Hacker News: rdimartino

New comment by rdimartino in "Show HN: ABC Classic 100 Rankings visualised"

rdimartino — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:22:48 +0000

I wonder if that was supposed to be the Goldberg Variations (currently listed as unranked in 2001). That’s what Wikipedia has, but I don’t see a good source for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_100_Original_(ABC)

New comment by rdimartino in "Show HN: ABC Classic 100 Rankings visualised"

rdimartino — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:03:39 +0000

What happened in 2001 that Marriage of Figaro was listed twice?

This was really neat to explore! Thanks!

New comment by rdimartino in "Webbol: A minimal static web server written in COBOL"

rdimartino — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 15:23:47 +0000

I'd love to learn more about what `CALL "socket"` is doing. CALL is for running subprograms, but it's not clear to me where "socket" is?

I've thought about a COBOL webserver before, but didn't get beyond reading the GnuCOBOL FAQ that mentions it's possible with CGI https://gnucobol.sourceforge.io/faq/gcfaq.html#id1126

I'm definitely going to dig into this project more later. This is very neat!

New comment by rdimartino in "Webbol: A minimal static web server written in COBOL"

rdimartino — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 15:20:51 +0000

I liked this too, but interesting that the Makefile uses the `-free` flag for cobc

New comment by rdimartino in "Ropey – A UTF8 text rope for manipulating and editing large text"

rdimartino — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 16:20:27 +0000

I hadn't heard of rope data structures until I read about the xi editor (also written in Rust) a few years ago, but it looks like that's been discontinued.

https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor

New comment by rdimartino in "Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to more users (2022)"

rdimartino — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 13:41:58 +0000

This is great. I’ve been using multi-account containers for years and have loved the isolation. But I wonder how Total Cookie Protection works with different auth flows, like logging in to Trello using an Atlassian domain. Maybe it’s unaffected; I haven’t really looked at how/if cookies are involved in that process, but I can imagine TCP causing some frustration for users. Definitely will give it a shot, though.

New comment by rdimartino in "Many young people diagnosed with Tourette’s after watching a YouTube channel"

rdimartino — Sat, 04 Sep 2021 14:09:05 +0000

Yes, I stumbled upon some of these same community discussions happening on Twitter and Tumblr. It was really interesting to read about the in-fighting about traumagenic vs endogenic DID. This discussion of real or imitated Tourette’s reminds me of that.

https://pluralpedia.org/w/Traumagenic

https://pluralpedia.org/w/Endogenic

New comment by rdimartino in "My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison"

rdimartino — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 16:32:38 +0000

I'm not sure your statements about prison time are accurate, at least in the US.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 46.2% of inmates are in for drug offenses[1] and there is definitely disagreement about whether that should be a crime, let alone an extreme crime. Additionally, 78.6% of inmates are serving sentences longer than 5 years[2], which by necessity means that a large portion of those are for drug offenses.

[1] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen... [2] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_sente...

New comment by rdimartino in "Cantor function, a.k.a. devil's staircase"

rdimartino — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 00:30:12 +0000

Another fun one is the slippery devil's staircase, Minkowski's question-mark function. It's strictly increasing but the derivative is 0 at rational numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski%27s_question-mark_fu...

New comment by rdimartino in "Are you living in a computer simulation? [pdf]"

rdimartino — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 16:26:07 +0000

It sounds like this https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/simulations