Hacker News: pkal

New comment by pkal in "Modern Board Games: and why you should play them (2022)"

pkal — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:48:36 +0000

The article doesn't sell it that way. "You should play modern board games if ..." would be a different claim. The premise

> They provide interesting puzzles to solve, and you work in a technical role - some part of your brain must find that appealing

is something I do not relate to at all. Almost every time I am in a situation where I play board games, my intuition is to think about how you solve the game so that one side always wins or break the rules so that everyone loses, but almost never am I actually interested in investing the energy to get invested in the game itself, let alone the rules.

New comment by pkal in "Towards trust in Emacs"

pkal — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 09:55:55 +0000

In practice this should also work. Do keep in mind if you just add this to your init.el then this will not persist if you re-create the scratch buffer.

If we are already experimenting with different ideas, this should also work (and gives a hint of how you want to fix the issue upstream):

    (define-advice get-scratch-buffer-create (:filter-return (buf) trusted)
      (with-current-buffer buf
        (setq-local trusted-content :all))
      buf)

New comment by pkal in "Towards trust in Emacs"

pkal — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 09:51:20 +0000

Do note that I only configure this for `lisp-interaction-mode', which in practice really only gets used for the *scratch* buffer. But there are a few other instances in core that also use it, and if that concerns you, you can extend the above snippet with a check like

    (when (equal (buffer-name) "*scratch*") ...)

New comment by pkal in "Towards trust in Emacs"

pkal — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:31:54 +0000

Shouldn't something like this fix the problem, at least for scratch buffers:

(add-hook 'lisp-interaction-mode-hook (lambda () (setq-local trusted-content :all)))

New comment by pkal in "The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client"

pkal — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:13:16 +0000

No, I just guess that most people who dislike it (like me) dislike it on an "eyeroll" level, where you wouldn't use it yourself but don't have the energy to make a fuss about it.

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

pkal — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 06:36:20 +0000

But in 1976 Emacs was implemented in TECO. In 1984 it was implemented in Lisp, because Multics Emacs _or_ EINE/ZWEI (Lisp Machine editors) were using Lisp as an extension language, which apparently has shown itself to be useful.

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

pkal — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 06:34:22 +0000

A point of clarification: GNU ELPA (https://elpa.gnu.org/) is part of Emacs, and you have to sign the copyright assignment to submit packages an to contribute to packages. NonGNU ELPA (https://elpa.nongnu.org/) doesn't have this restriction.

New comment by pkal in "My “grand vision” for Rust"

pkal — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 09:59:23 +0000

From the historical sources I could find online, it appears that Rust's borrow system was independently invented, or at least they don't mention linear logic or anything substructural. This is kind of interesting to me, especially given the reactions in this thread, and ties into the general difficulty of PL research to find acceptance among practitioners, especially when presented by researchers (which I think is regretful, I like the ideas in the article!). Perhaps we really should stick to terminology like "function colors" to make effect systems more popular (or not, because the color framing makes it sound bad to have different colors in a program, IIRC).

Joseph Weizenbaum's Hackerkritik

pkal — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 10:28:08 +0000

Article URL: https://sdf.org/~pkal/src+etc/hacker-kritik.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47099385

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by pkal in "Tiny C Compiler"

pkal — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 22:43:28 +0000

I don't think it is not maintained, there is plenty of activity going on in the repo: https://repo.or.cz/tinycc.git, they just don't seem to be cutting releases?

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

pkal — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 19:25:44 +0000

To each his own; I really like his presentation style and the humor!

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

pkal — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 18:31:26 +0000

According to https://algol68-lang.org/, and as expressed in the recording, the contributors (specifically Marchesi) believe that ALGOL 68 continues to have advantages over other languages to this day ("more modern, powerful and safe" and "without successors"). One mentioned in the video is that the more complex, two-level grammars allow properties that would usually be described in the semantics of a language to be formally expressed in the syntax (the example he gives is the behaviour of numeral coercion). I guess this is not a surprise, as van Wijngaarden grammars are known to be Turing complete, but nevertheless it seems like something interesting thing to investiagate! There is a lot of lost wisdom in the past, that we dismiss because it doesn't fit into the language we use nowadays.

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

pkal — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 18:24:53 +0000

That isn't totally true, even on Linux we have had https://jmvdveer.home.xs4all.nl/en.algol-68-genie.html for years.

Also, most languages trace back to ALGOL 60 (the C family tree goes ALGOL 60 -> BCPL -> CPL -> B -> new B -> C -> ANSI C -> ..., though there was some influence such as the idea of "casting", but apparently C only has a castrated version of what ALGOL 68 had) and Pascal is if anything negativly influenced by ALGOL 68 due to Wirth's disagreements with van Wijngaarden: https://dcreager.net/people/wirth/1968-closing-word/.

New comment by pkal in "My fast zero-allocation webserver using OxCaml"

pkal — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 16:36:39 +0000

I recently realized that "pure functional" has two meanings, one is no side-effects (functional programmers, especially of languages like Haskell use it this way) and the other is that it doesn't have imperative fragments (the jump ISWIM to SASL dropped the non-functional parts inherited from ALGOL 60). A question seems to be whether you want to view sequencing as syntax sugar for lambda expressions or not?

My Blessed Setup for Public Bookmarks

pkal — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 16:28:30 +0000

Article URL: https://incoherenceofthe.net/blog/links.xml

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46555526

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by pkal in "CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)"

pkal — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 18:45:41 +0000

Then perhaps "Did you learn X stating your opinion on it as though it were comprehensive and authoritative"?

New comment by pkal in "Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension"

pkal — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 12:09:40 +0000

Some sites like Anna's Archive have .onion site for the Tor network, and others do not. Is there a considerable downside (DDOS?) to providing access to their site by those means?

New comment by pkal in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

pkal — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 15:22:33 +0000

I think so, or at least something like that. In https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode60-rob-pike he mentioned that he has now been working more on Ivy (https://github.com/robpike/ivy) in his spare time.

My Cursed Setup for Public Bookmarks

pkal — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 15:53:49 +0000

Article URL: https://sdf.org/~pkal/blog/tech/links.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337020

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by pkal in "You Don't Need Anubis"

pkal — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 21:57:01 +0000

I am glad my comment resonated with you! There are probably people here with political motivations (on both sides), but it is encouraging to hear that there is a value in the direction of my exposition.