<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: wlindley</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wlindley</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:27:01 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=wlindley" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "How We Pushed CDC into Postgres"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Excellent that Control Data is contributing! Oh wait, I'm a few decades out of sync</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:23:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49243305</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49243305</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49243305</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "Curly braces: An evolution of Unix and C"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't it odd to read "curly" braces? Every printed dictionary I have, up through the 1990s at least, says that braces are {these}, brackets are [these], and parentheses are (these). Saying "curly brace" is as redundant as saying "round parentheses." Yes, braces are curly, by definition.<p>At least that's how it always in American English, and ASCII.  Apparently British English says more than [these] can be "brackets" and <these> were called "angle brackets" in the 1970s, but when did anyone in the computer industry ever start calling anything but {these} braces?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2026 00:11:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48262300</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48262300</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48262300</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "Your phone is about to stop being yours"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The real mystery is why anyone remotely aware of the Free Software movement would have ever been duped into advocating for handheld computers so hostile to their own goals.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:33:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947448</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947448</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947448</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "We mourn our craft"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Feb 2026 19:32:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926846</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926846</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926846</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "Ephemeral infrastructure: Why short-lived is a good thing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What does "compute" mean here? It is supposed to be a verb, but here seems to be a noun.  I have recently started seeing it apparently mean "computational capacity" but here it seems to mean "an instance of a virtualized computer installation."  All this verbing is confusing. Excuse me, I have an eat.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2025 21:17:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46167433</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46167433</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46167433</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "Show HN: A simple TUI orgmode editor inspired by nano and k9s"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As an emacs user since the mid-80s, I do note this functionality would be nice as a Major Mode, if one were an avid Lisp programmer.<p>As a Perl Monger since 1994, and as a developer who has used and extended Org::Parser from CPAN, I am happy to see support in any other language, as you have done with Go here.  I wonder whether you plan to extend your parser to fairly complete support of all/most of what Org offers.<p>Thanks for this!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:30:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882726</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882726</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882726</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "Floppy Disk / Diskettes // retrocmp / retro computing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The original IBM PC could be purchased either with 160KB/180KB single-sided floppy drives, or the 320KB/360KB double-sided.  Some early IBM PC users still needed the "flippy" trick!<p>See IBM advert, <a href="https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-10_OCR/page/n111/mode/2up" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-10_OCR/page/n111/mo...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Oct 2025 23:01:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45777664</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45777664</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45777664</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "Dotfiles feel too personal to share"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"...whenever 'a software' doesn't...." Ugh.  "A software package" or "a piece of software" or perhaps "a program" but you don't have "one software" any more than you can have "one hardware" or "one information." Grammar, please!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 Aug 2025 18:06:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44815513</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44815513</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44815513</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "Life before the web – Running a Startup in the 1980's (2016)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My company "Lindley Systems" did all this from 1980 (when I was 14) until the mid 90s, in the Heathkit (later Heath/Zenith) arena. I still have master diskettes and original manuals ready for taking to the Xerox shop, and only a few years ago tossed boxes full of registration cards (with 13 cent stamps on them).<p>We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M and MS-DOS but never shipped a product for MS Windows. We almost had a product ready in 1996 but then MS "upgraded" VB 3 to VB 4 and we started a rewrite, almost completed just in time for the "upgrade" to VB 5 - by which time our market had moved on.<p>It was a fun time to build custom and specialized hardware and software.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 May 2025 14:37:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014646</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014646</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014646</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "Google change is breaking some digital photo frames"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And again, There is no cloud, only someone else's computer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Mar 2025 17:59:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43292398</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43292398</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43292398</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "Tell HN: O'Reilly sells DRM-free eBooks again"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thank you, and all the best for a long-awaited and much-needed update to the book!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Feb 2025 17:53:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051022</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051022</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051022</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Also "napkin" (from nappe, old for "tablecloth").  