Hacker News Reader

emoIIon iOS indie app development looks like

Really, the fact that Apple pushes swiftui as production ready is laughable. The framework is so ridden in bugs, does not play nicely with the other frameworks like photosui, and the language itself is incredibly bloated.

emoIIon A better build system for OCaml

What do you mean? Afaik the type system does not affect run time speed, it’s just static analysis

emoIIon 8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production (2023)

For-loops and mutation are not really encouraged, often loops are implemented with recursion as in normal fp. The big difference to me is that OCaml doesn't try to be pure, so you can perform side effects as needed, instead of forcing the user to jump through hurdles when trying to print to stdout

emoIIon Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

Is there a type-system that provides runtime safety? I thought type-erasure was common practice

emoIIon The Intelligence Age

The sentiment to me is “we need unlimited compute and data” both of which are clearly limited. There is definitely more technology to invent and understand in order for us to do more with less

emoIIon Keeping CALM: When distributed consistency is easy (2019)

How far away is this from saying ”just program distributed systems functionally”?

emoIIon Show HN: I made a programmable computer from NAND gates

I think that’s a massive achievement

emoIIon Understanding Keyboard Events Better

I’ve recently spent some time working with terminal emulators in raw mode on macOS. While I chose to handle key events using escape codes, and found it seriously difficult (even gave up) to process the shift modifier key. However, I came across xquartz [1], which seems to do similar things as mentioned in the article. Would detecting shift key state have been trivial using such a library?

[1] https://github.com/XQuartz/XQuartz

emoIIon Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

Rectangle is absolutely great

emoIIon Hidden in Plain Sight (2006)

The introduction of this is a great read. I liked especially the tautology about abstraction and calling more code; that building upon higher levels of abstraction means ever-smaller missteps are required by the developer to make software significantly less performant. Made me think of the subject discussed in [1]

[1] https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/

emoIIon Recursive Recipes

Making yoghurt contains the instruction: "Stir in some yogurt (from the store or from a friend) and cover with a clean damp towel overnight."

This recursive dependency is not visualized sadly. Fun website nonetheless!

emoIIon The Overflowing Brain: Information overload and the limits of working memory

Another perspective is that putting our knowledge in the world by using digital tools is the only way we can function while being bombarded by information and distractions

emoIIon Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer

"The kids are playing, better record a spacial moment" was one of the most dystopic things I've seen in a long time. Same with the ad at the end, with the father wearing it around his kids. I feel like the interface demands strapping something this futuristic over your head is just... wrong. Perhaps a few years of refining the tech can lead to something that feels more natural

emoIIon Why split lexing and parsing into two separate phases?

The lexer groups individual characters into building blocks, tokens, that the language is made of. From keywords such as "if", "for", "function" and symbols like "{", to arbitrary identifiers that doesn't contribute to the actual meaning or structure of the program, i.e. "foo".

The parser groups the tokens into meaningful statements, it implements the grammar. If the parser sees an "if", it expects some condition next (depending on the grammar of course). If the parser detects statements that are not consistent with the grammar of the language, it should reject the program.

Tldr they work on different levels, lexers just finds the individual building blocks, the parser builds the program

emoIIon Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

Same behaviour for me using Safari.

emoIIon I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

Won't the prompt itself be the test? TDD is literally just providing an expected output on a given input, before implementing the functionality. The prompt we give AIs follows the same pattern, "I have a data that looks like ___, visualize it in a graph that ____"

emoIIon Counter-Strike 2 – Limited Test for select CS:GO players

Well the new smoke mechanics will definitely be a game changer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y9MpNcAitQ

emoIIon Spotify's redesign isn't going down well

The UX of Spotify have gone downhill every since they pivoted towards podcasts, and became particularily bad when they introduced the filter-system for your library and the homepage. Please, fire the product managers creating meaningless work just to keep their job. The only good addition to Spotify in the last five years is the _RE_-launch off in-app lyrics.

emoIIon How a CPU works: Bare metal C on my RISC-V toy CPU

Worth a mention: https://turingcomplete.game I've played for a few hours, it's well made!

emoIIon Letter to Sundar Pichai from TCI Fund Management [pdf]

Perhaps they should only have headcount to keep the service running. Twitters value proposition is still exactly the same as it was 10 years ago, and removing any new features since would not be noticed by most. Developing new features once the initial success has come could be considered making it worse if anything (e.g. reddit). Isn't the lack of new features one of the reasons we like HN?

emoIIon Microsoft is preparing to add ChatGPT to Bing

On the first point, that is no guarantee that users will stay on the site. The AI is currently only using data from 2021 and earlier as far as I'm aware, and does so without feeling out of date. Before we see any significant signs of the AI imploding due to lack of new information, SO might well be long gone

emoIIon Normalising Layoffs/Firing

If it's easy to fire you won't have to be as thorough when hiring because if the new employee doesn't fit - just waste him/her. If it's difficult to fire the company will put potential employees through hell before deciding. I don't think there's any country where the actual process of hiring someone is a legal nightmare

emoIIon 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

Granted I don't live in the US, but is Apple even spending a lot on marketing the iPhone in later years? I feel like their success is based on social pressure/word of mouth more than bombarding the public with messages. At least where I live, most of the iPhone ads are made by carriers if anything

emoIIon CS631 – Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment

Please educate me - since I feel like writing Java without IntelliJ is like riding a bike without wheels, what does emacs/vim do better?

emoIIon iOS 16

Have you seen the image quality of laptop webcams?

emoIIon Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

For sure the psychiatric care in the US is far from sufficient, but that doesn't remove from the fact that guns make causing massive suffering accessible in a way that building a bomb and blowing up a dam doesn't. Guns shouldn't be allowed to be sold OTC, and mental health issues should be taken seriously. Both problems have to be adressed.

emoIIon Ancient civilisation under eastern Turkey estimated to be 11k-13k years old

Isn't the point that our ability to learn and develop cultural behaviour is pretty much instinctive? Of course humans everywhere did things recreationally, it seems part of what it is to be human.

emoIIon Introduction to Compilers and Language Design (2021)

Out of curiosty, could anyone explain to me the reason they think programming languages and the parts that combine into making them work are interesting?

I feel like I have an interest in it, but I'm having a hard time figuring out _why_ I find it so appealing. I know the why doesn't matter as long as I enjoy it, but I'm curious what others think.

emoIIon Managing mental health while running a startup

"Even an unstoppable force can move 1mph"

emoIIon Mathematically correct breakfast: How to slice a bagel into two linked halves (2009)

https://youtu.be/cpynN_B_7QI?t=57

Although this is not a definite answer I think it makes sense, that the inconvenient hole actually provide a convenient storage solution, historically at least.