stefncb

I'm aware I was mean and maybe that wasn't right, so I'm genuinely sorry for that. My point stands anyway.

Human empathy in action.

Xe's. And as a response to your previous comment, it's not preference so much as completely ignoring someone's personality and instead assuming one based on some stereotype. And I'm sorry if that upsets you but you can't "prefer" to ignore someone because of gender or personality; I thought humans already concluded that's not a Good Thing. Get over yourself.

I somewhat agree with the sentiment, in the sense that I also don't enjoy tech in that way. But we're all different, and the fact that we enjoy things in different ways shouldn't mean that we can't listen to and learn from each other. The author is a very knowledgeable person that consistently writes really good articles.

As an aside, don't put everyone in the same bucket, it's really not great for e.g. trans people that don't want to be associated with that kind of tech enthusiasm. This is like the new variant of strict gender roles, not fun.

Fair enough.

I learned the chords very quickly, but everyone works differently. What kind of feedback exactly would you expect from it? I can't immediately think of anything that would make it much better. I guess animations could help, but then they might just be distracting.

I think the main thing people get confused by besides the chording is the teleporting of the cursor, but then you realize it's actually really useful once you get used to it (at least I did).

That's fair and I share the sentiment to some degree, especially in "regular" systems. In the time period I used plan 9 I quickly got used to it though, and the method of interaction made me a bit slower and much more considerate. I liked it a lot. I still miss it. I'll probably try it again some time.

Think about it a different way: the regex thing can only deal with unary numbers, like your computer can only deal with binary. It's really no different. I'm not sure if you can write a decimal-to-unary converter in regex but I reckon it's possible. At least using the non-regular regex like the original prime program did.

It is, but for what it's worth using the mouse is much more pleasant than what we're used to ime. It's weird at first, especially with the teleporting thing but it works really well.

Also, if you're gonna try it do it either with a proper three-button mouse or with a large-ish and easy to press scroll wheel button. Otherwise it's really frustrating.

I agree, except for the SQLite thing; the code is fully public domain and the license is safely ignorable. The reason it exists in the first place is for corporations to have some formal license to buy if they have an internal policy requiring it. They wrote it mostly as a joke.

Moore even later admitted that he made an insane guess for marketing.

People don't usually use them informally but it's technically incorrect not to use them. You'll mostly see them in books and articles.

Okay I admit my reply wasn't that good. I'll take another shot:

I think it's ignorant to assume that everyone on hacker news lives in a developed country and makes a lot of money. The statement was completely unnecessary, and could've been much more useful if it instead said "if you can afford one".

> if you are on this forum, you can mostly likely afford one

...what?

In this particular instance you'd have to disambiguate with "I have" or "I had", I alone would mean the wrong thing.

The solution is to not use the reader and instead write a parser yourself. S-Expressions are really simple, you should be able to do that quite easily.

The average upvote count for comments here is 5, anecdotally. On reddit it can be in the dozens, even hundreds depending on subreddit. My abandoned reddit account I had for 2 years had 39k karma, and I wasn't obsessed.

Someone else posted this link:

https://reddark.untone.uk/

Loads instantly for me. Seems to be the same website.

I agree with you completely. And a bigger annoyance than generating headers is actually reading them; C is really not a pleasant format to parse.

You don't need stable syscalls. Instead of exposing libc as a dynamic library with a questionable ABI, make a stable ABI and expose interface files that contain function names and parameters. You can easily parse these files and generate code for any language to interface with the system.

You can do this with syscalls, you can do this with dynamic libraries, or you can do it with IPC. The point is that it's completely language agnostic and not a pain to parse and use.

Why is it so strange that someone ignored a convention?

The difference is that states require you to follow the rules, but you can choose what language you want to use yourself. I don't need to know Java if I want to use Lisp, and you don't need to know Lisp if you want to use Java. Yes, stuff will need to be rewritten. If you want choice you trade efficiency for it. I'm okay with that.

If everyone uses the "proven" libraries and languages and whatever we'll have no innovation. I don't want to live in a rigid world where we somehow ended up choosing a set of things and nobody uses anything else; I want to see more software written in weird languages. Arguments that go like "but nobody is gonna learn a whole language to contribute to your stuff" are depressing - if it's good, I, like many others, would. Without experiments like these we'd still be in the 60s using COBOL because it's "industry proven" or "battle tested" or "blazingly fast" or whatever. That world is boring.

This is Hacker News after all.

Please explain yourself then. This kind of criticism is very unproductive and demoralizing to people who put hard work into making something.

I'm not for or against either side, but I was put off by your comment.

And that's fine. Choice is good. IMO the problem isn't that there are a lot of things to choose from, it's that there are a lot of things on top of each other. Stuff on top of stuff on top of stuff.

I personally wouldn't want to live in a world in which I could only use "one of these 5 languages", whatever those are. But I would love to live in a world where things weren't so deep in abstraction and complexity. These are two very different problems.

This isn't all that different from a four stroke, at some level. With a piston engine you lubricate from below, the oil never getting above the rings. Practically some does and gets burned away, but that's negligible usually. Anyway, the seals on the liquidpiston engine supposedly do the same, keeping the oil from leaking around the seals (in a significant quantity anyway; I'm sure it's higher than a four stroke though).

Here's what their webpage says:

> The seals do not experience centrifugal forces, and can be lubricated directly by metering small amounts of oil directly to the sealing surface through the housings, which means that oil consumption can be reduced to levels potentially comparable to that of a 4-stroke piston engine (essentially negligible).

Obviously take all this with a grain of salt. I haven't read any practical studies on this.

If you look at an image, you can see the three apex seals on the stator, which is shaped the same way as a wankel rotor. The rotor of the liquidpiston engine is shaped similarly to the wankel stator and has no seals. It's almost the same just turned inside-out.

It's effectively an inside-out wankel, so the seals are stationary. This is a much easier problem to solve, and now you don't need to throw oil in the combustion chamber to lubricate the moving seals.

Semantics. CL is extremely dynamic and has separate symbol namespaces, Scheme has more rigid types, Clojure has a lot of stuff built around immutability and replaced the general use of lists with arrays, Fennel has lua types and semantics, Janet is very small and portable, and adds a lot of small nice things.

Each of these feels completely different to program in, and it's mostly not about the standard library.

I assume his point was that there's no technical reason for C to not support it.

I honestly liked the whitespace significant operator precedence.