Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | shadowofneptune's comments login

Static stack allocation is the approach that the 6502 really demands, and it's cool to see in a conventional compiler toolchain. See the Cowgol language for another example: https://cowlark.com/cowgol/


There's another that uses what they call a "compiled stack" which I believe is the same concept. https://www.dustmop.io/blog/2019/09/10/what-remains-technica...


That requires the compiler to be aware of non-reentrant functions, though. It might be viable in small-scale codebases as are common in much embedded code, which is where a 6502 would most likely be used.


> If he “was on a deserted island and [plastic] was all that was available,” Rogers says he’d opt for types two [High-Density Polyethylene] and five [Polypropylene]. These are both higher density formulas, used to contain liquids and manufacture items like the rigid plastic forks dispensed at your local takeout restaurant. They have a higher melting point, “and they also don’t tend to chip or shatter as much,” says Rogers. (Still, Hussain’s team found these types of containers shed plenty of microplastics when heated.)

This the part I feel should be focused on. HDPE is notable for being safe to handle during its entire lifecycle, from production to use to recycling. Even when pushed well past its softening point, it does not create any hazardous fumes. A sustainable future does not mean avoiding the use of plastics entirely, it means identifying which are the most useful in the long-term.


"Still, Hussain’s team found these types of containers shed plenty of microplastics when heated.)"


Nalgene make HDPE water bottles now. They’re really durable. I’ve had two as my daily use bottles for about 4 years and they’re as durable or more durable than the hard plastic Nalgene bottles I used before.


They've made HDPE bottles for a while. When I was guiding canoe trips 20 years ago, the wisdom among the guides was that the HDPE ones will float, even if you fully submerge them with the cap off, whereas the Lexan ones will sink.


Aren’t the HDPE Nalgene the original one carried in the 90s, then polycarbonate came out, whoops BPE then transition to Lexan?

I loved the HDPE and appreciated it was likely the most inert (aren’t milk jugs HDPE?), but my family says it imparts a taste so we have a ton of Lexan.


Lexan is a brand of polycarbonate.


Given one I purchased became brittle and shattered a few years after I bought it, I'd dispute that.


probably fine just don't drink hot soup/coffee out of it. I've long since switched over to a glass lined beverage container after I found out about microplastics.


PE and PP are also the cheapest and most common plastics.

They are NOT very stiff, tho.


HDPE is very stiff, MDPE is kinda stiff and LDPE is flimsy. Same monomer just cross linked differently with a different production process. Plastic is chemistry magic.


It's just carbon and hydrogen chains. How complex can it be? Surely not so complex to require its own field.

/s

For those unaware of the joke, Organic Chemistry is quite complex. Hydrogen+Carbon can make plastic or Gasoline depending on the details of how it chains.


I’m aware, but HDPE is less stiff than other commodity plastics like ABS or PLA.


PE are essentially just really long fats.


This is false. PE is made up of hydrocarbon chains. Fats are made of fatty acids esterified to a polyol backbone, commonly glycerol.


If we're talking about chemical consequences of alkanes vs carboxylic acids, yes. However, the parent topic is talking about the effect of burning plastics, for which consideration it can be thought of as burning fat in that it (as opposed to other plastics where the byproduct cannot be compared to just burning fat.


If the workplace sucks, as most do right now, there's about three options for what to do:

1. Force out the people who are making it suck. This is difficult with how managers are trained nowadays, never to take sides even if one party is clearly a drag on the group. Shunning and isolation are options, but ones very hard to keep up without support. If it's the manager who is the bad influence, you might as well be trying to shame a baron out of owning a castle.

2. Stop caring about work. Phone it in. Don't care anymore.

3. Don't be present physically in that environment.

Of course people want to work from home when every interaction is unpleasant, when management is badgering you into doing things. It also saves on transportation cost, cost of caring for family, every single thing that an employer likes to pretend is not their cost to pay. It's not about people being naturally 'introverted' or 'extroverted,' it's about the social environment everyone, including management, creates around them.


I've tried options 2 and 3 and I prefer spending my time working instead of constantly having to look busy. Remote work (aside from the obvious life and time benefits) in my experience has forced management to evaluate performance based on output and not bums on seats.Change is scary but I don't think this is going away anytime soon.


The big thing seems to be less about GCC, and more a question of, "what should a compiler be?"

He'd be better looking at smaller, less-known compilers, like the Portable C Compiler or the Intel C Compiler. If you want hyper-optimized, better-than-assembly quality, you pretty much have to give up predictability. The best optimizations that are predictable can't be written using modern compiler theory. They instead involve a lot of work, care, and attention that can't be generalized to other architectures. It can require a love for an architecture, even if's a crap one.

