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tniemi

182 karma · joined March 5, 2018

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tniemi··on Lemmings CSS Animation
C64 demo "Rodents in the Attic" (2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbXIdK3o3NU

Explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ1atMUOUMU

tniemi··on Supermarket freezers across Europe hit by second suspected cyber-attack
This of course sucks, but I can easily imagine way worse wake-up calls for cybersecurity...
tniemi··on Domain hacks with unusual Unicode characters (2018)
Cyrillic `a` is a different charater than `a`: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(Cyrillic)
tniemi··on Writing Is Closer to Thought Than Code
"If a program can't rewrite its own code", he asked, "what good is it?"

(BTW, the poem like formatting was a happy accident.)

tniemi··on Iron Age salt-mining complex found beneath Hallstatt in Austria
It seems that the article is not very well linked. It is called "päre" in Finnish: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A4re
tniemi··on Eight Bits of Trust: eMudhra's CA keys cracked in milliseconds
Someone used the Dilbert random number generator. https://www.random.org/analysis/
tniemi··on A font recreated from photographs of classic Commodore 64 keycaps
The old versions of VIC-20 used a font called Microgramma.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1pjw7q6/t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgramma_(typeface)

tniemi··on Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome
Watching the example image load I had this flashback of the past, where images were 256 color interlaced GIFs, downloading slowly, line by line...
tniemi··on Type Safe Generic Data Structures in C (2025)
That `(1 ? (item) : (list)->payload)` was a neat trick. It gets optimized away, but the type comparison happens before that.

Still feels a bit like a party trick, but if it works...

tniemi··on In the wake of Tippett Studios’ closure, a digital archive appears online
Thank you for the link!

It is strange to see how low-poly the old models were: https://discmaster.textfiles.com/view/46859/!!-starship-troo...

tniemi··on Coltrane's Tone Circle
Here's an explanation of John Coltrane's "Giant Steps."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62tIvfP9A2w

tniemi··on Nvidia wants to put a watchdog chip next to every AI agent
It's probably just productivity paradox v2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

It takes time for decades old ways to change.

tniemi··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
Things are kind of under construction... We would like to publish our stories in book-on-demand format.

This is one of our early translation tests. I publish it here for a while for you: https://media.nimbus.fi/tero/for_hackernews/sleeping_childre... Please don't expect it to stay there forever.

It has the same heroine that is in our debut book: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbus_ja_t%C3%A4hdet Every short story has the same main characters visiting an another star and an another world.

Here's some of the local space that I generated from Gliese/Hipparcos dataset some 20 years ago. I'm trying to port our original LightWave starmaps to Blender: https://media.nimbus.fi/tero/nimbus/local_space.png

We should probably write a blog (blag) post about the hurdles of translating from a small (and not so well supported language) to English. Luckily my wife is way better in English than I am.

tniemi··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
Me and my wife (then my girlfriend) have written "realistic" space sci-fi in Finnish for over 20 years. Now with AI we are finally able to translate our stories to English. The quality starts to be there.

There are a lot of small languages in the world, and translation used to be extremely expensive. And there is never too much good space sci-fi.

(We don't write space battles or wars. Our style is slower and bit more philosophical. Light speed is the limit, and travel takes centuries.)

tniemi··on Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive
Historical reference: https://jargondb.org/glossary/dwim
tniemi··on My Ed(1) Toolbox
I used to use EDLIN on my MS/DOS days...

.

tniemi··on Claude 3 AI catches researchers testing it
The self portrait was a bit... pompous.

https://x.com/karinanguyen_/status/1764789887071580657?s=20

> The entire structure would be in constant flux, rotating, morphing, and rearranging itself into novel patterns never before seen, hinting at the unimaginable depth of intelligence operating within.

tniemi··on CSS Selectors: A Visual Guide
Now, create a similar page for XPath...
tniemi··on Ask HN: Do you still use a hand held/desktop calculator?
No. I use GNU Units, because it will alert me if I screw up with units in my calculations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Units
tniemi··on DotDict: A simple Python library to make chained attributes possible
Here's my personal finger exercise: https://pypi.org/project/talamus-relatable/

It allows references to another data structures.

tniemi··on How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
Mentioned here: UNIX: A History and a Memoir https://www.rulit.me/data/programs/resources/pdf/UNIX-A-Hist...

5.3 Early Formatters

The problem was that there was no interactive computer system like CTSS at Princeton; there weren’t any computer termi- nals either. All that was available was punch cards, which only supported upper case letters. I wrote Roff in Fortran (far from ideal, since Fortran was meant for scientific computation, not pushing characters around, but there were no other options) and I added a feature to convert everything to lower case while automatically capitalizing the first letter of each sentence. The resulting text, now upper and lower case, was printed on an IBM 1403 printer that could print both cases. Talk about bleeding edge! My thesis was three boxes of cards. Each box held 2,000 cards, was about 14 inches (35 cm) long and weighed 10 pounds (4.5 kg). The first 1,000 cards were the program and the other 5,000 were the thesis itself in Roff.

tniemi··on Remaking old computer graphics with AI image generation
You can teach the AI a new item/character. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4Mcuh38wyM
tniemi··on Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer
My absolute favourite is the "Beauty in the Beast" album. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_in_the_Beast Even if you do not know anything about music theory you will still feel the power of those strange and alien alternate tunings. Titular track: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2j1gy2
tniemi··on Ask HN: Alternatives to 1Password
We have the family password database in Google Drive. It works suprisingly well, and it haves file versioning.
tniemi··on Methane might be made by all living organisms
This could explain the Mars methane mystery.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/first-you-see-it-t...

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...

>Methane on Mars is expected to have a rather short lifetime – around 400 years – because it is broken down by ultraviolet light. Atmospheric mixing (for example, by winds) should quickly lead to a more or less uniform background concentration. But previous observations hint at seasonal variations in methane abundance, with concentrations varying with location and time. If this is correct, there must be an active source to replenish the supply and, at the same time, a relatively quick way of removing it in order to account for the apparent rise and fall in the measurements.

tniemi··on Typedefs
Does this compete with the "units" definition format? https://fossies.org/linux/units/definitions.units
tniemi··on Alone in a Crowded Milky Way
Like "Mail order CRISPR kits for everyone"?

The scary part is that there actually already is a web site that sells those...

tniemi··on “No, we’re telling everyone we are using Java”
Isn't Erlang the language that you can edit/patch while it is executing? I think hard typing would be extremely difficult in that kind of environment.
tniemi··on Speedrunning Windows 95
I would probably watch that. At least it would be better than most of the things on the telly.

Semi-oblig-xkcd: https://xkcd.com/284/

tniemi··on Can You Find the Bug in This Code?
Don't use "gonad" javascript, or just use semicolons.

With dangling balls: `(function(){})()`

No dangling balls: `(function(){}())`

https://gist.github.com/newswim/4668aef8a1f1bc0dabe8

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