Hacker News: zvr

Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics

zvr — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 06:33:27 +0000

Article URL: https://leidendeclaration.ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48380670

Points: 142

# Comments: 83

New comment by zvr in "Bttf is a command line datetime Swiss army knife"

zvr — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:33:01 +0000

Thank you for helping maintain the Unix lore.

New comment by zvr in "Museum of Pocket Calculating Devices"

zvr — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:09:15 +0000

As the old joke goes:

"For your birthday, I wanted to get you a pocket calculator ... but then I thought you'd already know how many pockets you have."

New comment by zvr in "The Letter S, by Donald Knuth (1980) [pdf]"

zvr — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:27:17 +0000

> was Metafont the only outline-based font technology

Surely Karow's Ikarus was earlier than that.

One of the main innovations of Metafont was the use of "pen"s, so that one would describe a single path and the software would trace it and imitate the use of one or more pens, to end with an outline of something with thickness, and essentially more curves. It mimics how drawing and writing actually happens.

AFAIK, Zapf did not like this approach at all, as he was used to design typefaces the traditional way, by specifying all the curves. Richard Southall embraced the new paradigm and used Metafont as it was supposed to be used, but produced only a couple of demo typefaces (mainly the nmt family) and a handful of commercial ones (I can now only remember Colorado, with Ladislas Mandel, used in the phone directories of US West). I think he also implemented Melior, but of course this was never distributed as it was a proprietary Zapf design.

Note: all the above are based on recollections of my discussions with Zapf, Southall, and Knuth, in the distant past. All my relevant printed materials are in a different country right now, and I don't have easy access to them.

New comment by zvr in "Peter Salus has died"

zvr — Tue, 19 May 2026 07:55:51 +0000

RIP. I've actually found the Handbook of Programming Languages (4 volumes) that he edited much more useful than his Unix history.

I met him in a few conferences, back in the day. We ended up talking more about linguistics than Unix history, somehow.

New comment by zvr in "The SGI Buyer's Guide (2003)"

zvr — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:12:17 +0000

They definitely also had NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access): on multi-CPU systems, you had a variety of ways to specify where you wanted your data to live (stay close to one CPU, for example).

New comment by zvr in "NanoTDB – Golang Append-Only Time Series DB"

zvr — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:47:45 +0000

People who look for solutions in this space (Time Series DB for measurements, for example) can also look at the good ol' RRDtool https://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/ first released more than 25 years ago...

New comment by zvr in "VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage"

zvr — Mon, 04 May 2026 14:24:13 +0000

And thank you for this. In my professional setting, this is a very valuable addition -- provided it works correctly, of course ;-).

Now if we could also have comments inside the code ("BEGIN/END snippet by Copilot"), that would also be great!

New comment by zvr in "Open source does not imply open community"

zvr — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:32:15 +0000

I concur completely. Back in those days, the very basic stuff you mention (awk, sed, make) were being built by a handful of people, all sitting together, and the few outsiders who were submitting enhancements (even before these were called "patches") knew the email addresses to send these to. For Sendmail, you should contact the people at Berkeley, for most of the others you sent to Bell Labs.

Then software started appearing from other points. We were getting new versions of software after email announcements -- and later on, on comp.sources.unix -- and we were reading the comments to see that other people were contributing, too.

The way you publish your software (especially today) essentially boils down to how much you are looking for contributors vs. users (vs. no one at all).

New comment by zvr in "Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?"

zvr — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:32:32 +0000

Most of this is based on Copyright legal framework, which is surprisingly homogeneous around the world. The discussions about ownership of AI-generated material are exactly the same in EU.

New comment by zvr in "Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?"

zvr — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:29:31 +0000

Yes, and if the same come ends up in someone else's hands, they can state "we didn't steal it, a GenAI generated it for us, the same as it did for you". Given the non-deterministic operation of current GenAI systems (a major difference from compilers), it would probably be hard to prove either position.

New comment by zvr in "The Rise of the Em-Dash in Hacker News Comments"

zvr — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:44:20 +0000

One of the minor but very welcome latest updates of Microsoft Windows was the addition of the capability to type Win+- to get an en-dash (–) and Shift+Win+- to get an em dash (—).

New comment by zvr in "New Modern Greek"

zvr — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:41:15 +0000

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Grik-spiking werld.

New comment by zvr in "Supply chain nightmare: How Rust will be attacked and what we can do to mitigate"

zvr — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:00:10 +0000

You can still start such a company now. The tricky part is to gain the trust of customers.

New comment by zvr in "Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read"

zvr — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:27:33 +0000

Well, if it's AI-generated, it's not really copyrighted by you and you cannot license it under GPL, since you did not write it.

Nice work, nevertheless, and useful!

New comment by zvr in "Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops"

zvr — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:15:21 +0000

I believe the major hurdle would be from the "renter" part.

Usually such installations are only allowed to be done by the owners, not tenants.

New comment by zvr in "Gonon: Building a Clock with No Numerals"

zvr — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:27:57 +0000

Interesting, but some of the information is conflicting: the design was about "No assumed orientation. Something that works in a mirror" but then the 24-hour arc talks about "(top, 12 o'clock position) clockwise".

Placing midnight on top forces an orientation, while specifying clockwise makes mirroring impossible.

But this is only on the text description, the actual clock would work anyway.

New comment by zvr in "How A Spartan Revolutionized Baseball"

zvr — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:21:30 +0000

People are still be born in Sparta, Greece; no time travel needed.

New comment by zvr in "My son pleasured himself on Gemini Live. Entire family's Google accounts banned"

zvr — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:19:54 +0000

It's pretty straightforward to sync the contacts on the phone with the contacts on Fastmail via CardDAV, using DAVx5 for example.

New comment by zvr in "Sed, a powerfull mini-language from the 70s"

zvr — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 14:15:28 +0000

Right! ed was the first one, and its ideas and commands influenced sed (a "streams" ed), and ex (an "extended" editor, which also had a "vi"sual mode).