Hacker News: quink

New comment by quink in "Notes on San Marino"

quink — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 07:57:35 +0000

Westphalia did two big things in my view… 1. is permanent diplomacy and 2. it made sure that things were on a secular not papal foundation. It’s a big deal but to claim that countries weren’t a thing before it is a bit of an overstatement.

New comment by quink in "California Gov Newsom commutes death sentences for all 548 people on death row"

quink — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 22:05:09 +0000

> and the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need more care?

Imagine using _just saving some money_ to justify the death of a person. What a country.

New comment by quink in "Mystery of 60-Second Fluctuations in Power Grids Solved"

quink — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 05:48:48 +0000

Thinking about it tactically, I’ll go with taktisch. :) Takt-isch.

New comment by quink in "With 86% of the words, you might understand only 38% of an anime's lines"

quink — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 22:20:05 +0000

And in the case of Japanese, with words consisting of multiple Kanji you can even get more context of a word from the word without knowing the word. Down to, to a lesser extent, radicals too...

Maybe words are the wrong thing to delineate by, I mean even if you haven’t heard the word ‘circumnavigate’ you can probably deduce its meaning especially with context.

New comment by quink in "Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11"

quink — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 20:25:27 +0000

That's a year before the first PowerPC Mac even shipped.

New comment by quink in "South Africa's Navanethem 'Navi' Pillay Wins 2026 Nobel Peace Prize"

quink — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:24:37 +0000

To be fair, it’s an endemic issue to have to wonder about some of the basic facts of Australian politicians. Was Whitlam’s dismissal constitutionally sound? Where’s Holt? I think there’s probably a fair few constitutional scholars busy for the next few decades trying to piece together from first principles what Scott Morrison was or wasn’t… “Wait, Albanese?” turns out to have a fairly straightforward answer in this case at least.

New comment by quink in "South Park creators rename show 'South America'"

quink — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:50:43 +0000

And kind of the same for Rick and Morty, the most recent season was a real return to form.

New comment by quink in "Qantas Airbus A380 engine failure in 2010 (2023)"

quink — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 02:29:01 +0000

This feels more like engine manufacturer QC rather than anything Airbus.

Because also, from Wikipedia: On 22 June 2011, Qantas announced that it had agreed to a compensation of AUD$95 million (£62 million/US$100 million) from Rolls-Royce. - skipping Airbus entirely.

New comment by quink in "Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need"

quink — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 03:38:32 +0000

I still agree with parent’s definition more because it also covers the ironic, sarcastic case, as well as the inherent ambiguity of the word ‘besser’. Plainly put, ‘better’ for who?

If you just say it as a logical series of making it worse while making it better you miss that the intention of the ‘better’ is the first place wasn’t even the intention to make it better for the user.

New comment by quink in "Queryable Executables"

quink — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 05:57:21 +0000

Somebody else mentioned OS/400, I’ll mention MUMPS and its “globals”… specifically ^rOBJ

Everything old is new again.

New comment by quink in "CFTC declares market emergency, orders Kalshi to continue to operate in New York"

quink — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 01:03:52 +0000

Just listen to the overwhelming silence from the “states’ rights” crowd.

New comment by quink in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

quink — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:24:33 +0000

Nuclear scepticism… did you know that nuclear power plants need cooling? Germany is learning that lesson the hard way right now, just check the news, it really speaks for reducing their dependency on nuclear as having been a very very good idea.

No wait, they’re not learning it the hard way because they’ve already got rid of them. Phew…

New comment by quink in "A glitch in February of the year 0"

quink — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 06:08:53 +0000

They acknowledge that in the article, and make it clear that it really refers to 1 BC.

New comment by quink in "HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88"

quink — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 05:19:06 +0000

"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."

New comment by quink in "The MUMPS 76 Primer – anniversary edition"

quink — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 21:16:27 +0000

Not having literal strings in the source code, I do need to get a capital “R” somewhere and the name of the system being “IRIS” in system variable $ZV makes that easy and terse. Apart from that one trick I think it’ll be more or less just fine.

New comment by quink in "The MUMPS 76 Primer – anniversary edition"

quink — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 21:12:54 +0000

No you don’t - you can abbreviate it to just ‘K’ or ‘k’.

New comment by quink in "The MUMPS 76 Primer – anniversary edition"

quink — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:45:38 +0000

First job out of university and stuck around with it for the next dozen years, probably longer than sensible... in the context of maintaining a bag of software that got put together in the mid-80s, a substantial module of which continued to enjoy some moderate success to this day.

Also, the marketing term was post-relational if I recall correctly, the funny thing about that being that it was really pre-relational at first. Also, I forgot, it was IRIS this AOC stuff runs on - the $ZV actually needs that "R" in IRIS so it knows what label to jump to... and what file mode to use... it's wonderfully cursed ;P

That said, it doesn't hold a candle compared to this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4151554/need-mumps-sampl... which is just about the best obscured (or byte-saving rather) MUMPS snippet in existence.

One thing I miss about Caché/Ensemble/IRIS is the three different paradigms for manipulating the same bits of data - the whole object layer, SQL (with pre-compiled embedded SQL an option), and the raw global access.

New comment by quink in "The MUMPS 76 Primer – anniversary edition"

quink — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:31:36 +0000

I did most of Advent of Code last year code golfing in MUMPS (running on Caché), with the additional challenge on up to and including day 7 doing without literals - that's to say no numbers and no strings. It was good fun - https://github.com/dominique-m-aoc/aoc-2025/blob/main/day03p... for day three part 1 for example. Or day 7 part 2 where the alphanumeric chars spell a story with only two nonsense words, with almost all the chars being on their own: https://github.com/dominique-m-aoc/aoc-2025/blob/main/day07p... It is a neat language but even more so a neat overall system and bag of concepts that I feel annoyed we haven't seen more of...

New comment by quink in "Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore"

quink — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:59:41 +0000

I count 23 instances of invective language or politicisation in that HUD statement, and that’s to say nothing of the supposed data behind this.

How about blame wealth extraction by the 0.01% before going after the out group that’s clearly working more than the average and paying taxes?

New comment by quink in "Beware of Star Trek managers, especially when bearing MBAs"

quink — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:51:19 +0000

Likening non-Kelvin Kirk to Hornblower is so far off the mark…