Hacker News: nycticorax

New comment by nycticorax in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

nycticorax — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:15:58 +0000

Andreas Kling has said that one of his inspirations for SerenityOS was the Windows 2000 UI (https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/). I found his general goal for SerenityOS ("Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.") to be strangely validating ('Wait... So it's not just me?!'). And so of course I decided to try out the KDE desktop, which I had always kinda dismissed as being a bit too much of a niche within a niche. And it's great. It really is wonderful to use an OS that is designed from the ground up for serious technical users. And the ubiquity of web apps nowadays makes Linux a far more practical choice than it was back in the day.

New comment by nycticorax in "Unsigned sizes: A five year mistake"

nycticorax — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:32:49 +0000

OK, I did not know about [saturation arithmetic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_arithmetic). Cool!

But I can't agree with the claim that "nan is almost always a mistake". Certainly if you're doing floating-point computation on large arrays, the last thing you want is e.g. for an error to be thrown in a elementwise division just because two corresponding elements both happen to be zero.

It's true that nan!=nan is one of the more 'controversial' parts of the standard, that possibly would have been decided the other way in a perfect world. But it was also a reasonable pragmatic decision at the time the standard was developed. See here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1573715/1013442

New comment by nycticorax in "Unsigned sizes: A five year mistake"

nycticorax — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:19:03 +0000

This is only somewhat related, but: Has there ever been a language that adopted IEEE-754-like semantics for integer types? (Yes, I know this would be slow without hardware support.) By this I mean adding valid values for (signed) ints to represent positive infinity, negative infinity, and not-a-number; then use these values as the results of overflow, underflow, and division by zero in the natural way. It just seems like if these sort of values are useful in floating-point arithmetic, they might well be useful for integer arithmetic as well, for many of the same reasons.

New comment by nycticorax in "The window chrome of our discontent"

nycticorax — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:17:43 +0000

The whole thing of calling controls "chrome" is basically a metaphor gone horribly awry. The term was coined in the 1990s because (at least on Windows) the "content" usually had a white background, and the controls usually had a gray background. But of course the use of the word "chrome" inevitably implies that this stuff (the controls) are like the chrome on a car: nonfunctional, inessential visual frippery. And so UI chrome must be bad, and something to eliminate. But of course this is nutty: The UI controls are what you use to manipulate the content! It's like calling the steering wheel and the pedals in a car "chrome" and deciding you need to deemphasize them so that the driver can 'focus on the road' or something. The controls are important! They are how you drive the car!

New comment by nycticorax in "Gnome and Mozilla Discuss Proposal to Disable Middle Mouse Paste on Linux"

nycticorax — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:22:49 +0000

Middle-click paste is faster than Ctrl-C-then-Ctrl-V. And if you are a developer, you often find yourself copying long strings from one place to another. And it has been a standard behavior on Linux since the 1990s. This just seems to me like more of GNOME's "simplicity at all costs" run amok. I'm a power user. I want poser user features. So I use KDE, a project run by people who care about power users and their needs. I'm happy for you if GNOME meets your needs.

New comment by nycticorax in "Gnome and Mozilla Discuss Proposal to Disable Middle Mouse Paste on Linux"

nycticorax — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:59:51 +0000

I'm not surprised that GNOME would contemplate this: it seems like a very GNOME-y thing to do. (And maybe this is a good thing for GNOME users. But this kind of thing is also why I use KDE.) But why would Firefox feel the need to touch this? Surely this is a DE-level setting, and Firefox should simply go along with the DE behavior so that its behavior is consistent with the rest of the apps running in the desktop session.

New comment by nycticorax in "GNU Unifont"

nycticorax — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 21:37:28 +0000

Shouldn't the first sentence on that website describe what GNU Unifont actually is? I guess it's a single copyleft font designed to have coverage of all (or nearly all?) unicode code points?

New comment by nycticorax in "Mapping the US healthcare system’s financial flows"

nycticorax — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 17:23:23 +0000

It would help if you would say what exactly you think is wrong with it.

New comment by nycticorax in "Adios Chicos, 25 Years of KDE"

nycticorax — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 19:54:14 +0000

So, first off, it seems like Jonathan Riddell not working on KDE anymore is a huge loss for the KDE community.

