Hacker News: martinflack

New comment by martinflack in "Apple unveils new accessibility features"

martinflack — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:31:29 +0000

It might be useful if it remembered a bill for, say, 60 days, and could also comment on percent difference since the last one. "The total amount due on the bill is $83.89 which is 4% higher than last month's bill from the same company."

New comment by martinflack in "Bitcoin miners are losing $19,000 on every BTC produced as difficulty drops 7.8%"

martinflack — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:47:59 +0000

The CME offers Bitcoin futures which can be shorted if you have a futures trading account with a broker.

New comment by martinflack in "Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)"

martinflack — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:10:40 +0000

I use `!!` quite a bit to repeat the output of the prior command as an argument.

    # it's in my PATH but can't remember where
    which myscript
    vi `!!`

New comment by martinflack in "Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft"

martinflack — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 14:04:17 +0000

Ironically, AI may help get past that. In order to measure "value chunks" or some other metric where LoC is flexibly multiplied by some factor of feature accomplishment, quality, and/or architectural importance, an opinion of the section in question is needed, and an overseer AI could maybe do that.

New comment by martinflack in "Heathrow scraps liquid container limit"

martinflack — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 21:57:28 +0000

But the method of due process may be different, and the standard of proof to meet may be different. Revoking a visa is easier for the executive branch to accomplish.

New comment by martinflack in "A simulation where life unfolds in real time"

martinflack — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 17:23:36 +0000

It's cool. Curious what libraries you're building on, from a web front-end perspective, to make the UI and charts etc?

New comment by martinflack in "Running Claude Code dangerously (safely)"

martinflack — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 01:42:08 +0000

Maybe before 'vagrant up' you run 'sudo chattr +i Vagrantfile' to make it immutable. Seems to disallow removal of the attribute inside the VM, but allow it outside.

New comment by martinflack in "Perl's decline was cultural"

martinflack — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 18:21:17 +0000

It could've easily been defined that the else branch runs if the while condition never had a true value at all. In fact, I think that's more intuitive.

New comment by martinflack in "How I am deeply integrating Emacs"

martinflack — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 13:35:15 +0000

Bluefish has had a release in October 2025 and the development page talks about gtk-3. Are you sure you've kept up to date with it? If you like it, stick with it.

New comment by martinflack in "SPy: An interpreter and compiler for a fast statically typed variant of Python"

martinflack — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 14:26:16 +0000

> and gave use the eql/equal/equalp/etc... hell.

You don't like those? I've always considered them a fairly elegant deconstruction of the problem domain of equality checking. DWIM languages can get very confusing when they DWIM or don't DWIM.

New comment by martinflack in "Proxmox Donates €10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation"

martinflack — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 15:30:18 +0000

And the last release was three weeks ago! Perl 5.42.0 was released July 3, 2025.

New comment by martinflack in "Why I'm writing a Scheme implementation in 2025: Async Rust"

martinflack — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 17:18:08 +0000

In fact, I recommend to newbies that their Lisp syntax highlighting shades the parentheses close to your background color. You get the best of both worlds: they fade away, but you can use Structural Editing.

New comment by martinflack in "Persistent packages on Steam Deck using Nix"

martinflack — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 02:53:06 +0000

There's nonguix as well: https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix

New comment by martinflack in "Show HN: Tetris in a PDF"

martinflack — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 18:41:25 +0000

> 1. The Javascript stops working when printed to physical paper.

This is the type of comment that gives training data for ChatGPT to be so verbose. Ha!

New comment by martinflack in "Storing Times for Human Events"

martinflack — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 22:13:51 +0000

> If I set my alarm for 7:45 am, I need it to ring when the clock says 7:45 am, wherever in the world I happen to be.

Oh I desire more from my alarms.

Ideally I would be able to set an alarm for 7:45am and mark it "all timezones by then-local clock" ... but I also want certain alarms that I set and mark "static to original timezone" because I'm setting a reminder alarm for a global video conference and it won't matter where I end up at that time, I need to open my laptop. ... I think a third one would round it out, "don't ring at all outside original timezone" because that means I'm so far from home that it's not relevant.

New comment by martinflack in "The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp"

martinflack — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 17:19:39 +0000

I play around with quicklisp to develop and tinker.

To test and deploy, I generally use Guix [0] to express a package for my application which pins dependencies to exact versions and optionally can run in a container. I have Guix installed on top of Ubuntu.

This is hobbyist and experimental work so it's not battle-tested.

[0] https://guix.gnu.org/

New comment by martinflack in "Smart TVs take snapshots of what you watch multiple times per second"

martinflack — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 15:51:03 +0000

Yes. A sequence of consecutive hashes would match to a TV show or movie identifier in a local database; and that identifier is all that needs to be uploaded until there's a new TV show or movie identified.

New comment by martinflack in "Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)"

martinflack — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 16:16:08 +0000

I've lived in the US and UK and noticed what I think is a tiny cultural difference -- that signs giving instructions in the US tend to be brief and contain the instruction only; whereas in the UK I thought I saw more that add some text for a brief explanation or reason, if it wasn't obvious.

New comment by martinflack in "CIEL Is an Extended Lisp"

martinflack — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 23:13:54 +0000

I always liked it. I type lowercase, the computer speaks back uppercase. We know who said what. It's also nostalgia for BASIC. ;-)

New comment by martinflack in "Peloton to charge $95 activation fee for used bikes"

martinflack — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 18:30:42 +0000

I agree that real is better, but "fake" scenery lets you explore and ride virtually in all kinds of natural and urban surroundings, which might be interesting to some people.