Hacker News: tannhaeuser

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Python 3.14 garbage collection rigamarole"

tannhaeuser — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 09:48:43 +0000

3.13 broke most of the C API

3.14 broke GC

I guess these kinds of priorities are exactly why Python is not my favorite programming language and why you have tens of Python versions installed on any machine. Not to talk about the Python 2 -> 3 drama that was also about fetishising syntax and pureness over pragmatism, installed base, and respect for existing code.

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Python 3.14 garbage collection rigamarole"

tannhaeuser — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 08:55:03 +0000

Do people use python for new projects apart from ML stuff which hasn't moved to all-native yet?

My experience with Python is a really bad one for professional work: it's chaotic and slow, and has by far the worst versioning and packaging story of any mainstream language, yet its proponents keep praising it in denial.

I guess Python is an ok target for agentic coding, but my god do look Claude's commit messages pretentious, with code bases quickly heading into absolute unmaintainability. At least it had found gross JS injection vectors in a Django app that really shouldn't have made it through a code review, architecture level as they were, but oh well. A mature Django app is also not a nice dev experience IMO, with tons of implicit behavior all over the place encoded in a mix of magic filenames, database naming conventions, and URL routing quickly descending into regexp hacks.

New comment by tannhaeuser in "macOS Container Machines"

tannhaeuser — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:58:53 +0000

Just to clarify, this requires Mac OS 26 Tahoe for "container" doesn't it? So those of us holding out on Sequoia who can't stand the broken glass UI or what's called and the other undesired features need to stick to Docker desktop.

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

tannhaeuser — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:09:32 +0000

I only have used the power connector on a Surface Go tablet but have really no complaints. I've never been much of an MS person, but with that thing Windows (10) certainly left on a high note for me.

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD"

tannhaeuser — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:55:46 +0000

Debian LTS/extended LTS

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Prolog Coding Horror"

tannhaeuser — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:33:29 +0000

Not familiar with Erlang that much, but it's pretty clear Erlang was prototyped on Prolog because of its convenient facilities for DSLs using op/3 to define new tokens for its built-in bottom-up expression parser (using operator precedence parsing) and its Definite Clause Grammar recursive descent parser as trivial specialization of core SLD resolution (Prolog was created for NLP and planning apps in the first place after all).

I guess what may also have contributed is that there are a number of concurrent logics implemented in Prolog for prototyping Erlang's scheduler such as Concurrent Transaction Logic ([1]).

[1]: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bonner/ctr/Home.html

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Prolog Coding Horror"

tannhaeuser — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:01:06 +0000

"Planning, optimization, diagnostics, and complex configuration" [1]

Prolog also works extremely well as a target language for code generation by LLMs for these domains due to it being "higher up in the food chain" compared to procedural languages so to speak, and because Prolog was originally envisioned for classic NLP and hence has a corpus of one-to-one mappings from natural language to logic (as in the example in [3]). So well in fact that even with last-gen models textual descriptions for suitable problems become the bottleneck and you can in many cases just go straight to Prolog code instead ([2]).

[1]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net

[2]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net/llm-demo/part1.html

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48080201

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Prolog Basics Explained with Pokémon"

tannhaeuser — Sun, 17 May 2026 14:47:58 +0000

Prolog is actually a perfect fit for all kinds of adventure, role playing, strategy, and classic board/card games, with clauses representing game rules and facts representing the game state and universe in the most natural way.

Simple general-purpose opponents can be coded using just recursive backtracking search, while more advanced ones (supporting moves that need to destructively change state) can still be conveniently modelled by reifying facts and thereby enable backtracking over assert/retract-like Prolog DB modifications, as used in discrete combinatorial planners [1].

[1]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net/container-planning-demo/part1...

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Abstract Machines for Logic Programs"

tannhaeuser — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:00:43 +0000

> Here is a stack machine that [instead of addition] implements subtraction, based on the mode assignment i/o/i [without changing the code already used for addition]. (You might have heard people claim that logic programs can be "run backwards"; this is one thing that can mean.)

    k >> plus 0 _ P         |---->  k << P
    k >> plus (s N) _ (s P) |---->  k; _ >> plus N _ P
    k; _ << P               |---->  k << P

So if you're confused because of the slightly unusual notation, here's the same thing in Prolog syntax:

    % "Sum is the sum of S1 and S2"
    plus(S1, S2, Sum) :- Sum is S1 + S2.

    % "What is the sum of 3 and 5?"
    ?- plus(3, 5, S). 
    % Answer: S = 8

    % "Is 10 the sum of 3 and 5"
    ?- plus(3, 5, 10).
    % Answer: fail 

    % "What's the difference between 3 and 10?"
    ?- plus(3, X, 10).
    % throws an error

It doesn't work this way in general because the Prolog is/2 predicate can only be used in one direction to evaluate the term on the right hand side where must all variable must be bound to a number in context. The article mentions Peano arithmetic as one finite/incomplete axiomatisation of natural numbers but doesn't elaborate on it.

Debian welcomes the 2026 GSoC interns

tannhaeuser — Fri, 08 May 2026 08:56:18 +0000

Article URL: https://bits.debian.org/2026/05/welcome-gsoc2026-contributors.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060495

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters"

tannhaeuser — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:34:59 +0000

Tested gemma4 26 MoE 4bit quantisized gguf on llama.cpp following these guides with mmap'd I/O on a 16GB MBP and it was unbearably slow (0.0 t/s).

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner"

tannhaeuser — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:30:06 +0000

Not every fscking story has to be about AI.

Uncharted island soon to appear on nautical charts

tannhaeuser — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:30:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.awi.de/en/about-us/service/press/single-view/unkartierte-insel-demnaechst-auf-seekarten-verzeichnet.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47744132

Points: 103

# Comments: 51

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

tannhaeuser — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:10:50 +0000

Windows until 24H2 (when Edge and the last remnants of IE were replaced by Chrome) supported HTML apps [1], introduced with Windows 98 Active Desktop. They weren't used much but actually not that bad for end-user needs.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms536495...

New comment by tannhaeuser in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

tannhaeuser — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:22:29 +0000

You must go back to the drawing board and rely on highly-regulated Telecom standards (that's why they were mandated in the first place!) not monopolistic defacto "best practices" you have no influence over because they're more convenient for you.

This is simply unconstitutional and should be escalated ASAP if you don't want to end it before the appropriate court in Leipzig, Karlsruhe, or maybe Luxembourg.

High meat consumption linked to lower dementia risk in genetic risk group

tannhaeuser — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:07:16 +0000

Article URL: https://news.ki.se/high-meat-consumption-linked-to-lower-dementia-risk-in-genetic-risk-group

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47647514

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Colibri – chat platform built on the AT Protocol for communities big and small"

tannhaeuser — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 07:27:16 +0000

Not sure who the target audience for this is?

ActivityPub (Mastodon etc) has already very granular permissions wrt. who to federate with, which posts to make public, edit or withdraw posts after initial creation, etc. catering to EU privacy and moral/personality rights demands.

For closed group chat, there are many alternatives.

Discord is after all a video chat app designed to be used during a gaming session first and foremost.

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"

tannhaeuser — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 06:46:18 +0000

For LLMs and other pure memory-bound workloads, but for eg. diffusion models their FPU SIMD performance is lacking.

New comment by tannhaeuser in "Java 26 is here"

tannhaeuser — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 23:15:49 +0000

> I hated building UIs with Swing/AWT, many of which are still in use today and are gradually being replaced by lovely JavaFX.

Dude JFX yielded what was called RIAs to JavaScript like almost 15 years ago. Of the three major GUI toolkits Swing, JavaFX, and SWT it was Swing that gained HighDPI support first (10 years ago), and continues to be the base for kick-as IntelliJ IDEA and other Jetbrains IDEs.

Supply-chain attack using invisible code hits GitHub and other repositories

tannhaeuser — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 07:58:45 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/03/supply-chain-attack-using-invisible-code-hits-github-and-other-repositories/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47385244

Points: 14

# Comments: 4