But I'm not sure I really understand what happened. AFAICT, Valve had a contract with Blue Systems, specifically a subunit of Blue Systems that does KDE development. Blue Systems decided to sell that subunit to Techpaladin, Nate Graham's company. Riddell was unhappy about this, and proposed that... I guess that Blue Systems not sell to Techpaladin? Or that Techpaladin reorganize itself into a worker-owned company? And then when Graham declined to do this, stuff happened, and eventually Riddell got fired from Techpaladin, or not hired by Techpaladin, and now Riddell is not getting paid to work on KDE. So Riddell has (not unreasonably) decided to stop working on KDE. And the other people who once worked for Blue Systems and now work for Techpaladin have decided to keep working for Techpaladin.

Am I missing something? Being unfair to someone?

New comment by nycticorax in "This is my brain on leeches"

nycticorax — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 19:38:58 +0000

My PhD research was actually studying the leech nervous system. They're still an important 'model' organism in neurobiology. Probably not as important in the field at large as they were in, say, the 1970s, but still. They're also a good system for neurophysiology education, because they are cheap and easy to obtain, have large-ish neurons that are identifiable from animal to animal, and their nervous system has a relatively simple organization.

New comment by nycticorax in "We shouldn't have needed lockfiles"

nycticorax — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 19:21:01 +0000

Strongly endorse. That paper is really wonderful. It seems to me that MVS is the solution to the version selection problem, and now we just have to wait for awareness of this to fully percolate through the developer community.

New comment by nycticorax in "French villages have no more drinking water. The reason? PFAS pollution"

nycticorax — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 19:00:59 +0000

The post title implies that all French villages have no more drinking water, which is not the case. Sounds like it's 16 villages, all near each other. Still a big deal, but not nearly as bad as if it was all of France.

New comment by nycticorax in "Self-reported race, ethnicity don't match genetic ancestry in the U.S.: study"

nycticorax — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 21:21:42 +0000

DOI link to original article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.04.012

New comment by nycticorax in "The Future of Flatpak"

nycticorax — Fri, 23 May 2025 03:38:27 +0000

I don't agree with him 100%, but I always find Drew DeVault to be thoughtful on this topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936114

https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job....

Basically, he argues that application distribution outside of the distro (a la flatpak, snap, appimage) is just a bad model. The right model is the one distros have been using for years: You get software through the distro's package manager, and that software is packaged by people working on behalf of the distro. As he says: "Software distributions are often volunteer-run and represent the interests of the users; in a sense they are a kind of union of users."

The other issue, of course, is that in practice flatpaks/snaps/appimages never seem to 100% work as well as distro packages do.

New comment by nycticorax in "I don't like NumPy"

nycticorax — Fri, 16 May 2025 01:44:32 +0000

There are certainly some aspects of it that are inelegant, in the interests of backwards compatibility, but otherwise I don't know what you are talking about. Matlab supports >2d arrays just fine, and has for at least 20 years.

New comment by nycticorax in "We can, must, and will simulate nematode brains"

nycticorax — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 17:42:04 +0000

HN discussion of a related recent story in Wired magazine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43490290

New comment by nycticorax in "Fedora 42 Beta"

nycticorax — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 06:12:50 +0000

I'm excited to see KDE promoted to being an "edition", but does anyone know what is behind this decision? It surprises me that Red Hat would take this step, since they are (seemingly) a big GNOME proponent, and I thought many of the GNOME developers work for Red Hat.

New comment by nycticorax in "Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award"

nycticorax — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 19:18:39 +0000

The statement I take issue with is that Sutton "is not to be celebrated or trusted". Which I can only interpret to mean that the speaker does not think that Sutton should be celebrated or trusted. (And they've chosen to state it in a kind of pompous way.) Which I think is too strong on both counts. I (and apparently the ACM) think that Sutton should be celebrated for his technical accomplishments. Also, I think he probably can be trusted on a lot of technical matters. Should he be trusted on matters of whether there need to be safeguards on AI research imposed by the state? Maybe not, but those are only a subset of all the matters.

New comment by nycticorax in "Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award"

nycticorax — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 16:46:14 +0000

But the Turing Award is for his technical work.

New comment by nycticorax in "Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award"

nycticorax — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 16:10:04 +0000

This is so silly. Do you imagine temporal difference learning is some kind of human successionist plot?