And 640kb of memory should be enough for anyone. I recently got a 5Gbps symmetric connection, and it’s made a world of difference (I work with large datasets and streaming media).

Inarticulate.

The Economist has a similar standard: https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/style_guide_12.pdf (see the ‘pronounceable abbreviations’ section, for instance)

That’s the Guardian’s house style for acronyms: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51924/proper-capitalization-of-commonly-used-acronyms-and-initialisms

Calling the individuals involved in administering an execution “medical personnel” is macabre.

I feel okay, personally (other than being horrified by the polycrisis taking place in the world), but share your sense that we’re in the middle of a tectonic shift. Multiple friends, usually talkative, usually stable, have gone silent, and I know several people who seem to be having low level mental health crises.

My friend, Chris, who ended his life. It’s been years, but I’d give just about anything to have him back.

The issue is that’s incoherent and cheapens otherwise good writing on a topic with images and interfaces that aren’t accurate representations of the topic. To wit:

Compare these to what VB development actually looked like (I’m old, I was there, I programmed in VB professionally), and you’ll see how much of a disservice the AI slop images in the article do to the actual experience of working in the language:

(credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(classic)#/media/File:Microsoft_Visual_Basic_for_MS-DOS_(Professional_Edition_Version1.00).png )

Finding this accurate, fair use license image took me minutes.

Complete with AI slop images!

Heh. Sounds like a modern variant of Zawinski’s Law: https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/

At the risk of restarting the Editor wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war) from days of yore, I find it interesting that emacs wasn’t even in your list of contenders. I hear it mentioned less frequently these days, so perhaps it’s going by the wayside?

For the record, I’m a vi/vim user! I had the privilege of being taught to use it by an RFC-writing greybeard decades ago, and have used it without thinking ever since.

For those who find themselves on a machine with only vi/vim, or want to learn, here’s a quick primer when editing a file (usually done by typing “vi foo.txt” in a shell) –

:q! …Force quit vi (:q also works – gentler!)

:wq! …Save file and quit vi

i (then type characters) …insert text at current position

A (then type characters) …Insert at end of current line

G …go to first character of last line in the file

/foo …search for first occurrence of “foo” in the file (hit / again to find additional instances)

x …Delete character under cursor

:56 …Go to line 56

yy …Copy the line the cursor is currently on into the buffer

p … Paste the buffer

r (then type character) …Replace character under cursor

u …undo (hit multiple times to undo prior actions)

When done with a command like this, hit Esc to go back into normal mode.

Second nature after a bit of practice! I used to work with a guy who insisted on using ed. That was… odd.

I can’t speak for the creatures you mentioned, but if you live in a place with a bit of outdoor space and some birds, try sitting quietly and offering something like seeds or suet that they like on a nearby table. Move the food progressively closer and eventually, with enough time you’ll build sufficient trust to hand feed them. I’ve had a bird friend for years now. Giving him a morsel is one of the highlights of my day.

Reading the HN headline, my first thought was time travelers or ghosts, not astronomical phenomena. Disappointing!

I’m old. I was there. It was a better and much more interesting time!

Brings back many fond memories of our hulking, beige family 486 with its EGA monitor!

BTW, the text scrolling against that suitably 1990s page background creates an odd and disconcerting visual effect.

I still have a dozen or Zip disks from high school and university. Perhaps even a drive around, somewhere, just in case I want to look at some really old term papers! I don’t miss them; the notorious click of death got me one too many times.

Very interesting: “VOID removes objects from videos along with all interactions they induce on the scene — not just secondary effects like shadows and reflections, but physical interactions like objects falling when a person is removed…”

Reported in the New York Times: <https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04/05/world/iran-war-trump-news

Not a name I knew, but I’m grateful for the work he did to build the things we now take for granted. God speed, George.

I do like a nice dense dashboard. Good work!