It's a tradeoff. Not every compiler needs to be optimized, and not every compiler needs to embody the spirit of a language.


Esperanto was intended as a sort of diplomatic language. It's got flaws, definitely. The sounds and spelling are very much from the creator's native Polish, a lot of important terms are rather obscure («Usono,» from "Usonia" is the word for the United States). That said, it is in the end relatively easy to learn, and it is easy to express the ideas of diplomacy, science, and civil society.

China and Japan used to have a lot of Esperantists before WWII, for that reason.

https://www.loc.gov/item/2021670575/

> After World War I, the League of Nations considered adopting Esperanto as a working language and recommending that it be taught in schools, but proposals along these lines were vetoed by France.

It may be Eurocentric, but it's hell of a lot easier for diplomats to learn than English or French!


An actual Esperanto speaker here. I need to correct this. It was never intended to be a "diplomatic" language, as such a language only spoken by diplomats between their kind. So the language of a small elite, which does not want to deal with the average man on the street. That sounds like a story which was said about the predecessor of Esperanto: Volapük.

Esperanto was at some point in time the "workers latin", because the less educated worker could learn it as a means to talk with people from other nations. That ended with pushing English or other "more practical languages" in schools to this day.

Esperanto still is a working living language with a working worldwide community.


Zamenhof stated multiple times that he wanted to create an universal second language, as opposed to an universal first language. I don't think this distinction makes much sense, had any effect on any design decision, but probably it was important for the marketing of the language. In this sense it was indeed intended to be a "diplomatic" language, so that diplomats can use a single language. (As well as international organizations, merchants, tourists etc.)


That doesn't sound logical to me. If Zamenhof didn't intend for it to be a primary language, one you learn from birth, then why couldn't it be used by random people still? There has been trading between countries for much longer than Esperanto exists for, especially in border regions or small countries but also across oceans and continents.

Esperanto is from 1887. I was curious what holidays were like at the time:

> According to Stowe (1994), “many nineteenth-century Americans traveled, and many more participated vicariously in the experience of travel by reading travel letters, sketches, and narratives in newspapers, magazines, and published volumes” (p. 3). Similarly, the appetite for travel in the U.K. was also voracious --https://regrom.com/2020/08/26/regency-travel-traveling-abroa...

So also a goal Zamenhof could intend. I don't know how you get to the conclusion that, because it wasn't intended for my mom to use while I was a baby, it wasn't intended to be used by my mom or me on holiday if we're not "diplomats", unless you call any tourist an international diplomat


Western Europe is very different from the Europe that Zamenhof grew up in.

You get so many internationalist movements out of Russia because it already was in many ways international internally. Lots of languages and land, but both travel and speech were restricted by authorities, secret police seemed to hover invisibly everywhere. The language of everything important, the language of rulers, was Russian. Vacations were in-country, if they happened at all.

Looking to the UK, France, and the US is in this case misleading.


I think that view of you is wrong. The distinction is an important one.

By saying you create a diplomatic language, you are marketing towards the elite, as I wrote in my post.

By saying that everybody speaks it as a second language, which is indeed what Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, wanted is a different focus. The first is focusing on an elite, the latter focuses on the people.

It's like the distinction between "computers for knowledge workers" and "personal computers", the first is only for a small elite, the latter is for everybody. Or the distinction between "politics for a couple of few" and "politics elected by everybody", the first is called a form of dictatorship, the latter democracy.


Right, Esperanto wasn't created for the elite, or only for diplomats. That wouldn't make much sense. Also I don't think GP intended to suggest it, but you clarified it anyway, so all's good.


Frankly, this is why despite my admiration for Esperanto, I do not engage in it.

Posts like these are the 'no fun allowed' of constructed languages, and it pops up most often with Esperantists. Like a diplomat, you refuse to let people use words carelessly, or loosely.

Toki Pona is in itself a reaction to that. It's an exploration in wordplay, puns, and local culture.

EDIT: You also left like... a wall of text explaining why Esperanto is far superior to Toki Pona? That isn't fun to read or talk about. If the idea is to replace English as a language of the world, we don't have to bring the stern attitude of an English teacher along with it.

The sister post got my intent well.


> Posts like these are the 'no fun allowed' of constructed languages, and > it pops up most often with Esperantists. Like a diplomat, you refuse to > let people use words carelessly, or loosely.

