Much of the computational aspect of my PhD was written in BCPL[0], it's nice to see it's still alive and running.
Greybeard story time:
I learned BCPL when competing in a CoNeutron[1][2][3] competition. My player was written in Pascal but I kept getting errors. Eventually I tracked down a compiler bug, produced a 20 line program that provoked it, and submitted it to the Computer Lab. I got back a standard "We'll look into it, but it's probably a bug in your program."
About 30 minutes later I got another email, this one said: "Wow, it is a compiler bug ... congratulations! But it won't get fixed."
So I learned BCPL, transliterated the CoNeutron player code into it, and it immediately ran about 10 times faster and became effectively unbeatable. My player even beat David Seal[4][5]'s player running on then new ARM processors ... details of which were confidential, and never fully revealed.
Fun times.
=================
[0] Other bits were written in ForTran, zed line editor, and batch-control, all running on an IBM3084Q with Phoenix as the OS.
[1] It was intended to be a Neutron competition, but the rules were incorrectly explained.
I would be surprised if someone, somewhere, didn't still have a copy of what would nowadays be considered to be an absurdly small amount of data. If they do, I wouldn't be surprised if they read HN.
The original submission was to a post that explains why this is news, and not just a random project:
A brand new 68k Mac emulator quietly dropped last night!!
“Snow” can emulate the Mac 128k, 512k, Plus, SE, Classic, and II. It supports reading disks from bitstream and flux-floppy images, and offers full execution control and debugging features for the emulated CPU. Written using Rust, it doesn't do any ROM patching or system call interception, instead aiming for accurate hardware-level emulation.
... and while I appreciate the rationale behind it, I'm always saddened when a carefully chosen link that suits the way I think, giving and overview and a context with links to the projects, is then over-written by the direct link to the project that doesn't give a sense of why it's interesting or relevant.
But as the Man in Black says in The Princess Bride: "Get used to disappointment".
The guidelines are clear that the original/canonical source is what we want on HN:
Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
But you're welcome to post a comment with links to other sources that give the extra information and context, and we can pin it to the top of the thread, or do what I've done here and put them in the top text.
I understand the rationale, and as someone who moderates other communities I can totally understand why this is administered as a blanket policy. Having said that, it does sometimes result in what I think of as sub-optimal situations where information is unnecessarily lost or obscured.
In particular, adding a link to the original post, as you have done here, is likely to be of minimal value. People will click on the headline link, wonder what it's about or why it's "news", and close the window. On the other hand, clicking through first to the post means people will see the context, then those who are interested will click through to the project site(s). I've done this analysis in other contexts and found that the decision tree for engagement and user-information is in favour of linking to the post, not the project.
But as I say, I understand your position, and in the end, it's not my forum, not my community, and not my choice.
I think you're implying that we're more rigid and/or self-defeating about this than we are.
We always want the source that contains the greatest amount of information about the topic. As I wrote in the other reply in this subthread, the heuristic is whether a source contains "significant new information" vs an alternative.
That means, as explained in that reply, an article about the findings of an academic study is better than the academic paper, if it contains significant new information that isn't easily found from the paper itself (particularly if the article contains quotes from interviews with the researchers). A project creator’s blog post about a new project or release is better than a link to the project's GitHub page.
We generally prefer not to link to a third-party's social media post about a project, on the basis that it's light on significant new information and takes traffic/attention away from the primary source or another in-depth article about it. (It's different if it's a 3rd-party's detailed blog post about a project, which includes their own experiences using the project and comparing it with other projects in the same category. But then it's more of a review, than a report about the project itself.) Another problem with submitting a 3rd-party post about a project is that it then becomes a topic of debate in the comments, why one source was chosen over another, which happened here.
In a case like this, the information that was in that social media post could easily have been quoted in a comment in the thread, that we could have pinned.
Given that the author of the project posted an announcement in a discussion forum, there could be a case for making that the HN source, given that it contains the other relevant links and some additional commentary, though in this case it's a bit light on detail. But it makes all the difference that the source we link to is by the author of the project.
