HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Zuider

1,509 karma · joined September 23, 2007

submissionscomments
Zuider··on Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)
This sensitivity to intonation is why all the great quartet composers were either deaf, Hungarian, or both.
Zuider··on Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)
Classical guitarists are used to pushing nylon strings into consonance by compressing the string either towards the nut or the bridge. Not so easy with steel, where players will just preemptively retune to whatever chords are most prominent in the song.
Zuider··on Feral pig meat transmits rare bacteria
In the USA, it is open season on feral swine all year around, no permit required, as they are a very noxious pest. In Texas, you can even go heli-hogging!
Zuider··on Normans and Slavery: Breaking the Bonds
At the time, Ireland was indeed a wealthy country, having made its fortune selling leather to the Romans three centuries before, because the semi-nomadic Irish cultivated large herds of cattle roaming on unfenced plains, while the settled Britons kept sheep. This permitted the establishment of a culturally sophisticated Gaelic Order so stable that it was able to assimilate the invading Vikings and the first wave of Normans, who actually went native and began speaking the Irish language.
Zuider··on Tcl 9.0
Why did they remove tilde '~' as a convenient shortcut for the Home directory?
Zuider··on Pavel Durov and the Blackberry Ratchet
There are claims that Signal has already been compromised by the Five Eyes Intel Agencies, albeit through bribery rather than the overt coercion we see here. The key change is that Signal can no longer guarantee end-to-end encryption based on a passphrase tied to the app itself, and known only to the user.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/8974

Zuider··on Xi Goes Full Stalin with Purge
Given the intensive surveillance state set up by the CCP, it would be very hard to hide such benefits.
Zuider··on Code of Ethics
From experience, I would agree that the first thing activists who wish to take over a group will do is to behave badly, and then use this as the pretext to demand a Code of Conduct.

They will then subvert the spirit of the CoC, while adhering legalistically to the letter, in order to control others. They allows them divert a topic into pointless discussion of the rules, or to needle someone persistently, while remaining within the rules, until that person reacts, at which point they will insist that he has violated the CoC.

Zuider··on Code of Ethics
The minimum standard of good behavior need not be explicitly stated, and violations can be dealt with as they arise. The problem with written sets of rules is that they can be subverted and misused.
Zuider··on Why doesn't Windows have an "expert mode"? (2003)
But the festering garbage is entangled with essential material so that attempting to take out the trash can brick the OS.
Zuider··on Whither philosophy?
Aristotle's actual writings are lost. The books attributed to Aristotle are comprised of lecture notes collected by his students, later compiled according to topic, so you get the Ethics, the Politics, the Physics and Metaphysics.

They didn't quite know how to name the last book since its contents were so abstract and unrelated to the everyday world, so they simply called it "the book that comes after the Physics," which eventually became known as the Metaphysics. It is worth noting that the title is a specific reference to the book, not to any notion of the subject matter somehow transcending physics. After all, why physics, in particular?

In the light of that, it is even more jarring to see the term 'metaphysics' being used to describe spiritualism and new age mysticism.

Zuider··on EU says X hosts "illegal content" connected to Israel-Hamas war
You have just provided links. That is not an argument.
Zuider··on EU says X hosts "illegal content" connected to Israel-Hamas war
That is one plausible scenario, but another is that Breton, by all accounts, an arrogant, petty autocrat, is simply attempting to impose his will, not just on Musk, but everyone else. The words he has chosen to use suggests the latter may be closer to the truth.
Zuider··on EU says X hosts "illegal content" connected to Israel-Hamas war
Thierry Breton, the author of the letter, appears to have a personal grudge against Elon Musk, and has directed several aggressive ultimatums towards him such as, "In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules," "You can run but you can't hide" and "Our teams will be ready for enforcement."

Breton is set to be the next EU Commissioner, succeeding Ursula Van Der Leyden.

