aag

I love Waymo. Using the word "impact" is unfortunate.

Thank you for saying that. I regularly attend the International Conference on Functional Programming, which grew out of the LISP and Functional Programming conference. Except for the Scheme Workshop, which is the reason I attend, it might as well be called the International Conference on Static Types. Almost all of the benefits of functional programming come from functional programming itself, not from static types, but one would never get that impression from the papers presented there. The types are all that anyone talks about.

Yes, especially in a city like San Francisco where so many cultures come together: the Prius culture, the BMW culture, the Subaru culture, etc.

There are situations where it is allowed:

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-25251/

Me, too. I like masonry layout too much to wait for CSS to solve the problem, so I've been waiting to remove the last 1.3KB of Javascript from my home page since 2019.

Thank you to everyone who is making this happen.

Does anyone have more information on this sentence from the second paragraph?:

> Alphabet themselves reportedly see the writing on the wall, developing what appears to be a new browser separate from Chrome.

I can't get that page to respond. Did you mean <https://remotestorage.io/>?

<rant>I've never had confidence in MacOS or Apple software in general, and especially not in Apple Photos. Photos beachballs constantly, even when I do simple things like creating a new folder or naming a photo. It loses keystrokes almost every time I type a folder or photo name. No other program does this on the same Mac, which is an M4 Pro with 64GB RAM and terabytes of SSD. I know that it's not a problem with the hardware because the previous Mac Mini, which was well equipped, had the same problem for years. Reconstructing the Photos database didn't help.

Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups.

Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich.

I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere.

How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me.

Not recommended.</rant>

I have owned at least one of every Pebble watch since the beginning, have written watch faces for myself (but never posted them on the store), have received my Pebble 2 Duo, and am looking forward to receiving my Pebble Time 2. I am thrilled that Eric Migicovsky and his team are bringing the Pebble back to life. It was amazing that the Rebble team kept the watches alive all this time. But it's all open source, and doing that shouldn't give Rebble any kind of special say. There's no reason that "there has to be a future for Rebble in there" or that Rebble has to be "the core of the community." That sounds like nothing more than bruised egos.

Make sure you know about exit code 125 to your test script. You can use it in those terrible cases where the test can't tell, one way or another, whether the failure you seek happened, for example when there is an unrelated build problem.

I wrote a short post on this:

https://speechcode.com/blog/git-bisect

I like the modern social contract and hotels, but to be fair, AirBNB is inverting what had already been inverted. In some sense, AirBNB is returning to the old model before hotels were everywhere. A traveler would reach a new town and ask for lodging in someone's home. In many countries, providing lodging to strangers is still the norm.

It's there, but the documentation is weak.

The release notes from long ago when that back end was released are here, and give some detail:

https://share.google/xmUnDhC7lndujD7TI

This isn't a perfect solution, but you can bookmark your YouTube subscriptions page.

The blog post explains that it's more than that. Bounds checking, in particular, costs more for reasons having to do with browser implementations, for example, rather than for architectural reasons.

Writing a GC that performs well often involves making decisions that are tightly coupled to the processor architecture and operating system as well as the language implementation's memory representations for objects. Using a GC that is already present can solve that problem.

The "CPU" in every browser already has one. This lets garbage-collected languages use that one. That's an enormous savings in code size and development effort.

Does anyone know whether the exception handling implementation supports restartable exceptions like Common Lisp's and Scheme's?

Not including GC would have been a mistake. Having to carry a complete garbage collector with every program, especially on platforms like browsers were excellent ones already exist, would have been a waste.

And don't tell me I have an appointment for 2pm so I should show up at 1:45pm. That means the appointment is at 1:45pm. Just say so.

What a wonderful essay. I learned to type on a manual Underwood typewriter with a carriage return lever. I don't miss it, but there was something so satisfying about moving that lever and feeling the whole carriage move. It meant that I had typed another line, and had made progress. The thing I truly don't miss was not being able to afford a new ribbon, and having to move back over every character and type it again to make sure that it showed up because the ribbon was so dry. Or not being able to undo mistakes.

I have never found a hand dryer that works better than the Dyson ones. They actually dry my hands quickly, and they don't deafen me in the process unlike some of their competitors.

Hear, hear! Especially in software, patents are an indication of stagnation, resistance to innovation, and rent-seeking, monopolistic behavior. Using their number as a proxy for innovation is backwards.

I seem to remember that Microsoft's initial implementation used a field in the protocol in an incompatible way to encode that it was a different implementation. I remember people being annoyed at them for deliberately screwing up future compatibility. Does anyone remember the details of this?

His music appears in the soundtrack for the beautiful comedy movie Being There, with Peter Sellers, along with some lovely matching pieces by Stephen Edwards.

The term "hacker," even in the computer field, originally had a larger scope than computer security. It had a more philosophical definition, too. I host a copy of the Jargon File[1], compiled by Guy Steele et al., on my web site. It defined "hacker" as[2]:

  HACKER [originally, someone who makes furniture with an
  axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of
  programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities,
  as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the
  minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically,
  or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing
  about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating
  hack value (q.v.). 4. A person who is good at programming
  quickly. Not everything a hacker produces is a hack. 5. An
  expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does
  work using it or on it; example: "A SAIL
  hacker". (Definitions 1 to 5 are correlated, and people
  who fit them congregate.) 6. A malicious or inquisitive
  meddler who tries to discover information by poking
  around.  Hence "password hacker", "network hacker".

I'm guessing that PG had this broader definition in mind when Hacker News was started.

No history of the term "hacker," however brief, would be complete with a reference to The UNIX-HATERS Handbook[3].

[1] https://speechcode.com/jargon/

[2] https://speechcode.com/jargon/jargon.info.Hacker.html

[3] https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

I got tired of using Markdown and Org mode for writing web pages last year. They're so limited, and so full of odd gotchas and limitations. Instead, I started writing raw HTML, but with a post-processing step to add titles, headers, footers, and CSS, and to do macro-like things, e.g. insert pull quotes and YouTube viewers. But raw HTML is not great, either. I'm now working on an editor that lets me use Emacs-style commands and key bindings (e.g. character, paragraph, sentence, and word motion, deletion, and transposition; Emacs-style undo/redo; incremental search; and case conversions) to edit HTML in a WYSIWYG view. The new editor does it all in a Webkit-based HTML view built with Tauri. Editing this way is so much more pleasant and more powerful. I plan to publish it under an MIT license once it's good enough.

I once kicked Larry Page himself out of a meeting room because he had run over. I admired him for not making a special case for himself.

The Economist has articles on that subject already. They do their homework. Here's just one:

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/04/24/who-will-...

Thank you very much for recommending the Legentibus app. I've just installed it, and I'm already enjoying it. It looks nice, has just the right amount of introductory material, and runs smoothly, which already puts it head and shoulders above most apps. I'm looking forward to diving in.

I had four years of Latin in junior high school and high school, and have been trying to revive my skills using Duolingo for five minutes a day for a few years. It will be fun to try something new.

I've lived in the US all my life, and I've never heard anything remotely like someone needing to bribe the police to help in a situation like that. In fact, I have a friend who is a retired police officer and who commanded the SWAT team in a major US city. His team was dispatched more often than not to help people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.