Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
Couple of things I like
- tarantool https://www.tarantool.io/en/
- rebol/red-lang https://www.red-lang.org/
- U++ : https://www.ultimatepp.org/
- lazarus: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
- fasm: https://flatassembler.net/
416 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 436 ms ] threadYour book looks great, will check it out.
A Nim talk would be a great fit for the event.
Thanks for mentioning this! I work remote in SC and its nice to hear about a nearby convention.
At the time nimble also required me to have NPM to install the the Nim package manager, Nimble. This was not ideal, but looking at [the nimble project install docs](https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble#installation) it seems like it is now package with the language.
Might try dusting it off for some AoC puzzles this year :)
http://nim-lang.github.io/Nim/atlas.html
In python, for historical reasons the logging module uses camelCase while most other modules use snake_case, so it isn’t really possible to use the logging module and maintain a consistent style. This is a non-issue in Nim.
E.g. it's something to check but not an error. You can easily set a config to make them an error or ignore them.
Linux namespaces/cgroups but lighter than Docker.
I use it when I want to limit the memory of a Python script:
``` maxmem="56" #GB
firejail --noprofile --rlimit-as=${maxmem}000000000 python myscript.py ```
Couple of things I like
- tarantool https://www.tarantool.io/en/
- rebol/red-lang https://www.red-lang.org/
- U++ : https://www.ultimatepp.org/
- lazarus: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
- fasm: https://flatassembler.net/
It offers a more compact i'd say approach to develop and it's quite straightforward.
I only used it for small GUI applications, but you can see what others been building https://www.ultimatepp.org/www$uppweb$apps$en-us.html
This has accounted for about 90% of everything I've built since 1985.
Pick code generates my side project: https://eddiots.com/1
> Pick was originally implemented as the Generalized Information Retrieval Language System (GIRLS) on an IBM System/360 in 1965 by Don Nelson and Dick Pick [...]
I seriously miss it.
Every once in a while I try to get back into it. Usually it takes the form of trying (and failing) to get a demo/personal version of UniVerse, but lately I've been poking at ScarletDME a little bit. I'd even pay money (not much since this is just hobby stuff, but some) for UniVerse, but even the cost of it seems to be a closely guarded secret.
I HAVE to code in PICK.
"Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it." - Charles Burkowski
(Funny, they named the current support company "Rocket".)
Here's the link to the current Universe trial version (free and good until 04/2025. Get it, install it, and make something with it. Please don't let that part of you die.
https://www.rocketsoftware.com/products/rocket-multivalue-ap...
What's the trick to making that form work? It won't accept my @gmail.com address, and I don't really want to use my work email address and potentially mis-represent things. Especially since my work used to use one of Rocket's products.
If you have concerns about doing that, you can just download it from my website at
http://eddiots.com/UVTE_WINDOWS_11.4.1.zip (You may have to cut and paste this link into a new tab. HN doesn't seem to like this.)
If you have any problems or need the UNIX version, just reply here or contact me. email on my profile. Let me know how it goes.
My next phase is to put the PICK-generated svg into codepen and provide links to show how to draw the art with code.
- gron (Greppable JSON): https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron
- MarkDownload (Markdown Web Clipper): https://github.com/deathau/markdownload
- Lean4 links:
-- Theorem proving: https://lean-lang.org/theorem_proving_in_lean4/introduction....
-- Natural Number Game: https://adam.math.hhu.de/#/g/leanprover-community/NNG4
https://github.com/automatic-ripping-machine/automatic-rippi...
Put a DVD/blu ray in a drive and it automatically determines the title, starts ripping, then pops the disc out when it's done.
There's options for post-ripping transcoding also.
You can also try out a derivative like Inferno: https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485309
One of my favorite things about the old C2 Wards Wiki is that it's like an archaeological site where time is frozen in this period and you can browse through preserved arguments about how Smalltalk and Extreme Programming will take over the world.
It’s fun.
How is your experience with that?do you have it self-hosted or use their offering?
Additionally, as machine-generated content proliferates, I think having services use something like the web of trust concept for membership would be super powerful. The problem is, of course, the terrible UX of cryptographic signatures. But I think there's a lot of opportunity for the group that makes it easy to use.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
Programmability though
Fossil: distributed version control and much more in a single executable, from the creators of SQLite: https://fossil-scm.org/
"vopono is a tool to run applications through VPN tunnels via temporary network namespaces. This allows you to run only a handful of applications through different VPNs simultaneously, whilst keeping your main connection as normal.
vopono includes built-in killswitches for both Wireguard and OpenVPN."
Not many people seem to know about it and everyone I show it to loves it!
However, lately I've come to like llama.cpp and friends, yes it's not ChatGTP miracle whatever but how often do you /actually/ need that? Despite its tremendous popularity, it still seems like something more people should know about. For me, I've had great fun with running LLMs locally and experiencing their different "flavors" from a more "phenomenological" (what is it like to use them) perspective rather than a technological one.
It’s perfect (so far) for my purposes of an extensible data model.
I’m sure others have augmented applications with “generic” data types (like properties and such). You always walk this fine line that if you fall to far you find you’re writing a database on top of a database.
We’ve also in the past fallen into that hole when building a DB schema that we stumble into what we coined the “absurd normal form” or, also colloquially, the “thing-thing” table that relates everything to everything.
Well, RDF is the thing-thing table, and it just embraces it. And for my project it’s a lot of fun. I have structured types, with specialized forms and screens. But, if desired, the user can jump into adding relations to anything. It’s essentially an RDF authoring environment with templates and custom logic to make entities. And in the end they can always dive into SPARQL to find whatever they want.
It’s not intended to work with zillions of data items, it’s just a desktop tool. I always found it interesting early on that the primary metric for triple stores was how fast they could ingest data, I guess nobody actually queried on anything.
Anyway, it’s fun and freeing to work with.
You can create highly specialized templates in Lua, and there's a RDBMS extension called Cargo that gives you some limited SQL ability too. With these tools you can build basically an entirely custom CMS on top of the base MW software, while retaining everything that's great about MW (easy page history, anyone can start editing including with a WYSIWYG editor, really fine-grained permissions control across user groups, a fantastic API for automated edits).
It doesn't have the range of plugins to external services the way something like Confluence has, but you can host it yourself and have a great platform for documentation.
As an administrator, I wish MediaWiki had a built-in updater (bonus points if it could be automated).
I get that by using the container distributions. I just mount My LocalSettings.php and storage volumes in the appropriate places and I get a new version.
And since I run on ZFS and i take a snapshot before updating if something goes wrong I can rollback the snapshot, and go back to when stuff just worked (and retry later).
Personally I would prefer a wiki with git backend. I wrote one [1] but I dont recommend using it.
https://github.com/entropie/oy
[1] Docusaurus:
https://docusaurus.io/
[2] Tinasaurus:
https://github.com/tinacms/tinasaurus
https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/16zon95/are_there_a...