathematician and singer-songwriter known for colorful satire, dies

jfk13 — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 12:47:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/tom-lehrer-mathematician-and-singer-songwriter-known-for-colorful-satire-dies-at-97

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44710320

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jfk13 in "Can Software Be Durable?"

jfk13 — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 16:20:17 +0000

An example worth considering is TeX, which is now 43 years old (considering only TeX82; the earlier TeX78 was a substantially different piece of software). There has been some maintenance over the years, it's true, including a few feature additions in 1990 (TeX 3.0), but I would suggest it has shown itself to be extremely durable.

New comment by jfk13 in "How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully"

jfk13 — Tue, 27 May 2025 18:06:19 +0000

Except that it's not clear whether the intelligence† that underlies their homing ability is equally effective in helping them evade predators.

†Is "intelligence" even the right word here? I don't know. Much depends on how you define it, I guess, combined with the unknowability of the pigeon's own mental processes.

New comment by jfk13 in "Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding"

jfk13 — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:57:40 +0000

Glad to see you didn't acknowledge your source! :-)

(It's Tom Lehrer, for any who don't recognize it.)

New comment by jfk13 in "Tesla Cybertruck Drives Itself into a Pole, Owner Says 'Thank You Tesla'"

jfk13 — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 20:56:50 +0000

"Some of you may die but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make."

New comment by jfk13 in "HTML whitespace is broken (2024)"

jfk13 — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 10:11:19 +0000

Does the article's "Example 31" look correct to anyone? I see no "small space between the two boxes" (as claimed) in any of the browsers I tried.

New comment by jfk13 in "Where is London's most central sheep?"

jfk13 — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 15:45:41 +0000

How large does the field have to be? I grow some in my back garden...does that count as zero, then?

New comment by jfk13 in "The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk"

jfk13 — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 11:31:53 +0000

Yes, agreed! The first time I visited San Antonio (as a Brit who was based in Dallas for some months) happened to be at exactly that time. We didn't know anything about it, but found ourselves on the river walk in the evening, and along came the parade of boats bringing Pancho Claus & co... it was a lovely surprise and a beautiful evening.

New comment by jfk13 in "The day I taught AI to read code like a Senior Developer"

jfk13 — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 15:16:31 +0000

It does, but those would only be applied if the `font-variant-ligatures: historical-ligatures` property were specified, so they don't appear on this site.

New comment by jfk13 in "The day I taught AI to read code like a Senior Developer"

jfk13 — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 15:13:12 +0000

Specifically, `font-variant-ligatures: discretionary-ligatures` enables this.

(So does `font-feature-settings: "dlig" 1`, which is the low-level equivalent; the site includes both.)

New comment by jfk13 in "Oral history of Caroline Rose, writer of Inside Macintosh (2023) [video]"

jfk13 — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 21:04:07 +0000

Ah, remembering the phone-book Inside Mac volumes! Those were the days.

(Kids these days with StackExchange and Copilot have no idea.... now get off my lawn!)

New comment by jfk13 in "FDA proposes ending use of oral phenylephrine as OTC nasal decongestant"

jfk13 — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 21:45:57 +0000

Some years ago I was very frustrated, as a UK citizen visiting the States and suffering from congestion, that I was completely unable to buy it because I wasn't carrying suitable ID that the pharmacy would recognize.

New comment by jfk13 in "What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase?"

jfk13 — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 15:41:59 +0000

As a test for your browser's internationalisation support, try

    data:text/html,ijmuiden

In Firefox, this displays correctly as "IJmuiden" (thanks to the lang attribute; without that, it would show "Ijmuiden").

New comment by jfk13 in "Implementing a Tiny CPU Rasterizer"

jfk13 — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 23:33:38 +0000

It looks like for some reason Firefox isn't being served the same source as Safari or Chrome. In those browsers, the filename is wrapped in

, , and elements, and followed by .But in the version of the HTML that Firefox receives, all that is missing and the filename is just some text that ends up immediately in front of the first line of code.

New comment by jfk13 in "The almost-lost art of rosin potatoes" jfk13 — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 23:18:59 +0000 That's how my mother used to do it, but I've found that you don't actually need to use "lots of fat" -- you can get good results with much less (just enough oil or goose fat to cover the bottom of the roasting tray), provided you toss the potatoes in it (pre-heated) when putting them in, and turn them a few times during cooking. The variety of potatoes used is also a critical factor. New comment by jfk13 in "Writing in Pictures: Richard Scarry and the art of children's literature" jfk13 — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 21:21:51 +0000 For something that's more of a substantial story than things like Cars & Trucks or Busy Busy Town, let me put in a word for Peasant Pig and the Terrible Dragon. My kids had it pretty much memorized long before they could read it for themselves.New comment by jfk13 in "Font with Built-In Syntax Highlighting" jfk13 — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 15:58:21 +0000 Another issue you'd run into, I suspect, is that in practice text engines/editors/etc will often repaint only fragments of the content, and so the syntax highlighter would not necessarily see all the context it needs. E.g. if you have a comment that starts with "/*" and ends several lines later with "*/", but the editor decides to just redraw a line in the middle, the highlighter won't "know" to use the comment color as the text-drawing operation won't include the delimiters.(This issue already exists in a small way, as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41251114, but it'd only get worse as the syntax highlighter becomes more sophisticated.) New comment by jfk13 in "Font with Built-In Syntax Highlighting" jfk13 — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 15:43:41 +0000 A minor detail, but the MIME type should be `font/woff` (or `font/woff2` if appropriate), not the nonstandard `application/x-...`. (E.g. see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_...) New comment by jfk13 in "Font with Built-In Syntax Highlighting" jfk13 — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 23:50:32 +0000 I tried it (via Firefox DevTools) on your example page by inserting a @font-palette-values rule alongside the @font-face that loads the font: @font-palette-values --mycolors { font-family: Monaspace; base-palette: 0; override-colors: 0 red, 1 green, 2 blue, 3 magenta, 4 cyan, 5 yellow; } (I just picked some arbitrary colors as a proof-of-concept; they don't actually look good.) Then adding the property: font-palette: --mycolors; to the textarea element causes it to use these colors instead of the defaults in the font. New comment by jfk13 in "Font with Built-In Syntax Highlighting" jfk13 — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 23:21:46 +0000 Interesting - thanks. I'm on 17.1; time to apply a macOS update, I guess.