mprovost

8 ms·

61.
by mprovost 2y ago
I really recommend his novel-in-verse "The Golden Gate". Such a literary accomplishment, and a real page-turner. Maybe it's hard to follow up when you have such an early success? Actually, I was introduced to it by Douglas Ho
62.
by mprovost 2y ago
In an alternative universe where someone other than Americans invented the popular character set, would emoticons have existed at all if computers had the capability to display Unicode glyphs from the start? It feels like still insisting on
63.
by mprovost 2y ago
Another comment was arguing that anything since POSIX is a "waste of time", presumably including the GNU extensions. (The BSD utilities were the first "user-friendly" alternatives to the original AT&T versions...)
64.
by mprovost 2y ago
Unions aren't a monopoly they're a democracy. After a democratic vote, the minority has to accept what the majority wants. Yes, sometimes voters make poor choices. New workers know about the union before they join. You don't
65.
by mprovost 2y ago
The TikTok ADHD community commonly refers to these as "doom boxes" (or "piles") which reflects both the sense of dread that they instill, while also being an acronym for "didn’t organize, only moved".
66.
by mprovost 2y ago
There are photos of Bob Dylan dipping his harmonica in a glass of (supposedly) whiskey before playing. I've always heard that it would make the wooden comb in the old Marine Band swell which made it airtight and produced a better sound
67.
by mprovost 2y ago
The GNU project didn't invent ls. The GNU coreutils (including ls) were originally new versions of either proprietary (AT&T) or BSD licensed utilities.
68.
by mprovost 2y ago
You don't need internet for everything... by definition these systems are connected to the grid by wires which can transmit a limited signal. Utilities in countries such as NZ have managed load for decades by turning hot water heaters
69.
by mprovost 2y ago
It's not the case that there were no alternative designs at the time that v6 was proposed. RFC 1385 described a backwards compatible Extended Internet Protocol which used IP Option headers to stuff in extra addressing space. https:&#x
70.
by mprovost 2y ago
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said private property; But on the back side it didn't say nothing; This land was made for you and me. -- Woody Guthrie
71.
by mprovost 2y ago
Looks like Screenstab [0] which was a previous Show HN [1]. [0] https://www.screenstab.com/editor/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34729849
72.
by mprovost 3y ago
The original distributed configuration system from the 1980s, Sun's NIS (aka yp) was also driven by makefiles.
73.
by mprovost 3y ago
So glad to see that "The Dog of the South" made the list. Someone on HN recommended it years ago which is how I discovered it so I'll pass it along. Certainly meets the definition of a "Great American Novel" with th
74.
by mprovost 3y ago
The ligature on "www" was making me doubt my sanity. I had to doublecheck that it's for real but it comes from the Berkeley Mono font.
75.
by mprovost 3y ago
This puts a name to the approach that I've been using to write my Rust book. Leaping directly to a final, idiomatic solution without explaining all of the fundamentals first doesn't actually teach anything (except memorisation). I
76.
by mprovost 3y ago
Cool! It might be worth getting in touch with Diomidis Spinellis who runs the Unix History Repository and see if they're interested in adding them. https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
77.
by mprovost 3y ago
If only there was a branch of the US military with lots of ships, and bases around the world.
78.
by mprovost 3y ago
Reminds me of this classic Reddit story (the zombie bagel): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1rgpdf/comment/c...
79.
by mprovost 3y ago
I'm a bit surprised `rev` isn't in coreutils, it's ancient. Originally written because `cut` doesn't allow selecting fields from the end of a line. So to get the last field in each line, you reverse each line (right to l
80.
by mprovost 3y ago
Famously the BBC shows pictures of dogs at polling stations on election day so it's not political. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-61333251
81.
by mprovost 3y ago
CFOs of public companies typically do quarterly earnings conference calls with Wall St. So there's potentially plenty of recordings of their voices using the same kinds of language that it would take to fake something like this.
82.
by mprovost 3y ago
I'm sure there are many more examples but famously Groove Armada recorded the trombone parts of "Superstylin'" and "At the River" through a speaker because they didn't have a microphone in the studio.
83.
by mprovost 3y ago
‘Wuff, Wuff!!’
84.
by mprovost 3y ago
One of the hardest things with my Rust book has been finding my own technical voice. Initially I tried a more casual/funny style, but it didn't feel authentic. Eventually I came up with a more technical style where I avoid the pas
85.
by mprovost 3y ago
The original Unix systems were really memory-constrained, and the standard utilities for processing text files often couldn't handle "long" lines (usually over 2048 bytes, sometimes less). So the `cut` utility divided an inpu
86.
by mprovost 3y ago
That's a cool trick. There are crates for signal handling, and the libc crate exports raise(), they just aren't part of the standard library which attempts to be cross-platform. But if you're already going to unset the signal
87.
by mprovost 3y ago
I'll have to rewrite some chapters once it's stable and released but I'm not holding my breath... It will be a nice problem to have anyway.
88.
by mprovost 3y ago
Well, that's the source of the bug in Python as well so it's not exactly a unique choice or default. It's tricky to manage this in a cross-platform way.
89.
by mprovost 3y ago
I've run into a similar issue in Rust with SIGPIPE. The compiler adds the call to signal() to ignore SIGPIPEs when a Rust program starts. Apparently this was to stop a listening server from exiting when a client closed their connection
90.
by mprovost 3y ago
Unix was "designed" (if you can call it that) a long time before it was possible to move a running system between timezones. So many of these decisions were made in completely different circumstances (I almost said environment) an

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