Hacker News: tristramb

New comment by tristramb in "Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored"

tristramb — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:20:26 +0000

Or reading a forum populated only by bots.

New comment by tristramb in "A Letter from Dijkstra on APL (1982)"

tristramb — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:23:07 +0000

He liked to be able to reason about programs without running them. He preferred simpler languages because they contain less irrelevant noise which got in the way of that.

New comment by tristramb in "A Letter from Dijkstra on APL (1982)"

tristramb — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:52:46 +0000

"Kinda hard to find where Dijkstra praised something (except Algol 60)."

Hamilton Richards, who was one of Dijkstra's colleagues at the University of Texas, told me in an email that Dijkstra was impressed by the work of Richard Bird on functional programming.

New comment by tristramb in "ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena"

tristramb — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:37:09 +0000

If the transients occur immediately following the nuclear explosions but not before them, then the correlation together with the earth shadow deficit suggests that the transients are caused by reflective debris produced by the nuclear explosions. I don't know how feasible it would be for this debris to survive the explosion and be blasted above the atmosphere to glint in the sunlight at night, but there is the case of the missing manhole cover from one of the Operation Plumbbob tests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#Missing_ste...

New comment by tristramb in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety"

tristramb — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:09:55 +0000

Use the Tor browser

New comment by tristramb in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

tristramb — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:09:28 +0000

Yes, that is how Facebook, Yahoo and many other companies started out. But they rewrote their code when it became to big to be maintainable. The problem with shoddy code is not necessarily that it doesn't work but that it becomes impossible to change.

New comment by tristramb in "Is Germany's gold safe in New York ?"

tristramb — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:28:13 +0000

But it was like this before. Its just that now the sewer that was keeping it all hidden has now broken and it is spewing out all over the world.

New comment by tristramb in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

tristramb — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 11:05:05 +0000

Just behind me where I am sitting at the moment I have 21 RUBs containing my collection of about 42000 pinned out flies (mostly). The RUBs are stacked in and on top of bookshelves. I seem to remember that you could buy a rack to hold them but it looked too flimsy for what I wanted. The flies are pinned out onto plastic foam sheets in small clear plastic presentation boxes, 48 of which fit in each 12 litre RUB. I still have to properly identify about half of the flies. Photos of the presentation boxes and CSV files of the identifications are backed up to https://github.com/tristrambrelstaff/flies. RUBs have played a significant part in enabling me to manage all this.

New comment by tristramb in "Celebrating Tony Hoare's mark on computer science"

tristramb — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:04:54 +0000

"To explain what I was doing in logic-driven software architecture I looked for a good metaphor and, on the spot, proposed that there was a kind of “contract” between caller and callee. He did not say anything, but his mere presence had enabled me to make my incipient ideas jell."

I hadn't realised that Hoare was present when Meyer first used the term 'contract' to describe his ideas.

New comment by tristramb in "Tony Hoare has died"

tristramb — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:37:50 +0000

"Around Easter 1961, a course on ALGOL 60 was offered in Brighton, England, with Peter Naur, Edsger W. Dijkstra, and Peter Landin as tutors. I attended this course with my colleague in the language project, Jill Pym, our divisional Technical Manager, Roger Cook, and our Sales Manager, Paul King. It was there that I first learned about recursive procedures and saw how to program the sorting method which I had earlier found such difficulty in explaining. It was there that I wrote the procedure, immodestly named Quicksort, on which my career as a computer scientist is founded. Due credit must be paid to the genius of the designers of ALGOL 60 who included recursion in their language and enabled me to describe my invention so elegantly to the world. I have regarded it as the highest goal of programming language design to enable good ideas to be elegantly expressed." - C.A.R Hoare, The Emperor's Old Clothes, Comm. ACM 24(2), 75-83 (February 1981).

New comment by tristramb in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

tristramb — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 11:48:11 +0000

I retired in 2024 after a four decade career, mostly programming avionics systems but with a decade of Ruby on Rails towards the end. I am now sitting here eating popcorn and watching the disaster unfold. I am happy to be out of it. So long as it doesn't affect my pensions and the local shops still have food...

New comment by tristramb in "Galileo's handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text"

tristramb — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:47:27 +0000

It's not unlikely that Donald Knuth looked at examples of 16th Century typesetting when he came to design TeX. Or looked at examples of typesetting that had been influenced by 16th Century typsetting.

New comment by tristramb in "Indefinite Book Club Hiatus"

tristramb — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:21:30 +0000

I think it is a good general principle that, for any process that is likely to be a tempting target for scammers, you should require a non-electronic step to initiate that process. Requiring a physical letter of application for a job, for example.

New comment by tristramb in "Indefinite Book Club Hiatus"

tristramb — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:14:09 +0000

It doesn't have to prevent the scam completely, it just has to make harder for them to scam you than it would be to move on to scam someone else.

New comment by tristramb in "On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]"

tristramb — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 13:58:57 +0000

I seem to remember (but I can't find the source) that Wirth initially had three aims in designing Pascal:

1. To use it in teaching a structure programming course to new students. As in the late 60's all student programming was batch mode (submit your program to an operator to run, and pick up the printout the following day), this meant the compiler had to be single-pass and give good error messages.

2. To use it in teaching a data structures course involving new data structures worked out by Wirth and Hoare.

3. To use it in teaching a compilers course. This meant the compiler code had to be clean and understandable. Being single-pass helped in this.

New comment by tristramb in "From Tobacco to Ultraprocessed Food: How Industry Fuels Preventable Disease"

tristramb — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 09:52:55 +0000

Personal freedom includes not being manipulated by commercial interests.

New comment by tristramb in "British redcoat's lost memoir reveals realities of life as a disabled veteran"

tristramb — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:01:47 +0000

The Empire was self-financing. Taxes on trade paid for the ships and sailors to protect the trade routes (with a fair bit left over).

New comment by tristramb in "Photographing the hidden world of slime mould"

tristramb — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:10:13 +0000

Many years ago (or so it seems now), I was turned on to slime moulds by the photos of Kim Fleming on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/myriorama/albums/1271006/). The undersides of logs can be a good place to find them.

New comment by tristramb in "Two ways to crack a walnut, per Grothendieck (2025)"

tristramb — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:46:47 +0000

The Grothendieck method can be applied to implementing a new feature in a software system. You just refactor the existing code until the implementation of the new feature becomes trivial.

New comment by tristramb in "The Late Arrival of 16-Bit CP/M"

tristramb — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 14:30:02 +0000

In 'Managing Technical People', 1997, page 199, Watts Humphrey says that, after several failed attempts to produce a PC by IBM procedures, they set up an independent team that could skip the procedures as necessary to get the job done. This worked in the short term but it had two side-effects that were catastrophic in the long term: they lost control of the operating system to Microsoft, and they also lost control of the chips to Intel. He says both of these side-effects would have been caught by the checks inherent in the normal IBM procedures.