I used to run npm install unsupervised from a script on headless Debian that I deliberately chose dozens of times everyday. Later I moved my CI to Alpine.
Yeah, same. I jumped in via the website, and after driving around for ~5 minutes the main thing in my head was "damn, this is fun". And now, half my Saturday is gone...
I forget if it was NSFU2 or what but they had this in actual arcade games. For like $2 you could get a smart card to store your account, car, customizations, stats etc. Pop it in and load your ride up and my wife and I put in so many hours in the arcade playing this damn thing.
They destroyed themselves by missing the window for starting an entirely new smartphone ecosystem. They should've either released Lumia years earlier before the iPhone/Android duopoly got established, or made their OS capable of running Android apps (e.g. by being Android).
Maybe your compiler isn't, but GCC is designed to summon every nasal demon it can. It especially loves to elide null pointer checks. There was a PR that almost made it to Linux mainline that did some weird stuff in kernel space where memory mapped to address 0 is valid and contains important stuff. It got a pointer, read data from it, then checked if pointer is null before giving root permissions for some operation. Reading the code, everything seems alright. Even stepping through it with debugger shows that it works. But when compiled with -O2 or higher, GCC removed the null check and now everybody got root permissions unconditionally - because reading from null pointer is UB regardless of circumstances, and GCC treats UB as dead code even if it is reachable.
Sure, and char[] is no string because you can't tie anything with it. And don't get me started on the insects that allegedly live inside digital source files - that's an absurd concept, no self respecting computer specialist should be talking like that.
Wait, so if you're running on embedded, you're not allowed to store anything at address 0, requiring you to waste that little bit of RAM?
That's... a bizarre choice, considering how religious C is about not making any assumptions about what a machine can and cannot do, even going to the trouble of working with non-IEEE floats and int types that are not a multiple of 8 bits.
Not GP and not Lisp programmer. But I'm curious about what you said. If you had to name one popular app or web service (>10,000 monthly unique users) that'd be much easier to clone in Lisp than in Python or Rust, specifically due to macros - what would that be?
I'm not active with any Lisp these days myself, either. Back in Web 1.0 days, when a lot of apps were transforming streaming rows of SQL results into grouped HTML entities, I used macros to implement something akin to SQL's LEAD and LAG, but at the application level. I don't have time, so I have to leave it as an exercise to the reader why it would take more verbosity to implement this in another language.
Now, as a non-Lisper, I have to wait and hope the maintainers of programming languages I use will take useful syntax from other languages. Back when I was an active Lisper, I could take such syntax myself.
Is there any such syntax remaining? Sure, 20 years ago it was a pain to do manipulations of more than 1 element at a time. But nowadays everyone and their dog has some form of iterator combinators that make it a one liner. Even C++, although the line gets quite wide. Is there anything that, as of 2026, you seriously miss having in your day job language (and that language isn't Java)?
I'm having fun in TypeScript and only casually missing the capabilities of macros. It's Turing-complete, so doing the equivalent things is a simple matter of programming. And I'm almost always processing JSON structures, not SQL result rows, so I don't miss being able to write syntax like `sql-repeat` on a day-to-day basis.
Languages are no more Turing-complete than they were 50 years ago. If lack of Lisp macros was such a huge deal back then it affected day to day web development, then surely it must be affecting us all in this day and age too. Arguably, using JSON instead of SQL should make such macros even more important due to the unnesting of data we need to do. So why isn't it?
About today, JavaScript is good at referencing JSON. You don't need macros to make it better at it.
About back then, Perl/PHP/Python/Java/Ruby were never as good at pulling groups out of rows of SQL, but people could work around that by taking more time, writing more code, being more careful. So if you haven't seen macros used to make it better, you don't realize you're missing out on a huge deal. Maybe you just have a vague idea that things could be better, but you're too busy finding and fixing bugs to pursue this thought.
True if you would like syntax that doesn't lend itself to eager evaluation. In the `sql-repeat` example, `group-beginning?` takes an expression that can't be eagerly evaluated. It's evaluated twice, once for the current row and once for the previous row, and the result of evaluation is compared. It can't just be eagerly evaluated for the current row and the result used.
