Hacker News Reader

monistaon Tcl/Tk 9.1

> The biggest early selling point of Tcl was Tk

You're not that old, are you? :) Before www, expect was the way to go.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect>

monistaon ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

I don't use the VPN, but I still happily use their privacy-oriented (Firefox-based) Mullvad browser.

https://github.com/mullvad/mullvad-browser/

monistaon Chuck Norris has died

Strange if you never heard about Bruce <s>Lee</s> Schneier.

monistaon Chuck Norris has died

Chuck Norris haven't died, he just went to carry out the Last Judgement of God (ant probably torture Satan on the way).

monistaon U.S. Capabilities Are Showing Signs of Rot

Have you guys tried to read it with javascript turned off, as I always do? Works for me.

monistaon Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise

Learning from fiction? Let's learn from the Dune then and start Butlerian jihad already.

monistaon IBM AI ('Bob') Downloads and Executes Malware

Funny that Yandex's AI agent is called Alice.

monistaon North Korea executing more people for watching foreign films and TV, UN finds

I believe the logic is simple, the same as with advertising illegal drugs: lies can be seductive and do harm. HK officials make people consider any outer information as lies-filled propaganda, and thus justify the prohibition.

monistaon North Korea executing more people for watching foreign films and TV, UN finds

Not about to defend NK regime, but to make it fair, and not to play "they are bad guys, thus we're good guys".

First, doubts of people not right away believing any news about NK are justified, given how many lies about NK, like executing by feeding to dogs, were spread. So don't take them as NK defenders, it may be just a healthy skepticism.

Second, note that NK kills their citizens for what is illegal in their country, which is gross, but in 2019 Americans killed North Koreans for what was pretty legal, and got away with it [1].

Third, it looks hypocritic to read how horrible is that people got prosecuted for just watching videos. We all know that in so called civilized democracies, people's life can be ruined (luckily not taken) for possessing illegal video materials, it's just legality differs by jurisdictions.

West's true advantage is that we're much more shy in capital punishments, however we're still far from humanistic ideals, and I believe concentrating only on NK regime crimes lets the mindset "they being so bad, then we're not so bad after all".

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy-seal-north-korea-...

monistaon North Korea executing more people for watching foreign films and TV, UN finds

You should also mention that capitalism is evil (so is everyone who believes to it), otherwise it's lie by omission.

monistaon North Korea executing more people for watching foreign films and TV, UN finds

Given that NK hackers have probably much more incentives to do their work well than western ones, you shouldn't wonder that they do.

monistaon Show HN: I made a website that makes you cry

Made me laugh, thank you! Laughing is healthy, though should be taken more often than once a week. For the record, it gave me https://player.vimeo.com/video/994963176

monistaon How to Incapacitate Google Tag Manager and Why You Should (2022)

If you block Google Tag Manager, you probably also want to block Yandex Metrics and Cloudflare Insights.

monistaon What happens when clergy take psilocybin

And it's a very bad practice. No experiment ever should be taken without an assistant (sitter in this case).

monistaon Why Claude Code feels like magic?

Would it surprise you seeing eg. seeing on the front page articles about both Nobel prize winners and Darwin award winners? What is intelligence, after all? We expect AI to be as smart as Einstein or Terens Tao, but so far, we see that LLMs are pretty good at behaving just like humans, that is, most times stupid.

monistaon Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

> I would indeed expect an upright 'd'. It's an operator, not a variable. I don't recognize the tradition you're mentioning.

That's strange. I've never seen a math article in English with upright 'd' differential, only have seen it in German and Spanich articles. It's also math italic in TeX (you can check Knuth's TeXbook).

monistaon Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

Typst authors being germans, one can hardly accuse them in the "everyone uses English" attitude. Typst `dif` math operator (as in dx/dt) produces upright 'd', quite unexpected to ones used to slanted 'd' tradition.

monistaon Robert Elder's Guide to GNU Coreutils

Speaking of mystical abbreviations — CAR, CADR, CDR !

monistaon Robert Elder's Guide to GNU Coreutils

    seq 10 | paste -sd, -

monistaon Lessons I wish I had learned before teaching differential equations [pdf] (1997)

And they were right imho. Having a clear notion of a subject is good for both physics and mathematics, but what's good for physics or engineering, is not enough for math, in math, you also need rigorous reasoning, or you'll fall into subtle mistakes.

monistaon Lessons I wish I had learned before teaching differential equations [pdf] (1997)

Note though, that nonstandard analysis isn't compatible with more "intuitionistic" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_determinacy (in place of axiom on choice), which free you from Banach–Tarski paradox and have some other appealing properties.

monistaon Scientists create artificial protein that can degrade PET plastics in bottles

It's good news, but reminded me at once Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (1971) by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, where a bacteria made to utilize plastic went wild and started destroying wire isolation everywhere, causing multiple crashes etc.

monistaon No dogs were harmed in the making of this app

I read is as a reference to https://xkcd.com/242/

monistaon Cloudflare is free of CAPTCHAs; Turnstile is free for everyone

Can you please elaborate, how exactly running from fresh container would stop tracking? As I see it, once you get fingerprinted, running from the same environment keeps your fingerprint (excluding (super)cookies, which you could clear inside your browser as well), thus not preventing tracking.

monistaon Show HN: Terminal Based Wikipedia

Obviously, just use Alt-X butterfly ...

monistaon HTML is all you need to make a website

I find some irony in that some 20 years ago, while there were pure-html web apps, eg. web-chats using <meta refresh...>, there were also java applets (remember the <applet> tag?), which were fast and used common inet-family sockets. I believe, they were mostly booed because security and privacy concerns. The applets were small (bytecode, so no interpreter required) and allowed using same language (statically typed) for both frontend and backend. Now, instead of making them more secure, we have xmlhttprequest, web sockets, node and typescript or webasm with minified and obfuscated scripts. Well, evolution paths are often curly.

monistaon HTML is all you need to make a website

Now, with all the <div><div><div><div>div</div></div></div>s in doesn't look so useful ...

monistaon Languages Pre-Fortran

For some reason they don't mention ukrainian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_programming_language which, according to some sources, was used to program soviet ballistic missiles.

monistaon 'Be' is nice, end of story

I wanted to point to FOSS (GPL3) alternative ProcessHacker [1] which I'm using for years, and found out that their github link [2] now redirects to systeminformer [3], looks like repo rebranding, wasn't able to find it mentioned anywhere though.

[1]: https://processhacker.sourceforge.io/

[2]: https://github.com/processhacker/processhacker/

[3]: https://github.com/winsiderss/systeminformer/

monistaon Reading Soviet Sci-Fi at the End of the World

The genre he works in is often described as hyper-realism.