Hacker News: jz391

New comment by jz391 in "Mojo 1.0 Beta"

jz391 — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:44:12 +0000

> I wouldn't call it "exceptionally nice"

I guess depends on your reference point :-) I recall in the beginning, python offering an easier/more readable alternative to Perl, which itself was a step up from awk/sed/sh script (for the tasks/uses GP mentions)

New comment by jz391 in "A simplified model of Fil-C"

jz391 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 04:28:23 +0000

Reminds me of a commercial project I did for my old University department around 1994. The GUI was ambitious and written in Motif, which was a little buggy and leaked memory. So... I ended up catching any SEGVs, saving state, and restarting the process, with a short message in a popup telling the user to wait. Obviously not guaranteed, but surprisingly it mostly worked. With benefit of experience & hindsight, I should have just (considerably) simplified it: I had user-configurable dialogs creating widgets on the fly etc, none of which was really required.

New comment by jz391 in "Bringing Clojure programming to Enterprise (2021)"

jz391 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 05:49:57 +0000

The key issue is that Lisp's minimal uniform syntax has less variation to help with visual pattern matching, which we humans are good at (compared to richer syntax).

The meta-programming power of Lisp may be largely due to being homoiconic, although Dylan/Julia etc achieve similar without it. However Lisp's minimal syntax is not a prerequisite for homoiconicity: S-Plus/R has a more conventional syntax while retaining "code is a list" representation.

JP Jonathan Blow on LSP [video]

jz391 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:31:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApmD4IQP-Ac

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271634

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jz391 in "Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase"

jz391 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 02:12:18 +0000

To extend your analogy: if the house is a listed building (UK concept; apparently US equivalent is listed in National Register of Historic Places), by law you cannot just tear it down. You need to do much more work to renovate what can be done without disturbing the original structure. This obviously costs much more and is generally done by different specialists, who have harder job and hence are better paid. So the question comes back to: what kind of work do you want to do...

New comment by jz391 in "Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)"

jz391 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:25:50 +0000

And, of course, the next level of procrastination is to develop your own programming language, which you will use to write the engine to use in creating the game :-) Definitely hats off to Jon for pulling it off - he had a lot of focus and some previous experience - and it also helps to have re$ource$ from past successful games. For many of us, the lure of developing better tools, rather than the end product, proves to be too strong to resist. At least Jon stopped short of developing own OS :-)

Our Kona EBM a 96% vs. 2% Sudoku Benchmark

jz391 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 03:54:21 +0000

Article URL: https://logicalintelligence.com/blog/energy-based-model-sudoku-demo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46908892

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jz391 in "The cleaner: One woman’s mission to help Britain’s hoarders"

jz391 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 06:38:22 +0000

True for many, but I actually have been acquiring some computing books I had enjoyed reading in my youth (e.g. Organick's Multics). Perhaps living permanently abroad strengthens nostalgia...

New comment by jz391 in "Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing"

jz391 — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 02:45:03 +0000

Interesting. The voice used for the pronunciation sound seems to be using the wrong language though (FYI using Firefox).

New comment by jz391 in "Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to (2016)"

jz391 — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 01:05:16 +0000

Absolutely. As an Electrical Engineer turned software guy, Ohm's/Kirchhoff's laws remain as valid and significant as when I was taught them 35 years ago. For software however, growth of hardware architectures/constraints made it possible to add much more functionality. My first UNIX experience was on PDP-11/44, where every process (and kernel) had access to an impressive maximum of 128K of RAM (if you figured out the flag to split address and data segments). This meant everything was simple and easy to follow: the UNIX permission model (user/group/other+suid/sgid) fit it well. ACLs/capabilities etc were reserved for VMS/Multics, with manuals spanning shelves.

Given hardware available to an average modern Linux box, it is hardly surprising that these bells and whistles were added - someone will find them useful in some scenarios and additional resource is negligible. It does however make understanding the whole beast much, much harder...

New comment by jz391 in "What Killed Perl?"

jz391 — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 02:24:22 +0000

Indeed. Coming from UNIX tools (sed/awk/sh/grep/tr etc), perl had a lot of appeal and almost intuitive syntax - alternatives in the '80s being C, awk, or if you were unlucky, FORTRAN IV without string type :-). The benefit of having a single language with all of the functionality of these tools was amazing at the time and ability to use familiar syntax was a benefit. However expectations for programming languages grew somewhat since...

SiPearl unveils Europe's first dual-use sovereign processor with 80 cores

jz391 — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 22:06:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sipearl-unveils-europes-first-dual-use-sovereign-processor-with-80-cores-expected-in-2027-for-government-aerospace-and-defense-applications

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45468378

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by jz391 in "Ask HN: Local RAG with private knowledge base"

jz391 — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 17:36:01 +0000

Does anyone have experience using any of these for scientific paper PDFs, in particular containing equations (I'm guessing graphs are still well beyond their reach)? The workflow for these seems to involve converting PDF->text...

New comment by jz391 in "Why does Windows use backslash as path separator? (2019)"

jz391 — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 16:32:08 +0000

Could be worse of course: Multics (the first system with hierarchical names) used greater-than (>) as separator. Unix/DOS use of slashes gives us the sane pipeline/redirection syntax we all love (see [1] for the Multics redirection syntax).

[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7030/why-...

New comment by jz391 in "Show HN: Purl – A Simple Tool for Text Processing"

jz391 — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 13:12:19 +0000

I understand what you mean (although I "grew up" on UNIX, don't find this a problem); however, it would be better if the long (i.e. readable) options were prefixed by double dash to follow usual UNIX convention.

Using single dash for single character options allows you to combine them, which is really useful (if you do remember these options of course), so `-exc` means `-e -x -c` etc.

New comment by jz391 in "Permutation City (1994)"

jz391 — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 18:29:32 +0000

Excellent Sci-Fi yarn, with nostalgic references. I particularly liked the VAX-11 and LISP reference ("ideograms in a formal language full of parentheses")

New comment by jz391 in "AMD's Next GPU Is a 3D-Integrated Superchip"

jz391 — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 16:01:37 +0000

Not my area, but isn't a lot of NVIDIA's edge over AMD precisely software? NVIDIA seem to employ a lot of software dev (for a hardware company) & made CUDA into the de facto standard for much ML work. Do you know if AMD are closing that gap?

New comment by jz391 in "Show HN: React Spreadsheet 2"

jz391 — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 20:42:16 +0000

I've used Slickgrid (open source, https://slickgrid.net/) with some success.

New comment by jz391 in "The Four Color Theorem [video]"

jz391 — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 11:01:09 +0000

Does anyone know if Cahit's Spiral Chains proof (<https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0408247>) was found to have issues? It is much more elegant, as it avoids the exhaustive computer case verification...

New comment by jz391 in "Solving a simple puzzle using SymPy"

jz391 — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 20:47:02 +0000

I believe the parent was referring to line from the article which said "...square that gets partitioned into rectangles of equal area" - i.e. area of yellow, green, pink and orange is the same, so the area of the big rectangle containing all those four colours must be 4 times the height of orange rectangle (since their widths are the same).