Hacker News: mhd

New comment by mhd in "Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion"

mhd — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:08:22 +0000

On the same page (for me): "Silicon Valley needs to get God"

Well, seems it already did.

New comment by mhd in "A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones"

mhd — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:57:28 +0000

Beowulf cluster time for old Pixels?

New comment by mhd in "QBE – Compiler Backend – 1.3"

mhd — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:38:24 +0000

> I love that there are compilers beside the big 2

Whatever happened to Tendra?

New comment by mhd in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% workforce"

mhd — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:08:41 +0000

Surprised that this isn't part of a "journey"…

New comment by mhd in "From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control"

mhd — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:43:58 +0000

One interesting predecessor were the versioned files of time-sharing systems. You can still access Donald Knuth's directory tree for example, and see that a lot of files have different revisions.

Knuth's Tex directory: https://www.saildart.org/%5BTEX,DEK%5D/

New comment by mhd in "Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language"

mhd — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 10:19:13 +0000

I once had some Norwegian room mates in Ireland, and whenever we collectively couldn't find the proper English word, we usually got lucky with our native tongues. When listening to Scandi TV series, I'm still surprised more than I should be by the occasional match (recently: suddenly -> "plutselig", similar to German "plötzlich").

Now, as for the Danish room mate, he might as well have been speaking Greek.

New comment by mhd in "Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language"

mhd — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 10:10:08 +0000

Like a more devious Lingua::Romana::Perligata?

https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/L...

New comment by mhd in "Ada, Its Design, and the Language That Built the Languages"

mhd — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:01:56 +0000

No mention of Algol? Or Mesa?

New comment by mhd in "My AI-Assisted Workflow"

mhd — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:09:21 +0000

> Why is everyone compelled to write one of these articles?

LinkedIn clout.

New comment by mhd in "Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16"

mhd — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:06:35 +0000

Enlightenment always had a pretty weird value proposition. In the very beginning, there was "fvwm-xpm" and early "E" prototypes. They were graphically crazy with a heavy focus on shaped Windows. There's still nothing quite like that weird steampunk/Brazil-ish theme they had. Probably for a reason.

Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.

New comment by mhd in "Sheets Spreadsheets in Your Terminal"

mhd — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:17:14 +0000

> Teapot is pretty great, it's too bad there is close to zero room for real innovation in the spreadsheet domain.

One issue is that this is hard to do while still retaining backwards compatibility. Lotus Improv basically gave you no other choice, something that Excel The Next Version can't do. And I doubt that we're getting a third MS app, no Multiplan -> Excel -> NewSpreadsheetThingProbablyCalledCopilotAnyway.

I know a lot of people that don't even use Excel's tables, introduced almost 20 years ago. But instead they painstakingly recreate most of its built-in features. It's just an easy shortcut away, and has plenty of GUI support hidden in the ribbon morass, but it's not the default state…

New comment by mhd in "Undroidwish – A single-file, batteries-included Tcl/Tk binary for many platforms"

mhd — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 20:04:51 +0000

Way back in the days, I always thought that Tcl/Tk had a pretty good packaging story compared to the P-languages, given the presence of Starkits-/packs[1], and (somewhat sadly) the absence of dependencies.

1: https://www.tcl-lang.org/starkits/

New comment by mhd in "Astral to Join OpenAI"

mhd — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:43:22 +0000

Maybe it's time to get out my Cowlishaw Rexx book again…

New comment by mhd in "Two Years of Emacs Solo"

mhd — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:26:12 +0000

I'd say most people run Emacs in the GUI mode, not in a terminal. So these days, you're pretty much on the same level as most rivals.

Sadly, "these days" is a low bar. The days of consistent platform-specific "Human Interface Guidelines" are over, it's all just a browser wrapped in a top-level window or something that simulates that, with most interaction patterns being a cargo cult of how it's remembered from the 90s. So "GUI" means that some unique overlays can be drawn without a fixed width character grid and that you might get the original file requester now and then.

New comment by mhd in "DOS Memory Management"

mhd — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:23:37 +0000

I remember playing at least one game without the mouse, to save those precious KBs…

New comment by mhd in "A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts"

mhd — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:17:36 +0000

People doing DTP with Calamus on their Ataris stuck around for a long time after the systems weren't used for much else – MIDI tooling excepted, of course.

On the other hand, there you didn't have that many powerful packages on any system, besides Quark & the various Adobe tools du jour everything paled in comparison.

For word processing, being forced to use Word was/is usually worse than for DTP, though. But feature-wise, everything seemed to converge during the 90s, so "having" to use Word instead of e.g. WordPerfect was less and less of an issue.

With some exceptions of course, most famously GRRM and other people who got into things very early sticking with the first thing they learned (i.e. WordStar), or apparently some journalists being really into XyWrite.

New comment by mhd in "Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler"

mhd — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 13:44:56 +0000

One thing I always liked about some older languages was being able to have blanks in identifiers. Although I see that they actually managed to invent a new stropping variant that doesn't work with that… For the "kids"…

New comment by mhd in "Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload"

mhd — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:32:36 +0000

So Copilot in Office is the new "Hall of Tortured Souls"?

New comment by mhd in "DECwindows Motif"

mhd — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:25:25 +0000

> motif had the opposite of versionitis

I basically meant that we could've avoided the (needless) versionitis of gtk, the toolkit once introduced to rewrite a Motif-based application. (Never understand why they did have to reinvent the Xt part, too, but, well…)

New comment by mhd in "DECwindows Motif"

mhd — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 07:44:48 +0000

That's a cruel alternate universe, I would've hoped that Motif being in use by more people than just the devs of one homebrew Unix desktop would mean that we wouldn't have suffered through that much versionitis.