Hacker News Reader

jll29on SOML – A Config Format for Humans

Looks like Windows *.ini format except ":" instead of "="...

jll29on Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN

  # order selected volumes
  # bulk order all books on this site

(you could use Amazon affiliate links to help finance the site.)

jll29on Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN

Feature suggestion: once copyright is up, link to a free online version (e.g. on archive.org, or similar online collections)

jll29on Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN

Great site, thank you for sharing.

Now, all we need is diff-book-order(1), a command which takes as input your personal "library.bib" file and it orders all books mentioned on the parent's site that are not already part of the personal library.

jll29on How to save the UK taxpayer £130M a year (by switching to Linux)

Linux has come a long way, both in terms of matured installation processes as well as friendlier Desktop and GUI applications.

In Germany, some cities have migrated to Linux successfully.

Linux TCO is pretty good if you take a long-term view, because it is simpler and more predictable than some of its alternatives, and the organization can develop what it needs when it wants instead of following one single external corporation's roadmap.

jll29on Is there a temp phone number like temp email?

https://tokly.app/?utm_campaign=international-calls-search-t...

jll29on Tiny Little Office

Definitely there is a need, as you say, but the Internet lacks a cross-site (DB-like) transaction capability. Hotel bookings and flight leg bookings are interdependent, and you will want to lock them in (transaction "COMMIT") once the complete path has been validated as available; if, in contrast, one flight leg or one hotel night are unavailable, the whole plan path may have to be cancelled.

Such a tool would be enormously helpful even for individuals traveling (e.g. business people or scientists visiting customers or trade fairs), which is important as this massively increases market size/potential user base scale.

jll29on Arena Allocators in C

See Sections 5+6 in https://drh.github.io/cii/toc.html

jll29on 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

This does not have to be an "either-or": you can be sovereign and still interoperate with others, while retaining your own infrastructre to fall back on or in parallel.

jll29on Knuth reward check

I also got one for catching DEK out for claiming "Alan Turing broke the Enigma".

That claim goes to the Polish cryptoanalyst Marian Rejewski instead, of course (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski); what Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers did was automate the breaking, which was important because it had to be done again every day (due to the many combinations of configurations of the Enigma).

jll29on I tried to move my notes out of Emacs. I failed. Again

plain text:

- longevity

- portability

- ease of processing

- cannot "break"

- viewable and editable with anything

Any other way is only acceptable if it can export to plain text.

jll29on Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years

It's a great idea, and the OP and donors are making a big difference. While I was a doctorate student, I supported a Romanian orphanage (run by Americans I never met except via email) with parcels of medicine and stationary (basic stuff e.g. anti-fever pills, coloring pens etc.). Since I never sent any cash, I was not worried about being scammed.

I've also been financially supporting three grassroots projects to help children in three places, namely Lomé, Togo, Caruaru, Brazil and Bhopal, India (via https://www.fkb-bza.de, sorry, Website in German only, a charity that has the advantage of being free of any overhead - thanks to people I personally know and trust that travel there regularly, paying for their own tickets).

Thought experiment (putting back the geek hat on): I wonder if the OP's activity could be made viral and scaled up across the continent:

While there are more donors do:

- for each African country

- pick a seed city c

- pick a seed student s from c

- assign donor d to s to fund s' education

When paying for s.o. education, receiving students pledge to pay it forward by becoming a donor once they get a job that permits to do so or to return to become a teacher for a while.

On top of that, students form or join an online community to support each other and get to know each other (peace is as important as education!).

jll29on Penguin Mail – open-source Rust email client for Linux with AI

Looking for something as simple as PINE but with a fast full-text and fielded search.

Should be TUI-based and for Linux + Mac.

jll29on JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025

I hope they have something great up their sleeve... would be a shame if that gem of a company got killed by AI.

jll29on A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

For completeness' sake, here's also a history of competitor REUTERS' terminal:

• https://www.thebaron.info/archives/technology/reuter-monitor...

• https://www.thebaron.info/archives/technology/reuters-techni...

jll29on A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

In finance, people who consider the cost of a Bloomberg terminal "expensive" are often considered "not serious" (small fish)... it has often been seen as a status symbol as well as a professional work tool.

jll29on A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

Not really. If you ran a restaurant instead, you may also have to buy a few thousand dollars worth of ingredients and pay thousands of dollars in salaries per year and renting a venue to make the revenue that you are making. Even a pizza delivery service may need a few thousand dollars a year for a car and its driver plus petrol, taxes, insurance. Relevant is not the cost of doing business, but the annual revenue and margins.

