Hacker News: mainland

New comment by mainland in "Em dashes are amazing"

mainland — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:51:10 +0000

I have also always loved---and used---LaTeX ;)

New comment by mainland in "Em dashes are amazing"

mainland — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:43:17 +0000

If you are at all interested in punctuation---and especially the em-dash---I highly recommend Nicholson Baker's essay "Survival of the Fittest" in the NYRB:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/11/04/survival-of-the-...

I have always loved---and used---the em-dash, and after reading this essay in The Best American Essays 1994, sometime around 1995, I finally felt justified in my affection.

New comment by mainland in "Experience with an Uncommon Lisp (1986) [pdf]"

mainland — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 14:54:06 +0000

Here is a copy of what looks to be the original report: <https://wellcomecollection.org/works/seuuc6a5>

Here is a link to the version published with the ACM: <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362375.362379>

New comment by mainland in "How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people"

mainland — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 15:28:49 +0000

If you'd like to see what Donn's BASIC was like, you can! The Internet Archive has a version that runs in-browser [1].

Although the Folklore article says there were two books describing Donn's BASIC, I believe there were at least three: Introduction to Macintosh BASIC, Using Macintosh BASIC, and The Macintosh BASIC Handbook. All three are available at vintageapple.org [2].

[1] https://archive.org/details/mac_MacBASIC.335

[2] https://vintageapple.org/macprogramming/

New comment by mainland in "Generative AI Should Not Replace Thinking at My University (Douglas Hofstadter)"

mainland — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 16:43:25 +0000

https://archive.is/DOb4c

Generative AI Should Not Replace Thinking at My University (Douglas Hofstadter)

mainland — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 16:42:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/generative-artificial-intelligence-universities/674473/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434900

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

Teaching Mac OS 9 new device tricks

mainland — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 16:10:21 +0000

Article URL: http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2022/07/a-brief-dive-into-power-mac-inits-and.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32002996

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mainland in "BLAS-level CPU Performance in 100 Lines of C"

mainland — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 16:06:57 +0000

An interesting, older paper that explores how to bridge the "ninja gap" between naive code and hand-optimized code is Can Traditional Programming Bridge the Ninja Performance Gap for Parallel Computing Applications? <https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~msmelyan/papers/isca-2012-paper....>.

They reduce the ninja gap for a range of benchmarks from 24x to 1.3x by relying on "smart" compilers and using only basic program transformations---no intrinsics!

New comment by mainland in "Show HN: A RISC-V core in Racket"

mainland — Sat, 01 May 2021 15:13:33 +0000

Great post! What do you use to draw your state diagrams?

New comment by mainland in "SIMD Everywhere: 0.5.0"

mainland — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 12:26:56 +0000

If you're doing new development and not opposed to using C++, I recommend xsimd, which provides a higher-level interface to architecture-specific SIMD instructions: https://github.com/xtensor-stack/xsimd

New comment by mainland in "Introducing the San Francisco system font"

mainland — Sat, 13 Jun 2015 12:37:07 +0000

The OverbiteFF extension (http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/) will let you use the gopher protocol as well. I actually installed it just so I could browse the floodgap gopher server.

New comment by mainland in "Introducing the San Francisco system font"

mainland — Sat, 13 Jun 2015 03:12:38 +0000

A bit of Googling got me this:

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/userserve-ucsd-edu/Fonts/%20bitmapped%20fonts/screen-ImageWriter%20Fonts/Boston%20II

Hopefully that's what you're looking for :)

New comment by mainland in "The Anatomy of the Assignment Operator (1997)"

mainland — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 21:40:12 +0000

The first "correct" solution will leak memory if the call to TSuperFoo::operator= throws an exception.

New comment by mainland in "The Roots of Lisp (2002) [pdf]"

mainland — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 15:38:17 +0000

Using pkfix before ps2pdf will improve the final output---it replaces bitmap fonts with Type 1 fonts.

Type-Safe Runtime Code Generation with (Typed) Template Haskell

mainland — Fri, 31 May 2013 15:42:42 +0000

Article URL: http://gmainland.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/type-safe-runtime-code-generation-with.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5799242

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by mainland in "Haskell Beats C Using Generalized Stream Fusion [pdf]"

mainland — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:20:25 +0000

The library writer is the "consumer" here. The programmer just uses the library, and the library chooses the proper stream representation.

Of course the programmer can also use the lower-level stream interface directly if desired, but then the programmer must also know which stream representation to choose.

New comment by mainland in "Haskell Beats C Using Generalized Stream Fusion [pdf]"

mainland — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:18:38 +0000

First author here. The dot product example was compiled with GCC 4.7.2 -O3 -msse4.2 -ffast-math -ftree-vectorize -funroll-loops; see the caption to Figure 5. What compiler options would you have suggested? The Haskell version only used SSE instructions, not AVX; this should have been made clear in the paper.

The more complex examples are in Section 5.2; see Figure 8. Granted, we would have liked to have done more, but deadlines are deadlines...

Facebook Prepping ‘Project Spartan’ Mobile Platform

mainland — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:43:14 +0000

Article URL: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/facebook-project-spartan/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2666390

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

A Print Reader Is Worth 228-Times As Much As An Online Reader

mainland — Sun, 29 May 2011 12:07:57 +0000

Article URL: http://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-times-print-versus-online-2011-5

Hacker News: mainland

New comment by mainland in "Em dashes are amazing"

New comment by mainland in "Em dashes are amazing"

New comment by mainland in "Experience with an Uncommon Lisp (1986) [pdf]"

New comment by mainland in "How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people"

New comment by mainland in "Generative AI Should Not Replace Thinking at My University (Douglas Hofstadter)"

Generative AI Should Not Replace Thinking at My University (Douglas Hofstadter)

Teaching Mac OS 9 new device tricks

New comment by mainland in "BLAS-level CPU Performance in 100 Lines of C"

New comment by mainland in "Show HN: A RISC-V core in Racket"

New comment by mainland in "SIMD Everywhere: 0.5.0"

New comment by mainland in "Introducing the San Francisco system font"

New comment by mainland in "Introducing the San Francisco system font"

New comment by mainland in "The Anatomy of the Assignment Operator (1997)"

New comment by mainland in "The Roots of Lisp (2002) [pdf]"

Type-Safe Runtime Code Generation with (Typed) Template Haskell

New comment by mainland in "Haskell Beats C Using Generalized Stream Fusion [pdf]"

New comment by mainland in "Haskell Beats C Using Generalized Stream Fusion [pdf]"

Facebook Prepping ‘Project Spartan’ Mobile Platform

A Print Reader Is Worth 228-Times As Much As An Online Reader

Ribbon Microphones: Audio Icon You Can Build in Your Garage