Viewing profile — Pinus

For those HN readers who are not stationery junkies: The “real” Blackwing pencils went out of production... I don’t know when, but it must be at least 15 years ago, probably longer…

If I remember correctly, a recent Gallup in Sweden indicated that about 25 % do not take calls from any unknown number. I don’t know whether this result has been corrected to take …

According to Zawinski’s law, I expect curl to implement IMAP before long. (Checks docs) Oh.

More advanced slide rules typically have a set of “folded” scales, that can sometimes save a calculation from ending up off scale. In theory, these should be offset by half the sca…

The slide transition at 6:16 took me by surprise. =) Chap needs to have his suit jacket fixed, though... that collar gap!

Did anyone ever actually use trigraphs or digraphs in C? All I ever saw in Sweden (where the most commonly used seven-bit character encoding lacked brackets, braces, backslash and …

I remember seeing more or less the same bug 20 years ago... "Calling" process did connect, write, close. "Answering" process did accept, write("hello"), read, close. One of them go…

As for the "who would want that", I think the use case for that kind of printer today is slow logging. With a laser printer that outputs a page at a time, if you log one line per d…

Unfortunately, the plain text does not look good, and does not offer good control of the typesetting. At least, nearly all markdown I see is almost unreadable in its “raw” state. I…

I finally got around to it myself. Worked just fine. (VS Code, Github Copilot, Claude Haiku 4.5).

If you just toss the image at one of those newfangled AI thingamajigs (Copilot, Claude, whatever) and say "Compile this C++ program", does it work? Someone must have tried it by no…

Thanks for writing this! I remember reading about dBase II as a kid, and now that I’m (much!) older and actually using some of the databases of today, I have sometimes wondered wha…

The problem I always run into when I try something like this, is that I mostly (there are exceptions) use paper as a data processing medium (as opposed to a data recording medium).…

As far as I can remember, most mail servers were fairly sane about that sort of thing, even back in the 90’s when this stuff was introduced. However, there were always these more o…

From what I have understood, a significant part of the reason why Sweden scrapped its nuke program last time around, was that we found out that nukes pose more questions than they …

Obviously, it has to eventually build and run if there’s to be any point to it, but is it necessary that every, or even any, step along the way builds and runs? I imagine some sort…

I haven’t studied the project that this is a comment on, but: The article notices that something that compiles, runs, and renders a trivial HTML page might be a good starting point…

We _have_ standardized on Earth circumferences for length, only we divide by 40 million to make the numbers more sane, and got the measurement slightly wrong!

You take a language designed around the limitations of 1970’s computers and the absence of limitations of Donald Knuth’s brain, and then you build a document system on top of that.…

Meanwhile, Cambridge has, or at least had a few years ago, at least one combined pedestrian/cattle tunnel (there was a fence down the middle!) under a major road.

If you want something to hang on your wall, an original strip is coming up for auction in Stockholm more or less as I write. The bid is currently at over 1 MSEK (100kUSD)... https:…

For the built-in float type in Python, the behaviour is a bit funny: >>> nan=float('nan') >>> a=[nan] >>> nan in a True >>> any(nan==x for x in a) False (Because the `in` operator …

I thought there was something about the king of the UK having to ask permission to enter the City of London, but apparently that is a misunderstanding ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

I thought "this feels like Univers" when I saw the text. A quick check, and it turned out to be URW Classic Sans, a font that I had not heard about, but which is apparently a Unive…

My IT department blocks me from seeing this page. I suppose they wish to preserve my sanity, by shielding me from yet another config-language spec. =)