See <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napkin#Etymology_and_terminology" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napkin#Etymology_and_terminolo...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Feb 2025 19:05:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003910</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003910</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003910</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "Tell HN: O'Reilly sells DRM-free eBooks again"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Listed is "HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide (6th ed.)" by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy from 2006.<p>However there was a 7th edition, ISBN 9781449302597, published 2011.  Yet nowhere online can I find a copy to purchase. Does anyone have a clue what happened to the 7th edition or where it might be found?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:25:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978221</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978221</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978221</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "When AI promises speed but delivers debugging hell"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Garbage in, garbage out. Code spewed by a random generator that has not the slightest understanding of what it is doing, whacked at by a hammer until it seems to be working.<p>What is this supposed to produce other than a mass of bugs and vulnerabilities?  "A.I." is utter garbage and always will be, it is foolish to think otherwise.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Jan 2025 13:54:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42830113</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42830113</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42830113</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "The Supreme Court Rules Against TikTok–Now What?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>According to: <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8038/text#HC4C03F670CE1457EB36137006C994F04" rel="nofollow">https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8038...</a><p>"FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION.—The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by— (A) any of— (i) ByteDance, Ltd.; (ii) TikTok;…"<p>How is that not a Bill of Attainder?  Although it does not explicitly say that these companies are guilty of a crime, since when is it legal to make a law against a specific person, group of persons, or a specific company?  That cannot possibly be Constitutional.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:46:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759365</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759365</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759365</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "The Supreme Court Rules Against TikTok–Now What?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What exactly is being forbidden here?<p>Outlawing installing a program ("app" being short for "application program") on your computer (even if it is called a "telephone" it is obviously a computer)?  Surely there cannot be laws against running whatever program you want on your computer.<p>Outlawing access of such a program to the Internet? Obviously that cannot be possible, that would be a "Bill of Attainder" (a law against a specific person or group) which is illegal.<p>Outlawing access to the servers to which that program communicates? Likewise a Bill of Attainder, and illegal.<p>So what exactly is being done here?  No-one is explaining</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Jan 2025 21:53:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42743657</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42743657</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42743657</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "Talking over a wall changed my direction as a programmer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a program. "App" is a word, short for "Application Program," publicized by Apple for its handheld computers that masquerade as (and are euphemistically called) "telephones." "App" effectively means "proprietary closed-source program that talks to proprietary walled-garden programs running on someone else's computer, and acts as a spy sending all your sensitive data to who-knows-where."<p>No-one ever called a real program an "app" before that, did they?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Dec 2024 22:00:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42482677</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42482677</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42482677</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "The tech utopia fantasy is over"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Most shocking of all is how almost every free-software, anti-big-government, anti-big-business, and libertarian advocate swallowed these allegedly "smart" alleged "telephones" -- which are obviously computers that someone else controls and utterly disempower the users -- to the utter disregard of every principle they said they believed.<p>Don't call it a "computer" (computers are scary), call it a "smart" "telephone." Or call it a "device" as if it were a can opener.<p>Don't call it a "program" (programmers are geeks), call it an (ugh) "app" [which is just short for "application program" of course]<p>Never had one of those nefarious handheld treacherous computers, never will, thanks.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 23 Nov 2024 19:50:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42223408</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42223408</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42223408</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "What is the history of the use of "foo" and "bar" in source code examples? (2012)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In the 1940s, the Army used a phonetic alphabet starting Able, Baker, Charlie. My late father was on the first two postwar atomic bomb tests (the first after Trinity, and at Hiroshima, Nagasaki) which were Able and Baker.<p>Able was an air burst over Bikini (thus the name of the swimsuit).<p>Baker, the water burst, was the world's first atomic disaster; as a result of Baker, the third scheduled test Charlie was cancelled.  My father died years later of colon cancer, perhaps not unrelated to contaminated air and water at the Eniwetok base afterwards.<p>FUBAR indeed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 05 Oct 2024 22:24:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41753365</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41753365</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41753365</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wlindley in "If AI seems smarter, it's thanks to smarter human trainers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>a/k/a It is all a clever scam.  True, or true?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Sep 2024 22:38:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41683415</link><dc:creator>wlindley</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41683415</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41683415</guid></item></channel></rss>