Pinus

6 ms·

1.
by Pinus 6d ago
I suppose a graphite moderator would fit the description.
2.
by Pinus 21d ago
A font that takes some characteristics from certain kinds of renaissance-era handwriting. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Humanist_sans-serif_t... .
3.
by Pinus 1mo ago
Something similar is in place in Sweden. For landline numbers, it is of course easy. A number with, say, a Stockholm area code is not suddenly going to be in Nigeria. For mobiles it is trickier, because a Swedish mobile may very well be in
4.
by Pinus 1mo ago
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. (I have only been watching this from the outside, so don’t
5.
by Pinus 1mo ago
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 itself into account. :)
6.
by Pinus 2mo ago
According to Zawinski’s law, I expect curl to implement IMAP before long. (Checks docs) Oh.
7.
by Pinus 2mo ago
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 scale length, i.e. sqrt(10). However, since the folded scales a
8.
by Pinus 4mo ago
The slide transition at 6:16 took me by surprise. =) Chap needs to have his suit jacket fixed, though... that collar gap!
9.
by Pinus 4mo ago
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 vertical bar) was to just use the same code points and writi
10.
by Pinus 4mo ago
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 got ECONNRESET on Windows NT, bu
11.
by Pinus 5mo ago
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 day the power fails after 65 days, you lose the 65
12.
by Pinus 6mo ago
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’d much rather read manually formatted, monospaced, text. Th
13.
by Pinus 6mo ago
I finally got around to it myself. Worked just fine. (VS Code, Github Copilot, Claude Haiku 4.5).
14.
by Pinus 6mo ago
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 now – give us a report!
15.
by Pinus 7mo ago
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 what those older personal-computer databases looked like.
16.
by Pinus 7mo ago
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). Most of what I do on paper is messy, half-baked, wrong, tur
17.
by Pinus 8mo ago
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 or less motivated fears about some server somewhere running
18.
by Pinus 8mo ago
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 answer. Obviously, you need the nukes themselves, and a reli
19.
by Pinus 8mo ago
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 of iterative set-up where one component generates code, m
20.
by Pinus 8mo ago
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, and I would certainly agree with that when it’s humans wri
21.
by Pinus 8mo ago
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!
22.
by Pinus 9mo ago
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. What could possibly go wrong? =)
23.
by Pinus 10mo ago
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.
24.
by Pinus 10mo ago
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://auctionet.com/sv/events/891-the-
25.
by Pinus 11mo ago
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
26.
by Pinus 11mo ago
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/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation#Tem... ).
27.
by Pinus 11mo ago
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 Univers clone. (Not to be confused with URW Classico, w
28.
by Pinus 11mo ago
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. =)
29.
by Pinus 1y ago
This gets extra fun when you have a product which is actually named "My Card" (which, of course, is a bad idea to begin with, but...). Is it "Your My Card" or "My My Card"? French web sites seem to have lost th
30.
by Pinus 1y ago
I’m planning a trip to France right now, and it seems like half the websites in that country (for example, ratp.fr for Paris public transport info) require me to check a CloudFlare checkbox to promise that I am a human. And of those that do

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