Hacker News: toolslive

New comment by toolslive in "Map of Metal"

toolslive — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:09:08 +0000

They (Black Sabbath) were booked as a blues band by Jazz Bilzen in 1970. People just didn't know where to bucket sort them at the time.

New comment by toolslive in "Map of Metal"

toolslive — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:06:55 +0000

really nice! For the inclined, there's also

https://www.metal-archives.com/

New comment by toolslive in "Idempotency Is Easy Until the Second Request Is Different"

toolslive — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:34:53 +0000

> *

I wondered about this too. Also, why was it framed in the context of JSON based RPC over HTTP ?

New comment by toolslive in "US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos"

toolslive — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:17:55 +0000

https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/65_hs1-8342289+M...

404 ?

New comment by toolslive in "Comparing the Z80 and 6502 to Their Relatives"

toolslive — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:50:32 +0000

I come from the same lineage as the author. I did 6502 (doing C64 demos) long before I encountered the Z80. From what I remember, the Z80 offers a vastly superior programming experience. It has more registers. it has 16 bit registers. It has a shadow register set (you can switch between sets, which is handy for interrupt routines, for example) Programming assembly on the Z80 just is less of a fight.

New comment by toolslive in "Laws of Software Engineering"

toolslive — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:52:14 +0000

maybe add: "the universe is winning" (in the design department). Full quote: "software engineers try to build "idiot-proof" systems, while the universe creates "bigger and better idiots" to break them. So far, the universe is winning"

New comment by toolslive in "Types and Neural Networks"

toolslive — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:53:19 +0000

ha! I found an online simulator. Just try to do a

    10 print "hello world!"

to get a feel for it.

https://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/jtyone.html

New comment by toolslive in "Types and Neural Networks"

toolslive — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:44:41 +0000

> This is what most programmers do. They type raw text into the editor; the compiler either processes it into structured data, or returns an error the programmer has to internalise before resubmitting.

In the 1980s structural editors were quite popular (fe the basic editor in the ZX81). Using these, it is impossible for the programmer to create text that is not a valid program.

New comment by toolslive in "What if Python was natively distributable?"

toolslive — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:23:43 +0000

the idea has been around (and implemented) at least since the 1980s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_(programming_language)

The CSP approach is also interesting. fe Limbo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language)

New comment by toolslive in "A CPU that runs entirely on GPU"

toolslive — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:55:22 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi#Knights_Landing ?

New comment by toolslive in "Moldova broke our data pipeline"

toolslive — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 12:22:29 +0000

what's wrong with protobuf & friends ?

New comment by toolslive in "Moldova broke our data pipeline"

toolslive — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:21:35 +0000

For CSV, I don't know how this comes out. It depends on the library/programming language. It might be 73786976294838210000 or it might throw an exception, or whatever. I'm just saying JSON will not solve your problems neither.

New comment by toolslive in "Moldova broke our data pipeline"

toolslive — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:12:41 +0000

JSON brings its own set of problems. for example, look at the python generated JSON below.

    >  >>> json.dumps({ "X" : 1 << 66 })
    > '{"X": 73786976294838206464}'

What's the parsing result in javascript ? What's the parsing result in Java ?

New comment by toolslive in "5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools"

toolslive — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:06:29 +0000

It's what a lot of engineers have been saying for decades: Looking at the surfaces of the artefacts, it's obvious more advanced tooling, than what was claimed by archaeologists, must have been used. Oh irony, the bits were already lying about in the museum's archive for a century.

New comment by toolslive in "GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment"

toolslive — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:37:42 +0000

Being just (as in the right thing happened) and being legal (as in the judicial system does not object) are 2 totally different things. They overlap, but less than people would like to believe.

New comment by toolslive in "The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)"

toolslive — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:44:43 +0000

I'm just saying integrating over a temperature range with T in the denominator is annoying, while it doesn't have to be.

New comment by toolslive in "The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)"

toolslive — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:08:06 +0000

As an engineer, you should not even use temperature at all. All thermodynamic formulas simplify (a lot) if you use the inverse temperature.

New comment by toolslive in "The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)"

toolslive — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:04:48 +0000

> 1 foot = ...

hold on: a horizontal foot, or a vertical foot ? 0.30480061m versus 0.3048m

New comment by toolslive in "Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)"

toolslive — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:00:37 +0000

No. The claim is cpython has no spec. The link you posted is about the language. The spec claim is about the behaviour of the runtime.

The underlying claim is hat pypy cannot succeed precisely because there's no clear definition of success/compatibility/compliance. The situation is completely different in the Java world. There there is a specification for the memory model, runtime, aso and you can be sure that when you switch between runtimes, it will just work.

New comment by toolslive in "Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)"

toolslive — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 18:36:30 +0000

Well, the original comment was implying org mode had limited popularity because there is no specification. I'm claiming cpython is way more popular compared to fe pypy because it has no spec. The typical scenario is: people try pypy. it mostly works but because of some weird problem some library is broken and then they give up.