Hacker News: lebuffon

New comment by lebuffon in "Two high-speed trains collide near Toledo, Spain"

lebuffon — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:37:42 +0000

The word "computers" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

I would think that the software is the weakest link in the chain.

New comment by lebuffon in "Gforth 1.0"

lebuffon — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 17:55:27 +0000

Whoa! That is a really nice piece of work. Congrats!

New comment by lebuffon in "Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down"

lebuffon — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 13:28:13 +0000

When you are forbidden to expand taxation on the people with money, because "ideology" and your country is accruing debt at historic levels, tariffs are about the only revenue source that you have that won't make the oligarchs angry.

New comment by lebuffon in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

lebuffon — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:17:17 +0000

I have wondered if an option would be to have a state make it law that every 4 or 5 years they open the bidding for a health care insurance provider for the entire state. A state committee then takes the bid with best premiums to services ratio and they do the job for the contract term.

There would still be the option of people and businesses to buy 3rd party "extras" like private hospital rooms, vision care etc. on top the state plan, but some level of basic health care would be provided to all people paying into the state plan.

Would that work?

New comment by lebuffon in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

lebuffon — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:11:30 +0000

Makes me wonder if this project is the reason for a slight downturn in Liver cancer from 2019 forward in the UK.

https://crukcancerintelligence.shinyapps.io/CancerStatsDataH...

New comment by lebuffon in "The Fabled Flatbreads of Uzbekistan (2015)"

lebuffon — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:36:05 +0000

This has some resemblance to albeit the much simpler bread found in Pompei.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/07/07/ancient-bread/

New comment by lebuffon in "Teaching Kids Forth"

lebuffon — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:51:26 +0000

The "no safety net" means that Forth is a low level language. You can touch anything in the machine. Many times it is used without an O/S. So if you push a random number onto the hardware stack you will get burned.

New comment by lebuffon in "Teaching Kids Forth"

lebuffon — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:39:32 +0000

Of course not. I was merely expressing that Forth makes interactively very easy. And like all languages, it is impossible to evaluate them if you don't use them for some significant amount of time.

New comment by lebuffon in "The Birth of the American 12-string Guitar (2013)"

lebuffon — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:57:21 +0000

On fingered strings the guitar sustains for about 10 seconds until the note is very quiet, but still ringing.

On a Cello a fingered string is gone in 2 seconds.

New comment by lebuffon in "The Birth of the American 12-string Guitar (2013)"

lebuffon — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:54:22 +0000

I can play chords on a violin or viola and strum them. Keeping a four-finger chord perfectly in tune in rapid changes is really hard (near impossible) without frets.

New comment by lebuffon in "Teaching Kids Forth"

lebuffon — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:32:04 +0000

Forth is very good in this regard, because the word names are short and there is no "fluff" around the syntax if you can even call it syntax. Also there is no need to name your data. Literal numbers can be used just as easily even for memory addresses.

However there is no safety net. ;-)

New comment by lebuffon in "Teaching Kids Forth"

lebuffon — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 03:16:48 +0000

I used Forth to explain numbers in different radices to my grandson. Being able to interactively try things at the console was really helpful. It also helps to separate the internal number in the machine from how we display it, due to the different operators to print numbers as signed or unsigned. This is something that I have seen young programmers confuse.

I think another area where Forth can help young people is in understanding some low level details like memory addresses and reading and writing memory. It seems simpler than abstracting it to "pointers", more like assembler but interactive.

New comment by lebuffon in "Rethinking legal education in the AI era"

lebuffon — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:05:44 +0000

A related question for me is to ask when will lawmakers begin using AI to better integrate new law into the existing framework?

New comment by lebuffon in "GM Backs Sodium Ion Batteries for U.S. Grid Storage"

lebuffon — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:31:50 +0000

Excellent. I stand corrected. I was using published Chinese numbers.

New comment by lebuffon in "Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota"

lebuffon — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 01:33:14 +0000

And when we begin coupling solar to cheap sodium ion battery banks it gets very interesting. Sodium ion will even be compatible with a Minnesota winter!

New comment by lebuffon in "GM Backs Sodium Ion Batteries for U.S. Grid Storage"

lebuffon — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:50:50 +0000

The other big reason is the longevity. LFP life span gives you about 2000-5000 cycles depending on where your application can't tolerate the capacity reduction. Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life.

This makes financing a large grid scale storage plant look way better to the bean counters because the investment continues to work and make money, after the 5 year amortization, typical of a corporate investment. This will be the kicker IMHO.

New comment by lebuffon in "Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey"

lebuffon — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:36:51 +0000

India is kind of cute.

In the late 90s I attended a Telephone industry conference while working for a telephony test equipment company. A rep. from the Indian government gave a talk on their telephone system regulations. During the question period I got up and asked how India was dealing with voice over internet protocol (VOIP). With a straight face the speaker replied "We will not allow it". :-)

New comment by lebuffon in "The Beam Engine"

lebuffon — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:54:46 +0000

There is also a steam engineers term called "high-balling" which referred the little ball in the steam pressure gauge used in the early days. So high-balling was travelling at high speed.

New comment by lebuffon in "Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database"

lebuffon — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:13:25 +0000

If De Soto is correct, and I am not qualified to judge, based on your statement about land ownership in Brazil, then capitalism was not fully developed to where it could have been. Get the book. It's an interesting read.

And yes I can see that we are at the end of an era. This may be more the end of the U.S. empire than the elimination of capitalism, but for sure a new 'ism" is going to be required soon. What that is will be interesting to see. It would be nice to see someone with imagination come along instead the bipolar options we are handed today.

New comment by lebuffon in "Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database"

lebuffon — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:09:53 +0000

Sure at the "end game" stage you are correct. But on the way to that stage it does what it does really well, meaning it makes lots more capital.

De Soto is talking about why it "cannot" get started in a place without government controlled land registry.