Also true if you want a shorthand syntax for defining a variable where the name of the variable is meaningful. JavaScript takes care of the most common case with destructuring assignment, but with macros you could make such syntax yourself.
And arguably harder to read and maintain other people's software.
Don't get me wrong I'm a macro fan. I've worked with some elegant codebases using metaprogramming but it's been challenging bringing people up to speed with super clear efficient - but novel - code,
Other projects that were just down the line Java boilerplate built on a well understood library worked just as well in other ways.
Personally I think reducing cognitive load is key, I've found people don't have the energy to work with clever code, even if it makes writing it a delight.
... and then llms happened, and I now don't write code at all but closely review a fire hose of mediocrity that gets the job done. I don't want that too magical.
I remember people being scoffed at for using clipart, for pretty much the same reasons people are scoffed at today for using AI (low effort, samey, doesn't fit the rest of the visual style, and subjectively ugly.)
I feel like clipart was... honest low-effort (or at least low compared to bespoke art) whereas generative-AI stuff has a connotation of disrespect or deceit.
No. I'm overall an AI proponent but even I feel an innate sense of disgust when seeing AI-generated flyers. Feels like some cyberpunk dystopia where machines have begun to organize, advertise, and run events for the 'trite human cattle' to keep them occupied.
Lazily-placed text in an otherwise blank word document that gets printed and stapled haphazardly to a posterboard is infinitely preferable.
I feel similar about LLM-generated text, though that's even more egregious. If I have to get one more claude-written email from the company CEO I'm going postal. You have a slight excuse with art as most people couldn't draw to save their lives (including myself), but to write is literally to think. And, in the case of executives they have ONE job (to lead by communicating), outsourcing such a basic soft-skill focused role to AI is just pathetic.
> And, in the case of executives they have ONE job (to lead by communicating), outsourcing such a basic soft-skill focused role to AI is just pathetic.
Weren't executives always outsourcing writing to their (human) assistants?
I think the disgust aspect might be from a kind of uncanny-valley.
Generative art and text-slop have lots of surface features which lead us to expect quality or effort, and then we're betrayed when we look closer. Our natural reaction to betrayal is to shun the actors behind it.
Observable universe is just the part of the universe from where light had time to hit the Earth already. It is growing pretty much at the speed of light, not because of physical changes to the space-time, but because the light from farther away finally arrived. So while it's definitely finite, I wouldn't say it disproves the claim that nothing about the universe is known to be finite.
Because of inflation, there is a distance at which the objects not already in our light cone are moving away faster than the speed of light. So the amount of stuff that we will be able to observe is limited.
Family legacy is quite obsolete in modern society.
Not every society wants to be modern.
Modern society cuts family ties which is a lot of times not so great, but on the other hand it saves lots of people from abusive relationships.
Once you can leave abusive parents or siblings, whole world of opportunities opens. Then again on the other hand not everyone can deal with such a freedom.
Yet still I am personally supportive of modern approaches where people can choose their destiny and not being tied to a family legacy.
At least in France, it means the father leaves and the kid doesn't have enough money to study — and we're transitioning to the workplace providing the funding for studies (apprenticeships where the company pays 10k€ per year, empoverishing the worker).
I'd rather see the name of the father be stuck to the kid so if he's a failure, everyone knows who failed him.
Please don't vaguepost on hn. It's hard to guess if this is an attack or a defense of the nuclear family (us other commenters would have to guess if you know how recent that phenomenon is).
Therefore, you just invite confusing answers and useless discussions in your reply.
Please don't gatekeep hn posts. Comments with little interests will receive little replies and others will rise. You adding a reply helps the post you dislike rise over others.
Yes, same here. But i should admit that i hold somewhat conservative values compared to modern 2016+ societies values.
I consider my values to be very centrist and common sense, however every year i learn more and more that what i consider to be common sense isnt very common.
Yes that was one thing I had in mind, but I also think even older patterns, like the whole tribe contributing to raising the children of everyone, is something worth thinking about. Why did every society did it? And things like that. We have some of those in a modified form today, like daycare, but I feel like we’re straying a bit too far into unknown territory without considering the consequences.