In the case of this submission, the story has been on the front page for 12 hours already, including some time at #1, and is still going strong, so I don't think anything has been lost.
You're always welcome to make a case for why a particular source is the one that contains the most "significant new information" and is thus the one that should be the HN source.
so just to confirm, this HN submission [ 1] should have linked to this pdf of the paper [2] and put the article [3] that is the current link for the post as a comment?
The question we always ask is whether a source contains “significant new information”.
In the case you cited, the Quanta Magazine article is a report about the study’s findings that is readable and understandable to lay people, and includes backstory and quotes from interviews with the researchers and also images.
I.e., there’s plenty of information in the article that isn’t in the paper. So we’ll always go with that kind of article, over the paper itself, particularly in the case of Quanta Magazine which is a high-quality publication.
In other cases an article is “blog spam” - I.e., it just rewords a study without adding any new information, and in those cases we’ll link directly to the study, or to a better article if someone suggests it.
Anyone is always welcome to suggest a source that is the most informative about a topic and we’ll happily update the link to that.
"What did appear as a challenge, though, was a physical realization of such an object. The second author built a model (now lost) from lead foil and finely-split bamboo, which appeared to tumble sequentially from one face, through two others, to its final resting position."
I have that model ... Bob Dawson and I built it together while we were at Cambridge. Probably I should contact him.
I was expecting to see the photos, but the jpg are linked there instead of visible. IIRC you were using a self-made CMS for your blog, with more support for math formulas. Does it not allow images?
Everyone complains about how crap my website is, so in this case I've just exported a page from my internal zim-wiki. Yes, it can have photos, but it doesn't give any control over sizing or positioning, so I'm providing links for people to click through to.
It's the middle of my working day and I'm in the middle of meetings, so I don't have time to do anything more right now.
Interesting ... and baffling. I've simply exported that from the zim wiki, not doing anything special, so I have no idea why the internet archive would complain about it.
And it's the other part of my site that people complain bitterly about:
He's brilliant, bonkers, and wonderful company. I spent a fantastic morning with him early last year (2024) and it was brilliant fun. I will for many, many years treasure my signed Klein Bottle and my signed copy of "The Cuckoo's Egg".
You're only 10 years older than me, and I'm hoping to be as active and engaged as you are for a long time to come ... you are a fantastic role model, especially with your interaction with, and inspiration of, the younger generation.
Long may it continue, and I hope to take you up on your invitation to visit again.
Reading his book as a kid was what got me into computers and networks. After some years I finally got a few of his bottles as gifts for my various mentors along the way (plus one for my desk as well.) He's a special human. I didn't know about the TED Talk; thanks, I'll check that out!
I posted it here because I expect there will be a significant audience on HN, and I wanted to let people know that if links are failing for them, they're not alone.
Alternatively, if the links are not failing for them, then I'll know it's something wrong for me.
Greybeard story time:
I learned BCPL when competing in a CoNeutron[1][2][3] competition. My player was written in Pascal but I kept getting errors. Eventually I tracked down a compiler bug, produced a 20 line program that provoked it, and submitted it to the Computer Lab. I got back a standard "We'll look into it, but it's probably a bug in your program."
About 30 minutes later I got another email, this one said: "Wow, it is a compiler bug ... congratulations! But it won't get fixed."
So I learned BCPL, transliterated the CoNeutron player code into it, and it immediately ran about 10 times faster and became effectively unbeatable. My player even beat David Seal[4][5]'s player running on then new ARM processors ... details of which were confidential, and never fully revealed.
Fun times.
=================
[0] Other bits were written in ForTran, zed line editor, and batch-control, all running on an IBM3084Q with Phoenix as the OS.
[1] It was intended to be a Neutron competition, but the rules were incorrectly explained.
[2] http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/coneutron.html
[3] https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/CoNeutron.html
[4] https://davidseal.muchloved.com/
[5] https://www.informit.com/authors/bio/1e767638-32b7-4c7b-81c8...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_(computer)
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