Hacker News: z500

New comment by z500 in "Alan Kay's answer to “Did the ENIAC have a BIOS”?"

z500 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:47:30 +0000

Octal just maps onto 3 bits instead of hex's 4. I always imagined it had something to do with the size of the byte not being standardized yet.

New comment by z500 in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

z500 — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:15:41 +0000

> Also, somebody contributed reduce() to Python way back in the 90's, as well as other functional idioms. He wouldn't have added that himself -- it was never his preferred style.

> He preferred a more imperative style. But he allowed those contributions, and then slightly regretted it later.

That would explain why they're so inconvenient to chain.

New comment by z500 in "“Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain"

z500 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:02:07 +0000

It's an X from the blackboard bold range in Unicode.

New comment by z500 in "Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux"

z500 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 19:39:53 +0000

Call me crazy, but for me the next stop after nitter is knitter, not the other thing.

New comment by z500 in "PageRank explained"

z500 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:55 +0000

I've always wondered what would happen if you named a kid Nominative Determinism. Some kind of paradox?

New comment by z500 in "Read the novels and forget everything else"

z500 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:58:42 +0000

> Maybe I should look into training an AI in the audio style of Patrick O’Brian and have it read Shakespeare for me.

That's what you took away from that?!

New comment by z500 in "Twenty Years of RISC OS Open"

z500 — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:06:54 +0000

I went down a rabbit hole a few summers ago and I ended up writing a calculator from scratch in assembly for RISC OS. Interesting experience having GUI routines at the syscall level

New comment by z500 in "Programming language file extensions that match ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes"

z500 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:32:02 +0000

On the flip side, .hpp always makes me chuckle. What is that, Header++?

New comment by z500 in "Why is programming so captivating, yet so agonizing?"

z500 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:52:22 +0000

I've never really been a math person, either, which is why I thought I was going to hate discrete math in college. I mean, it wasn't always the easiest thing ever, but it was a lot more intuitive to me than continuous math. And that's all programming is, materialized discrete math.

New comment by z500 in "Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them"

z500 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 20:09:19 +0000

And the SD card logo was originally intended for Super Density Disc

New comment by z500 in "Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source"

z500 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:12:58 +0000

I was one of these hapless Comic Chat users. Luckily someone gently nudged me toward a real IRC client lol. I was an absolute IRC fiend for years after that.

New comment by z500 in "Almost all coders at Id Software have been fired, following Xbox reset"

z500 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:12:48 +0000

That's odd, it always worked fine for me. I have had that issue with archive.today, though.

New comment by z500 in "US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos"

z500 — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:13:15 +0000

I'm confused. Aren't these supposed to be photos, or are we expected to be agog with 3D renderings?

New comment by z500 in "Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down"

z500 — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:02:28 +0000

Loads for me, but not particularly quickly

New comment by z500 in "I built a Game Boy emulator in F#"

z500 — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:10:45 +0000

That makes sense. The part where my program really benefits is in a bottleneck area that you always have to go through and where you visit every code path in it.

New comment by z500 in "I built a Game Boy emulator in F#"

z500 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:32:37 +0000

It's .NET 10 lol. It's not so slow you can't write stuff for it, I have implementations of Conway's game of life, Huffman compression, and a minimal TUI. The main problem is doing almost anything in it involves a method lookup. And there are almost certainly places I could have done things more smartly.

One thing I do want to try out is publishing it with native AOT. I had a lot of luck with that on one of my other F# projects, I got like a 75% speedup out of it. I understand the JIT is supposed to outperform native AOT in the long term but I haven't seen it reach that speed.

New comment by z500 in "I built a Game Boy emulator in F#"

z500 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:58:41 +0000

That's so cool! I love F#, but I wrote a little Smalltalk interpreter in it and I can confirm it isn't exactly a speed demon for that kind of thing if you use it as intended lol

New comment by z500 in "nowhere: an entire website encoded in a URL"

z500 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:09:31 +0000

Actually they do have one, but it's an older beta format that isn't supported anymore.

New comment by z500 in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

z500 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:03:25 +0000

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

New comment by z500 in "XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?"

z500 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:24:07 +0000

That was what I guessed too, but according to the article Intel detected both.