Wtf? What 'no fun allowed'?! In the community is fun allowed how and why are you making that stuff up based on what actually? What interpretation are you constructing, which is not based on any reality? We have wordplays, puns and local culture. People do these all the time and annoy the more grammatically inclined people with it all the time. These conflicts inside the community are normal any community will develop people who need to care about the language more and people who care less about any language. That's how new concepts are generated.

> EDIT: You also left like... a wall of text explaining why Esperanto is far > superior to Toki Pona? That isn't fun to read or talk about. If the idea is > to replace English as a language of the world, we don't have to bring > the stern attitude of an English teacher along with it.

The wall of text tried to answer the question sincerely of how they compare. Also it included my personal bitterness of about people who constantly piss on Esperanto for the wrong reasons. Like such as exactly this post of yours. And that's also why I stopped writing it. I wrote that it's lacking "functionality", that makes Esperanto more complex. Toki Pona is minimalist, it can't be the best language in the world for everything. But that does not make it bad. People enjoy learning it and despite what you try to make people in the Esperanto-community look like, there are a bunch of them speaking that language too for its value of minimalism, its value in playing around with the sapir-whorf-hypothesis regarding depression (it's after all the language of good), its value in finding a community, etc.

You see something, interpret it wrongly and then piss on it, for the wrong reasons.

> Toki Pona is in itself a reaction to that. It's an exploration in > wordplay, puns, and local culture.

That a niche of people who are inclined to perfectionism, down-beating and snobbishness are also inclined to favor Toki Pona is shown by your comment.


Slight correction: Zamenhof's native languages (so far as we can tell), in a sense of what he spoke at home, were Yiddish and Russian, although he certainly learned Polish at a very young age due to place of residence. Not that it makes much difference in this case - the quirks of Esperanto phonology, such all those affricates and consonant clusters are familiar to speakers of pretty much any Slavic language. Esperanto orthography, on the other hand, appears to be inspired more by Czech than Polish - "v" rather than "w", diacritics over digraphs etc.


That's part of the idea. It's that you slow down, try to figure out what exactly the other person means by what they are saying. In a language with a fixed vocabulary, context becomes even more important than normal.


Got diagnosed this year with mitral valve prolapse. It won't be an issue medically for some time, but it is definitely sobering to feel the heart beating so strongly.


In my personal experience, you avoid repetitive stress injuries by shaking up how you type. Reaching for the mouse, moving where you hold your hands. It's the old way of teaching typing with a rigid posture that causes carpal tunnel, not the rectangle frame in itself.

Ergo layouts are nice in theory but they make it harder to touch type. The modern keyboard layout is an example of a standard that works: everyone can sit down at a keyboard and start typing, even if function keys are different here or there.

EDIT: Ah, of course I am just one singer in the chorus of self-taught typists responding.


> Ergo layouts are nice in theory but they make it harder to touch type.

Because they're the exception? That's a bad rule. The only way we improve things is by creating exceptions and adopting them.

Personally, I switched to ergo keyboards 20+ years ago and I'm much happier for it. I've had to change models over the years and there was always a brief adjustment, but it was minor -- and my hands rest is such a more natural position!


See, you are demonstrating what I mean right here. I would like to switch just once. The Microsoft ergo model is the closest to a standard, it seems.


How do Ergo layouts make it harder to touch type? I learnt touch typing after getting my first ergo keyboard, but I found it a transferrable skill to normal qwerty staggered keyboards with little need for adjustment. My error rate might be 1% higher on none-ergo keyboards, but otherwise I don't notice much difference.

For reference, I use a ZSA Moonlander.


Personally, the split is a big problem. I don't keep a strict separation of left-hand and right-hand during typing.


Yeah. For everyone watching with excitement, keep in mind that the silicon semiconductor was for years worse in practice than germanium ones, even if it was theoretically better and cheaper. It took advancements in material sourcing, kilns, etc. etc.

Give this material 20 years, and we will see how it fared.


San Fransisco is the main port of the west coast. The Oregon Trail gets all the fame, but ship was usually how newcomers came to California and the other western states.

During WW2, that role was naturally even a bigger deal than in peacetime. It's also where you got dumped if you were dishonorably discharged. That's why the gay community of California was so unusually concentrated into one district of one city.


historically lots of mixed-heritage from the Latin lands, too.. German-Mexican and such.. San Francisco used to be a large Catholic landing pad.


> the other western states

But the midwest is not the western states...?


Read what I said again. People went from east and mideast to west by ship, and SF is the best port.


It's not. Not sure what the official boundary is (if there even is one), but Midwest is far east of Western. It would better be called 'Norcentral' these days, but the name is probably left over from times when St Louis was considered western


Consider applying for YC's W25 batch! Applications are open till Nov 12.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: