Hacker News: toolslive

New comment by toolslive in "Yet another way to invoke functions without parentheses"

toolslive — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:29:19 +0000

Satanic? never assume malice where incompetence suffices

New comment by toolslive in "Nitter: Update Oct 10th seeking funding and legal help"

toolslive — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 19:35:27 +0000

More and more, this has been weaponised: "No, we're not evil! We never intended for this to happen. It was just an accident" Is something I hear too often

New comment by toolslive in "Float and integer arithmetic follow two different paradigms"

toolslive — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:45:45 +0000

Not only that: `-ffast-math` might change the result of flops when the arguments are regular floats too. (It abandons IEEE754 compliance)

New comment by toolslive in "Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language"

toolslive — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:43:30 +0000

C was 1972, and golang was 2007. It's not that no new concepts exceptions were discovered in between. A pen is more elegant than a chisel.

New comment by toolslive in "Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language"

toolslive — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:23:04 +0000

probably the:

  ```
       ...
       bla, err := doSomething(...);
       if err != nil {
           ...
       }
       ...

  ```

pattern.

New comment by toolslive in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

toolslive — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:42:10 +0000

2 things. - meter rolling backward: it's completely gone. You cannot refuse the replacement and they have ben replacing them since 2021.

- I was wrong: the asymmetry is a factor 6 iso a factor 3. :(

New comment by toolslive in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

toolslive — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:31:22 +0000

Here in Belgium, there's "a bit" of asymmetry: the price per kWh I pay from the grid is roughly 3 times of what I get when I inject. I also have a fixed cost per year to have the right to inject. I knew this before I installed solar and have a home battery, so it only happens during summer.

New comment by toolslive in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

toolslive — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:01:39 +0000

In Belgium, Stella is fully accepted, contrary to fe "Cristal" or "Maes". Of course, it's no "Jupiler".

New comment by toolslive in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

toolslive — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:54:59 +0000

get a "Stella 0.0" and tell me it tastes terrible.

New comment by toolslive in "What Sun got wrong"

toolslive — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:32:25 +0000

it was called "Slow arse". This was because it was rather reluctant in handing out resources (memory fe). Having fought it, I remember the system APIs being really well defined and picky (which was good). At one point, the C compiler had some identity issues "am I 32 bit, or 64 bit?"

New comment by toolslive in "New wild cat species discovered – with only one known living member"

toolslive — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:55:21 +0000

There also was the Corsican wildcat[0] which briefly was a new species and now has "uncertain taxonomic status" (whatever that may mean).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_wildcat

New comment by toolslive in "Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds"

toolslive — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:41:31 +0000

pattern is there: first hit a public place (market, ...), then when people are scrambling to help, hit them again. "double-tap". Seen in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, ... It's quite cynical, the topic has its own Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-tap_strike

New comment by toolslive in "Learn Programming with OCaml"

toolslive — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 19:50:07 +0000

your body needs exercise or you end up an obese couch potato. Your mind is similar: it needs exercise or you end up a dunce.

New comment by toolslive in "Why are European countries moving their gold out of North America?"

toolslive — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:19:39 +0000

yes. but most of it is not to other countries. Most government debt (over 80% globally) is privately owned through sovereign debt instruments like bonds.

New comment by toolslive in "Visual Analysis of Binary Files"

toolslive — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 11:51:45 +0000

Humans are so good at pattern recognition it's uncanny. Back in the modem days, most people automatically recognised the most important phases of downloads because of the way they sounded .

New comment by toolslive in "We will need more (not fewer) scientists"

toolslive — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 06:52:30 +0000

Our knowledge is an inflating volume. New knowledge gets acquired at surface level, and the surface is ever growing.

New comment by toolslive in "Aphantasia Beginner's Guide"

toolslive — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 06:39:48 +0000

I have the same. I'm looking at my laptop's screen as I type this, and if I close my eyes while typing I cannot even visualise said screen. Now, I can blind-type, recognise faces, navigate aso without any problem. I can even play chess quite well (fide ~2050, 2200 blitz on chess.com), but I cannot visualise a chess board, nor can I visualise my moves or the moves of my opponent.

However, I don't "see" (pun intended) it as a problem. On the contrary, I'm not wasting cycles on irrelevant details while I'm thinking.

New comment by toolslive in "SpacetimeDB: a short technical review"

toolslive — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 08:25:19 +0000

the halting problem?

New comment by toolslive in "SpacetimeDB: a short technical review"

toolslive — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:02:42 +0000

One of the problems with running the application code inside the database server is that you need to make application developers use the programming language(s) you prepared for them. The other is that you need to trust them to not do crash out, or do infinite loops. Good luck moving application developers from their choice into the right choice.

New comment by toolslive in "Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory"

toolslive — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:16:25 +0000

tangential: I still remember how disappointed I was in PCs being used to a C64 (which was released in 1982) The quality of the games & sound effects was just not on the same level (C64 being much more advanced)