Readit News logoReadit News
alexjm commented on Do the simplest thing that could possibly work   seangoedecke.com/the-simp... · Posted by u/dondraper36
placebo · a day ago
Really surprised there in no mention of William of Ockham - you know, the guy that made razors...
alexjm · 10 hours ago
Watch out for Occam's Hacksaw: Any complex problem can be made to look simple by hacking away enough parts of it as "not essential", saying you'll handle them in version two.
alexjm commented on I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)   code.mendhak.com/gpl-v2-a... · Posted by u/ekiauhce
bombcar · 4 months ago
Legal size folders exist and are widely used by people who use ... legal size paper.

Legal folders can be great to be able to print letter-sized things on, then you have an area at the bottom to write notes and stuff.

alexjm · 4 months ago
Many filing cabinets in the US are also sized so you can put letter sized folders in one way, or rotate the folders 90 degrees and legal sized folders will fit correctly.
alexjm commented on Hacker News Hug of Deaf   susam.net/hn-bell.html... · Posted by u/susam
smallpipe · 5 months ago
Fun. You can tell it's receiving some love right now

    while true; do; sleep 5; curl http://susam.net:8000 ; done
    curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed
    curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed
    curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 11 ms: Couldn't connect to server
    curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer
    curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 8 ms: Couldn't connect to server
    curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed
    curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 8 ms: Couldn't connect to server
    curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed
    curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 10 ms: Couldn't connect to server
    curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 11 ms: Couldn't connect to server
    curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer
    curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer
    curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed

alexjm · 5 months ago
You might want to add the --http0.9 flag to curl, to tell it that getting a response of just "ok" (HTTP 0.9 style, body only without headers) isn't an error.
alexjm commented on Tips for mathematical handwriting (2007)   johnkerl.org/doc/ortho/or... · Posted by u/susam
xanderlewis · 7 months ago
It’s for the same reason that almost everything in Unix is like

ls, man, wc, ps, grep, …

instead of

list, manual, word count, process(es?), <actually, what the hell does that stand for again>, ….

You get used to it, and then it’s much quicker. And being able to write things down quickly is very important when you’re in flow.

alexjm · 7 months ago
Grep is from an ed editor command: global (g) to apply a command to all lines that match a regular expression, a regex surrounded by slashes (/), and print (p) to display those lines. Or g/re/p for short. This proved a useful enough operation that they made it a separate command in the early days of Unix.
alexjm commented on Beej's Guide to Git   beej.us/guide/bggit/... · Posted by u/mixto
ericholscher · 7 months ago
I usually use :q! which seems to do the same thing
alexjm · 7 months ago
The minor difference is that :q! quits without saving but returns zero as the exit code, but :cq quits with a nonzero exit code. Git interprets the nonzero exit code as "editing failed", following the Unix convention that zero means success. If you didn't save the commit message while working on it, :q! will send the empty template back to Git, which Git is smart enough to not commit. But if you accidentally save your work partway through, :q! will still commit the message you wanted to abandon.
alexjm commented on Ear muscle we thought humans didn't use activates when people listen hard   frontiersin.org/news/2025... · Posted by u/geox
buildsjets · 7 months ago
Most people may not use these muscles, but I do, to adjust the focus of my bifocals as needed. Zoom and enhance!
alexjm · 7 months ago
That was how I learned to tense my ear muscles -- because I could see they made my glasses shift on my face.
alexjm commented on UI is hell: four-function calculators   lcamtuf.substack.com/p/ui... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
taeric · 7 months ago
I'm super intrigued on the slide rule idea! Where did you get one and what sort of stuff do you typically do with it?
alexjm · 7 months ago
I have a kitchen slide that I use for ratios in recipes. It's an old plastic one from Think Geek.

For example, I usually put 15 grams of coffee with 8 oz of water (please excuse the mixed units). To make a different amount, I align the 1.5 on the top rule with the 8 on the bottom rule to set the ratio. Then each number on the top rule (coffee in grams) matches the scaled value on the bottom rule (water in oz). The 6 on the bottom rule aligns with ~1.1 on the top, meaning I should brew my little six-ounce cup with 11g of coffee. In practice, I do this a lot with bread, but the "baker's percent" convention for writing bread recipes makes it a more complicated example.

Another way to use a kitchen slide rule is when scaling a recipe. Say I want to make 2/3 of a batch of cookies. I line up the 3 on top with the 2 on the bottom. Then for each ingredient, I find the recipe's quantity on top, and read off the scaled quantity on the bottom. This works better with recipes that use weights, to avoid awkward fractions or converting between units so you can subdivide.

alexjm commented on US will ban cancer-linked Red Dye No. 3 in cereal and other foods   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo
iancmceachern · 7 months ago
This is like the whole bugs in food thing.

Sometimes no bugs are allowed at all, people be getting upset if their pop tarts have bugs in them.

Sometimes it's like some bugs are allowed and just part of it like when I buy organic broccoli at the farmers market and need to soak it to get whatever those things are in there out. Or when I get those little mummified bugs in the bottom of oatmeal tins.

Sometimes it's like the food is literally coated in bugs like all that stuff that's coated on schellac. Which, finally to bring it back to a callback to your point, is both GRAS and also made of bugs.

alexjm · 7 months ago
Shellac isn't made of bugs - it's made by bugs. Specifically, it's the resin secreted by a female lac beetle onto the branch of the trees that they live and feed on.
alexjm commented on Silver amulet is the oldest evidence of Christianity north of the Alps   archaeologymag.com/2024/1... · Posted by u/secretmark
ilamont · 8 months ago
The article mentions "18-line Latin text" but I was unable to recognize any word on the scroll (took Latin in high school) even something obvious like deus.

Was this some sort of Latin shorthand?

alexjm · 8 months ago
Some of the letter shapes look like Latin/Roman cursive, but even then I'm not sure I recognize any words either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive

alexjm commented on Thomas E. Kurtz has died   computerhistory.org/blog/... · Posted by u/1986
pieter_mj · 10 months ago
In the manual they have the symbols for zero (0) and the letter O switched.

This leads to the statement : F0R X=1 T0 1OO.

Was it really that way back(wards) in 1964?

alexjm · 10 months ago
It's most likely legacy from pre-computer unit record equipment. These machines could only handle numbers and printed zeros without a slash because there was nothing to confuse them with. When letters were later added, it was the new character that got the slash.

Additional citation hunting from 2020 when the BASIC manual was shared & discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25462835

u/alexjm

KarmaCake day122September 21, 2018
About
Hello!
View Original