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vandyswa

156 karma · joined October 17, 2012

Author of VSTa OS as well as ForthOS. Currently developing a natural language system with deep semantic processing.
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vandyswa··on Recreational Programming
Painful website, tho
vandyswa··on Hang on to Your Firefox
Yes, uBlock Origin. How can that not be _the_ killer app for surviving with your sanity when (trying to) view the modern web?
vandyswa··on DMARC has been public since 2012 but most company domains still don't enforce it
DMARC, just like SPF before it, solves nothing. The spammers adapt. And unlike SPF, DMARC has an enormous technology surface area. Its failure modes are legion, and each one is tedious to run down to resolution. Which just returns you to something which never pays the rent anyway.
vandyswa··on [dead]
He has issues with AI dev policies. Personally, I forked at 5.7 due to bloat. Each of us has our red line, apparently.
vandyswa··on Show HN: Audiomass – a free, open-source multitrack audio editor for the web
What's a waveform box and how does one select it?
vandyswa··on I prefer OG style websites – what are yours?
Here in the Seattle area ferry schedules can matter. I cooked up this webapp, 4.5k bytes to load the front page, another 1/2k per destination you query.

Web technologies call out to the minimalist in me, but I appear to be in the minority.

vandyswa··on Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
When I wrote the login program for my VSTa microkernel, I took a page from the CDC side of the world--it echoes a _random_ (but small, non-zero) number of *'s. So you get feedback, but indeed peering over your shoulder will not disclose password length.

And yes, it remember how many it echoes so backspace works correctly.

vandyswa··on EVi, a Hard-Fork of Vim
Same motivation, different generation. I carry my own fork of vim 5.7, from around 2000. It did what I needed, and did it well, and I could already see where it was going.

SMH at what I see in it now!

vandyswa··on Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
Yes, I'm glad to see a comment on Prolog. I think of it as _the_ foundational programming language for solving such problems. It isn't so much that it's a back propagation language; it's just that, based on which variables are bound at a given point, it will go forward deductively, or backwards inductively.
vandyswa··on Making RSS More Fun
To me, it feels like most feed readers are made by people who don't use RSS, and just exercise their feed reader on a few feeds. I seem to be at 211 feeds with (currently) 13,000 cached entries, organized across a couple dozen categories.

A reader where you'll click into the body under a headline only 1-5% of the time is a totally different beast.

vandyswa··on Inside Amazon's engineering culture: Lessons from their senior principals
With Amazon layoff blood running in the gutters today, I'm sure their PR people shook the tree to get something nice to drop onto the interwebitudes.
vandyswa··on Public trust demands open-source voting systems
A solid starting point, but it's easy to lose sight of the other critical part of the puzzle--integrity of the voting rolls. High quality vote tabulation needs to start from voters, where _only_ legitimate voters vote, and each only votes (at most) once, after which yes, their vote is accurately tabulated.
vandyswa··on Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour
Yes, I understand the C++ aspect, but I was never a C++ coder, and D "fit in my hand" in a way which made me certain that its creator had coded extensively in C and understood the aspects which made it so perfect for its time. It really felt like D, not D++ to me.

(Oh, disclosure, I'm just a D user, no organizational or financial interests here.)

vandyswa··on Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour
FWIW, another take on "C Alternative" is the D programming language:

https://wiki.dlang.org/Tutorials

Comparatively mature, there's even a freeware book which is quite good:

http://www.ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html

vandyswa··on Doge Put a College Student in Charge of Using AI to Rewrite Regulations
Is there any sign of its effectiveness (or lack thereof)? It seems like the world of dense regulatory language may actually be amenable to such techniques. If a (presumably bright) college person driving the tool gives good results--who cares?
vandyswa··on Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots [showcase]
I have a static web page with a table of A href's. Source controlled under git. Problem solved.
vandyswa··on Recommendation for non-DOS/Unix open source OS outside x86/X64
RSX-280 for the Z280 CPU:

https://github.com/hperaza/RSX280

Nothing like DOS. Nothing like UNIX.

vandyswa··on Married Women Could Be Stopped from Voting Under Save Act
Assuming this act even moved forward (big IF), "bugs" like this show up in first drafts of bills all the time. They'd do a little research, then apply a fix. Amusing that the "coverage" didn't seem interested in "how could this easily be addressed?".
vandyswa··on I miss Vim
I'm that old guy who married his highschool sweetheart and never looked back. I'll be sticking with vim 5.7 until the day I die:

https://sources.vsta.org:7100/vim57/index

vandyswa··on How Unix spell ran in 64kb RAM
This spell check must have come later. The original spell check burst the words of the document, and sort -u'd them:

makewords sentence | lowercase | sort | unique | mismatch

vandyswa··on The genesis of today's recruiting crisis (2023)
A nice limited hangout. Within the suspended reality field of the current USA military, the loss of a warrior culture must not be addressed. In fact, hidden. You are richly rewarded to place emphasis on almost anything else.
vandyswa··on RFC 35140: HTTP Do-Not-Stab (2023)
RFC's operate under the IETF. RFC's are developed under some specific group, and you can join that group, the business is generally conducted on email. There are (well, were back when I participated) in-person meetings, but attendance there was not mandatory.
vandyswa··on U.S. women are outpacing men in college completion in every major group
It's sad that women are dominating in accrual of debt to purchase something where the actual value is drifting downward rapidly. Yes, there are places demanding the credential, but they're entering the region of danger where what they actually are selecting is people with poor cost/benefit analysis skills.
vandyswa··on The economy is going great, except for the housing market
Just scratching my head on this "great" economy. Brutal food prices, energy prices, car prices, commodity prices. Lots of "jobs" that pay less with fewer or no benefits. All the side streets and park-n-ride lots with campers. And the federal debt around $35 trillion with debt service bigger than our bloated military budget?

I get it, for this author the loudest squeak is housing cost. But he really needs to also work for a big picture.

vandyswa··on Let Google decide
If at all possible, have a family lawyer. You just won't believe how helpful it is in some of these edge cases to have an officer of the court able to attest based on personal knowledge.
vandyswa··on Cassie LaBelle: "eBay completely destroyed my life"
I got the DEA call/email--I let our family lawyer deal with it, and it came to nothing. The crazy thing is that these pill presses, from a 3D printing perspective, are an absolutely trivial object. I'm glad that the drug war is going so well that there only remains the persection of certain shapes of plastic. (irony)
vandyswa··on Ask HN: Do 10DLC Requirements make it impossible for hobby projects to send SMS?
Yes, after the third time around where they wanted to review my business filing and my corporate web site... I punted.
vandyswa··on I got everything off the cloud: I'm now paying 10x LESS money
This discussion is interesting, but I'm always cautious viewing discussion when an argument contrary to the interests of a very, very, very large industry are in play.
vandyswa··on The best browser bookmarking system is files
My own solution is along these lines. I have a static html page on my personal server; that's the home for all my browsers. (It's under git, of course.) Just flip to my ongoing mosh session to my server, and a trip into vim can add/move/delete anything desired. It's currently an HTML table, which tells you how long this technique has been serving me well.
vandyswa··on Bug squash: An underrated interview question
I've done the equivalent of this by asking them to describe an interesting bug they've encountered in past lives; how it came up, how they hunted it, how they fixed it. By listening to them describe the work, asking questions, and following their thought processes, you can come to a fairly good hire/no from this single walk-through.

I know, it's short and humane, so not a good fit for current Sillycon Valley culture.

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