E.g. $32k cost of business to make $2bn revenue statistically approximates zero.

jll29on A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

Especially if you're the BOSS - you may have a terminal, but you may transact by telling your underlings what to do on your behalf.

jll29on A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

Also on the input side: for instance here is a cheat sheet for a small part of the available keyboard commands: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/documents/bloomberg-cheatsheet.pdf

jll29on A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

For instance, Bloomberg provide you with:

- real-time data on financial instrument prices;

- real-time news (own and syndicated);

- an email address (firstname.lastname@bloomberg.net) used to email and chat with other professionals on the Bloomberg network. This is like LinkedIn and WhatsApp combined for people in finance, and people can keep the address for two years after e.g. losing a job, so they can use the network to find a new role.

- analytical software: tools to calculate various KPIs to assess and analyze business opportunities.

- capability to transact: The BB terminal is not just an information system, it also permits you to buy and sell directly.

(My university has one BB terminal that MBA students can access and get training on.)

jll29on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops

https://www.einfachbacken.de/rezepte/flammkuchen-rezept-einf...

https://www.amazon.de/Federwei%C3%9Fer-selber-machen-einfach...

jll29on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops

They can heat the grapes and sell the juice, it's fantastic - I just got a 3 l canister of fresh grape juice to drink on the weekend (since it's harvest time for vineyards, fresh from its producer, no additives, no preservatives, not even filtered). The taste is unlike anything from this world - I'd compare it to liquid honey, which only goes to show what industrally processed stuff the shops are feeding us with.

jll29on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)

"Stratus ztC Endurance®

Stratus ztC Endurance extends fault tolerance to modern enterprise and operational environments with intelligent, predictive technology that prevents failures before they impact operations. Delivering up to *99.99999%* [my emphasis] availability, the platform combines proactive health monitoring, automated failover, redundancy, and simplified serviceability to keep applications continuously available and ensures that data stays protected.

Stratus ztC Endurance is ideal for organizations running mission-critical workloads that cannot tolerate downtime or data loss."

Source: https://www.penguinsolutions.com/en-us/solutions/fault-toler...

jll29on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)

Great story, thanks. I wish it said more about the architecture and also VOS.

Speaking of reliable beasts, I own(ed) a HP PA-RISC workstation that never crashed in six years, and it was even purchased refurbished (second hand, and educational rebate, and still the cost of a car in 1996 - but worth every penny).

I'd add "R.I.P. HP 9000 715/75" but of course she is STILL working now, twenty years later, and she is sitting right next to me (also got a second 715/100XC for spare parts in case on day they are needed).

jll29on In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life

Once a scientist, always a scientist.

Great reporting - reading this NYT article gives me a little bit of the excitement that I normally only get from reading Quanta Magazine.

jll29on Writing Efficient C++ Code (2013)

I think it has become EASIER: for instance, since C++23 Rust-like move semantics can be used, which provides the compiler with extra information that can be leveraged for the generation of better code.

Or take constexpr - it permits to move computations to compile time that are complex and in older versions either had to be done at runtime, or an ugly workaround had to be used (e.g. assigning a mysterious literal pre-computed in another run or by hand).

jll29on Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers

I loved writing Pascal and Modula-2 at the time, and using both for a while sure made me a better programmer. Pascal was an excellent educational tool, but for a decade had enormous business impact, too.

Most criticized things regarding Pascal e.g. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas... were already fixed by extension or coukd be fixed easily.

Its slight verbosity - somewhere between C and COBOL - arguably was a pro rather than a con.

Today, Ada and Julia seem to be the langages alive that resemble Pascal the most.

jll29on The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy

Italians need to make more babies - or there's going to be a serious pizza baker shortage by 2030!

(It follows straight from the general population decrease.)

jll29on Can gzip be a language model?

Yes: you can classify a test file by topic with gzip as follows:

  gzip -9 sports.txt   testfile.txt

  gzip -9 politics.txt testfile.txt

  gzip -9 business.txt testfile.txt

(ass. sports.txt politics.txt and business.txt are text docs pertaining from the sports, politics and business domains, respectively, and have equal size)

The test file belongs to the topic with the smallest size *.gz file.

Witten's group at Waikato uni were perhaps the first to work on this.

Also check out the Hutter prize if you are interested in this.

jll29on What happened to the Snowden archive

Two of my former colleagues (both Reuters journalists) were murdered by U.S. soldiers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=zYTxuW2vmzk

Then all the civilians that took care of their bodies were also killed, including children.

Then the Department of Defense then denied existing video coverage of the event (personal comm., Tom Glocer, J.D., former CEO and attorney, Reuters).

-> So homicide, mult. war crimes and lying.

I'll be eternally grateful to Manning and Assange for letting the truth come to light, and to all whistleblowers driven by their conscience and idealism.

But the most disturbing thing about this all is the dirty laughter of that helicopter crew. Seeing that video makes one ashamed to belong to the human species.