Zuider··on A new instrument found unusual success
Stevie wonder was one of the pioneers of the Fairlight Synthesizer, which was possible for him to use because it used a text interface navigated by arrow keys, rather than a fiddly GUI with unpredictable placement of drop-down menus. Arguably, a touch-screen GUI would have the same predictability (because of consistent placement of active elements) as the Fairlight text screen. In short, rather than being a tasteless joke or a stunt, it was an instrument that he could profitably use, which was demonstrated by the fact that he actually could use it.
Zuider··on Drop Table “Companies”;– LTD (2016)
As the blog post says, most SQL databases won't accept a name given in double quotes as the name of a table.
Zuider··on Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
Forth was created to control the aiming of a radio telescope. It was used in the original Star Wars movie to direct the complex motions of the model space ships.
Zuider··on The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
The British Flat Earth Society is a joke society in this vein. They amuse themselves by writing very erudite debunkings of the nefarious Spherical Earth conspiracy theory, and sending strongly worded Cease & Desist notices to NASA.
Zuider··on The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
In must cultures of the world, shared history is a consensual fiction, which is regarded as being truer than the truth.
Zuider··on The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
You can use the Polynesian palm scallop, which attaches itself to the damp bathroom wall in picturesque clusters like roof shingles. It is an aerial filter feeder, capable of subsisting on household dust (which is mainly organic matter) though for faster growth, one can use a fine-mist spray of blended sausage meat and soggy marrowfat peas. They are also excellent for repelling rats, their natural predator, by emitting sharp bursts of ultrasound when the rodent's presence is detected.

The problem is in getting hold of them, as trade in this protected species is illegal.

Zuider··on Red Programming Language
Red is mostly written in Rebol 2.7 whose final release was in 2011 when most software was 32-bit. Until Red becomes fully self-hosting, it looks like there will not be a 64-bit version.
Zuider··on Red Programming Language
Red is based on the Rebol language and is said to be 95% compatible with Rebol 2.7. The Red website includes links to the tutorials and code examples for Rebol alongside Red specific links.
Zuider··on Red Programming Language
But do those languages permit rapid Lisp-like development in the way Red does? I am not sure I see the problem. The slow static compilation is reserved for the final deployment of the app, so it should not hinder development.
Zuider··on Minix development has been abandoned?
Intel uses a specialized version of Minix 3 for its Intel Management Engine in every CPU it released since 2008, so technically, it is the most installed OS.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/intels-secret...

Zuider··on Minix development has been abandoned?
It is a kernel/OS level concept (though it was also used in games.)

Historically, task-switching had hardware support to some degree even in 8-bit microprocessors such as the Z80, M6809, and 6502 and in 16-bit microprocessors prior to the 386, using interrupts to push all the registers onto a stack, and setting the program counter to start executing instructions at a new address.

The vital innovation introduced with the 386 was to add memory protection, so that the different tasks could not corrupt each other's allocated memory. Hitherto, multitasking was too unstable for serious commercial use.

Zuider··on The Hammerhead Worm
It must be a primal, instinctual, fear from when our mouse-sized mammal ancestors were hunted by those things at night.
Zuider··on The Hammerhead Worm
Spider, spider, spider, I sprayed you with bug spray...
Zuider··on FastGPT: A fast, full search, AI answering engine
How old is your most recent data?

>The most recent data I have access to is from 2023.

What is the latest major world event?

>The latest major world event is the return of major war in 2022.

Name a major world event in 2023.

>The launch of SpaceX's Starship rocket, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built.

Zuider··on FastGPT: A fast, full search, AI answering engine
Impressed with the speed and clarity of the responses. It says the latest data it can access is from 2021.
Zuider··on Delphi 11 and C++Builder 11 Community Editions Released
Borland released a Delphi compiler for Linux in the late 90s named Kylix, discontinued in 2011. However, it was not successful for a number of reasons, notably that there were better, free IDEs available, there were many compiler errors, and poor integration with GDB. For this reason, developers found it frustrating to use, and it had poor uptake. Even so, Borland had spent so much trying to make Kylix work that it contributed significantly to the company's ultimate collapse.
Page 1 of 19Next →