Hacker News: talideon

New comment by talideon in "Netherlands pulls gold out of the US"

talideon — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:34:56 +0000

If you want to be pedantic, then this also wrong: half of Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Scotland are actually on the Laurentian plate, which split apart. The Scottish Highlands used to be part of the same range as the Appalachian. Plates are not continents.

New comment by talideon in "Netherlands pulls gold out of the US"

talideon — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:18:33 +0000

Lake Ontario wasn't a "nationalist" name. It's an anglicised version of the Wyandot name for the lake. The Canadian province is named after the lake, not the other way around.

Don't be a ghoul.

New comment by talideon in "How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?"

talideon — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:12:57 +0000

The term "cartel" might be useful here.

New comment by talideon in "Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT"

talideon — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:39:22 +0000

s/actual NAT/actual firewall/

New comment by talideon in "Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT"

talideon — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 20:51:13 +0000

NATs are not firewalls. Any firewall-like functionality provided by NAT is entirely accidental and better provides by an actual NAT.

New comment by talideon in "The Indo-European Family Tree"

talideon — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:09:39 +0000

Is it though? It's not as if it can pull in hypothetical superfamilies like Nostratic. It's not saying it's a family tree of all languages, just I-E. Your assumption is that somebody would look at it and forget that Mandarin exists, or Arabic, or Finnish, &c. I don't buy that. Hence my fruit joke. I'm not sure exactly what you expect them to do to avoid an egregious misreading by somebody spectacularly smoothbrained, because anyone with that mentality isn't going to be paying attention anyway.

[Removed my Anatolian criticism: I just hadn't zoomed in enough!]

New comment by talideon in "The Indo-European Family Tree"

talideon — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:49:40 +0000

And a fun extra one is that Lithuanian "gobti" is cognate with English "give"!

New comment by talideon in "The Indo-European Family Tree"

talideon — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:46:11 +0000

Well, yeah, but that's like saying that producing a tree of pomaceous fruit hides the fact that citrus fruits exist.

(Yes, I did make an apples and oranges joke.)

New comment by talideon in "Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium"

talideon — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:22:05 +0000

We're not talking commie blocks here, nor macmansions, which is what passes for top-of-the-line in a disappointingly large segment of the US.

New comment by talideon in "Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter"

talideon — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:20:55 +0000

Well, the likes of Wordpress make this a bit of a mixed bag. It still publishes multiple feeds in multiple format, with what proports to being an RSS feed actually being a Frankenstein's monster of RSS, Atom, and random other namespaces.

I don't know why they persist in still doing that after all these years.

New comment by talideon in "Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter"

talideon — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:12:36 +0000

You don't have to convert anything to XHTML5. You only need to do that if you specify type="xhtml" on an element, but you can use="html" and escape the markup. RSS has this behaviour too, but it's spelled out better in Atom.

I suspect you've been making your lifeIfe difficult for no good reason.

> why should I care where the files are published?

You don't, but those consuming your feed do. You do it for their benefit.

New comment by talideon in "The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous"

talideon — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:13:08 +0000

It's almost like every release is just basically advertising.

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.