Hacker News: talideon

New comment by talideon in "The Apple Disk II Controller Card (2021)"

talideon — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:21:49 +0000

It wasn't really the hardware's fault though. It was crippled by Commodore's marketing department wanting to maintain compatibility with the VIC-20's 1540 FDD, which meant that the bit banging method used to work around a bug in the VIA chip had to be used. Then to add insult to injury, because of how the VIC-II and 6510 need to share the bus, it ended up running even slower than the VIC-20.

New comment by talideon in "Introduction to Atom"

talideon — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:46:24 +0000

Not really, and it's still more error-prone than Atom.

There's really no good reason to use anything other than Atom.

New comment by talideon in "GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing"

talideon — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:29:50 +0000

And so it begins...

New comment by talideon in "Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games"

talideon — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:45:07 +0000

Sound trackers actually originated on the C64! Chris Huelsbeck's Soundmonitor is generally regarded as the first tracker. There were plenty of others, such as Electrosound, Future Composer, Ubik's Music, and the Ariston Music Editor. It's not that nobody used software for this kind of thing, but it was pretty common to just use your own sound routine and toggle stuff in.

New comment by talideon in "Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games"

talideon — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:38:29 +0000

Hah! I never noticed that, but you're right!

For those interested in how the Wizball soundtrack should sound, the best place to go is DeepSID: https://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/G/Galway_Marti...

New comment by talideon in "Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games"

talideon — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:13:30 +0000

I'm not sure about Ocean, but a lot of companies used the Tatung Einstein, itself a 64KiB machine, as a development platform. I would assume that the software used for building this stuff was able to deal with source files larger than the machine can hold. They might've moved onto the likes of Atari STs, IBM-compatibles, and Amigas by the time Wizball was released though.

Plenty of music was developed in the form of source files.

New comment by talideon in "Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games"

talideon — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 13:53:22 +0000

That sounds nothing like any of the Wizball or Game Over tracks, I'm afraid.

New comment by talideon in "What are skiplists good for?"

talideon — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:39:54 +0000

Plenty, but these days mostly if you either (a) want a simple implementation or (b) don't have to worry much about cache locality. The problem is that (b) doesn't really exist outside of retrocomputing and embedded systems these days. It's still one of my favourite data structures, just because it's a clever way to get most of the benefits of more complicated datastructures on small systems with minimal code.

New comment by talideon in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

talideon — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:41:58 +0000

There appears to be nothing linking Old English "git" with Modern English "git". Also, OEng "git" would've been pronounced more like "yit".

New comment by talideon in "Sc-im: Spreadsheets in your terminal"

talideon — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:57:56 +0000

But originating on Unix in '81, and thus predating Lotus 1-2-3 by ~2 years.

New comment by talideon in "Sc-im: Spreadsheets in your terminal"

talideon — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:55:38 +0000

It's a tool with a long vintage, and it wouldn't make sense to port it to a different language just to take advantage of the likes of bubbletea or textual.

New comment by talideon in "OpenAI Acquires TBPN"

talideon — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:36:18 +0000

I misread that acronym as TBDN, which made me wonder why they'd bought The Beef and Dairy Network podcast...

New comment by talideon in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

talideon — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:30:08 +0000

Germany has a population of ~87,000,000 though.

New comment by talideon in "Hormuz Minesweeper – Are you tired of winning?"

talideon — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:03:59 +0000

The US is not in a position to process much of the sweet crude it has. Instead, imports sour crude, which is what much of the US's refineries are actually built to handle. This is why Venezuela was such a thorn in the side of the US, as they were one of the major producers and also largely produced sour crude.

As adwn says, it's a globally priced commodity, and the US is not in a position to disentangle itself from that market because in spite of being one of the world's largest producers, US refineries are not in a position to process that product, so it needs to go abroad. The US needs to import significant amounts of sour crude to be refined for their own use.

The US is just as screwed as the rest of us.

Also, the primary worry for Europe isn't oil, it's natural gas.

New comment by talideon in "Astral to Join OpenAI"

talideon — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:54:32 +0000

Well, that's the first shoe dropping. Thankfully uv and ruff are MIT licensed and in a good place, so worst comes to worst...

New comment by talideon in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

talideon — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:08:22 +0000

Oil stayed more or less steady, so yes, it did.

New comment by talideon in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

talideon — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:04:37 +0000

The 'sell electricity to Ireland' bit here is doing an awful lot of work. It's more complicated than that.

For those who don't know, Ireland operates an all-island grid, and EirGrid (the grid operator for the Republic) owns SONI (the grid operator for Northern Ireland). That means that 'UK' and 'Ireland' in this has a large Northern Ireland shaped lump of ambiguity that statement.

New comment by talideon in "US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere"

talideon — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:17:11 +0000

Oh yes, the bastion of truth that is the Daily Mail.

Sorry, my eyes just rolled out if my head.

New comment by talideon in "Show HN: CEL by Example"

talideon — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:15:16 +0000

And even then, I'm not sure it's apples to apples, at least if by Rego you're thinking of OPA. CEL and Rego take very different approaches, with CEL being quite procedural, while Rego is about constraint satisfaction, not unlike Prolog. At $WORK, Rego (in the form of OPA) gets used quite a bit for complicated access control logic, while CEL gets used in places where we've simpler logic that needs to be broken out and made configurable, and a more procedural focus works there.

New comment by talideon in "Show HN: CEL by Example"

talideon — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:06:16 +0000

No, they're equating _Turing completeness_ with _might not terminate_. CEL, Expr, Rego, and other languages like them are intended to guarantee to complete. You can't do that cleanly with a Turing complete language.