You really can’t understand what I mean when I say humans used to organize themselves in certain ways? Just read about the topic then, humans almost always had a very similar pattern in how society worked which only broke with the transitions from hunters gatherers to agriculture around 10,000 years ago in most regions (though some still haven’t transitioned) and then to industrial society, around 250 to 100 years ago depending on the region. The current era where everyone has electricity and water and all sorts of devices to help with labor is really recent, just less than 100 years. It allowed us to experiment with society building in ways we just couldn’t imagine before. However, we just don’t know if the things we’re doing now are sustainable as we have not had hundreds of years of stable societies to know that. My comment was referring to that. The decline in population growth, rise of loneliness and other problems we have now just didn’t exist before. The changes we made to society are to blame , no question about that, and I think we are still learning just that older societies can’t just be rearranged the way we feel like just because we can, without suffering unpredictable consequences. Does that clarify things for you or should I explain how those pre industrial societies functioned?
>Just read about the topic then
>Does that clarify things for you or should I explain how those pre industrial societies functioned?
This level of condescension paired with an equivalent level of ignorance is astounding, especially as the only reason I asked you was because I wanted to steelman your position, but it was so vague that this was hard to do.
I originally asked if you meant the nuclear family with your statement "why humans organized the way they did for millennia before we decided to change everything.", because I wanted to know if you are aware that the nuclear family as a dominant structure is _a lot_ younger than that.
But in another reply, you said that you meant to talk about the nuclear family and the raising of children by the whole tribe. These are very different from each other, and that's why I asked you to clarify. Now I know that you just wanted to express a general feeling of regret that things aren't the way you image them to have been in the past, and your comment didn't contain any real content besides that, I can move on with my life.
The idea of surnames is an anthropologically recent tradition. Humans living in small communities had no practical need for multiple names. Surnames mostly arise in societies with relatively strong centralized states so that the government has an easier time tracking its citizens (census-taking, tax collecting, etc.).
The idea of being named after your father (or your husband for that matter) is much older than surnames. Don't know exactly how old, because written history is only available for strong centralized states, but at least biblical times.
Yes, but the context of this thread is about taking your father's surname specifically. Even "modern societies" where wives might have the option to not take their husband's surname aren't moving away from naming sons after their fathers, as far as their given name goes.
I meant the "John son of Jack" thing. It was extremely common for thousands of years across pretty much every European culture, and Jews (likely other people too but IDK). Eventually it transformed into surnames by Jackson. The important part is that surnames didn't introduce the idea of father's name being part of your name even if you're not named after him. This was already widely practiced, surnames just streamlined the process and made ancestry more trackable (though some countries still use the old rules to this day. Spain I think, and Iceland maybe?)
Dunno about other cultures, but in Poland it was very common until relatively recently to refer to wives/daughters by a suffixed first name (not surname) of the husband/father. If Mary Higgins married Jack Smith, from then on she'd be known as Jackowa, and their daughter Betty would be called Jackówna. This is distinct from naming children after their ancestors. The custom predates surnames by hundreds of years, but served essentially the same role of tying the women to their men.
That is a bit cliché isn't it? According to INSEE in France 12% of the kids were in shared custody and that is the mean. At 10 y old it is around 15%. And around 24% of the fathers get full custody.
So while there is a bias towards mother custody of the kids (around 2/3), there is still 1/3 of the kids where it is not the case.
Also, not having full custody of kids doesn't mean the father is leaving completely from the kids life. More often than not the kids need to stay with one parent because job and cost of living forces them to be more regionally apart (only 37% of kids living in same town). That doesn't mean the father do not see the kids in the weekends/holidays nor contribute financially to study.
So the reality is way more nuanced than you make it out to be in a small comment.
Why not have him take the Maiden name so everyone can know the mother who failed him?
Why do you frame it as only fathers can fail children? Or only men can do wrong? Women can pay for studies as well, and have just as much duty to their children.
Of course there were gangsters in soviet times. Vory v zakone[0] in the 20s-30s, tsekhoviki[1] in the 60s-70s, with a brief period during and after WW2 where enough killed each other[2] not to be a major issue for a moment.
A disproportionate number of the "felony record, misdemeanor or past criminal record" are drug-related and racially biased, often for marijuana, which is like saying "US towns with speed traps have a lot criminals driving!".
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