Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45248788

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44508277

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

https://gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-condi... is a nice introduction; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24867548 points to a great book about it. I believe that Smalltalk ended up using a similar system, too.

> It would need to be the case that code that doesn’t want to handle errors (like Max’s simple website) doesn’t have any error handling code, but it’s easy to add, and common patterns (e.g. “retry this inner operation N times, maybe with back off and jitter, and then fail this outer operation, either exiting the program or leaving unaffected parts running”) are easy to express

Lisp’s condition system can handle that! Here’s a dumb function which signals a continuable error when i ≤ 3:

    (defun foo ()
      (loop for i from 0
            do (if (> i 3)
                   (return (format nil "good i: ~d" i))
                   (cerror "Keep going." "~d is too low" i))))

If one wishes to retry up to six times, one can bind a handler which invokes the CONTINUE restart:

    (let ((j 0))
      (handler-bind ((error #'(lambda (c)
           (declare (ignore c))
           ;; only retry six times
           (unless (> (incf j) 6)
             (invoke-restart 'continue)))))
        (foo)))

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42917992

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42581978

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41791820

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I just have my terminal emulator spin up tmux when it starts, and I start my terminal emulator from my desktop, so it always runs in a clean environment.

That conflicts with the standard Emacs binding to move to the beginning of the current line. Many years ago, I switched to C-z instead, on the theory that it is really easy to type C-z C-z when I really want to suspend whatever is currently running.

Pity that (AFAICT) terminals have no concept of Super and Hyper (USB doesn’t know about Hyper, either, but at least X11 does).

Oddly enough, I was recently thinking of using RFC 822 messages with CommonMark bodies and MIME attachments as a way to store blog entries on disk, so I was considering this exact problem earlier this week (small world!). RFC 2046 specifies multipart messages, RFC 2392 specifies URI schemes for linking from the body of the message to other parts; and RFC 7763 specifies the text/markdown MIME type. There’s already a ton of tooling out there which deals with MIME, so one needn’t reinvent the wheel.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41300309

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

Maybe it was this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10619792/

The authors’ statement that ‘unlike hallucinations, confabulations are not perceived experiences but instead mistaken reconstructions of information which are influenced by existing knowledge, experiences, expectations, and context’ is pretty compelling.

OTOH, I do think that now that it has shown the way, there is room for both improvement and replacement.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39821496

Points: 3

# Comments: 6

Mechanical watches. I came very close to getting into so-called ‘smart’ watches awhile back, but decided that would have been a pretty foolish waste of my money. Quartz would be more accurate, of course, but I like the sweeping hands and the clockwork.

No affiliation with it, just been happily reading and sharing it for years.

Like XML, Kubernetes does a lot of cool things which were not common before it came around (unlike XML, I think K8s actually manages to improve on the state of the art a bit, too). But just as XML was largely replaced by JSON, I am really excited to see what replaces Kubernetes.

I have a very custom desktop UI based on a tiling window manager (WM); I tend to run it with one or two windows per screen, so that I can focus. I have a suite of synchronised colour schemes between the WM, my editor, my browser (with custom styles for commonly-used sites), my terminal, my PDF reader and my screen locker, so I see one unified colour theme across everything I do on a computer (with separate themes for work and personal computers, so I instantly know what context I am in). I have as few distractions as possible from the work I am doing. I have a fairly consistent set of keybindings across my environment, with custom keybindings for custom work.

Since it’s written in Common Lisp, I can dynamically reprogram my WM as it runs. What I mean is that I can connect to it from my editor and open a REPL; I can define, replace and debug live code in the running instance. It’s not quite as powerful as a real Lisp machine would be, but it’s better than any other desktop environment I’m aware of.

My Compose key setup is much more powerful than macOS’s Option key. I have a pair of true Hyper keys dedicated specifically to my own cross-application tooling, unused by any specific program.

I believe that switching to macOS, Windows, GNOME, KDE or any other setup would be a step back, or at the very least require a significant investment of time and effort to begin to approach parity.

Then there is the issue of freedom. Just about every line of code I run is free software, which I may inspect, learn from, debug and change. It’s not there to make Apple more money.

Then there is the issue of privacy. Apple claim to care about privacy, but with free software I can actually examine code to see if it does anything I don’t want it to do, and I can hire someone to do that for me, or rely on others I trust who have done that. You can’t do that with proprietary software.

The developers of GNU/Linux and the other software are more aligned with my own interests, wants, needs and desires than the developers of macOS are. It’s not perfect alignment, of course (Mozilla is a good example where improvement really is needed, as are the systemd developers), but on the whole the free software community are reasonably well-aligned with me.

I care about privacy, freedom, customisation and productivity. When I use my system, it does what I want it to do and nothing (or at least very little …) else. It gets out of my way and enables me to be effective in my job and in my computer-based hobbies, and gets out of my way so that I have time for my non-computer-based hobbies and the rest of my life.

GNU/Linux and other free software afford me much more privacy, freedom, customisation and ultimately productivity than does macOS.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32994572

Points: 3

# Comments: 0