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felixyzon Akse3D – open-source 3D modelling anyone can master

Someone built something useful and you complain that it's "nice looking"? Consider reframing your feedback.

felixyzon Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

Your information diet. Social media. Gossipy and negative people. Mulling over old failures/regrets/slights etc. The mind is easily pulled along by negativity and outrage... as can be observed in our current global psychological state.

felixyzon Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

That's where the modern meaning of "digital circuit" etc comes from as well, the discrete/jointed nature of the digits (ie fingers). (Source: I read it a long time ago and was fascinated so stuck in my memory.)

felixyzon GTFOBins

You have to be extremely careful when you set up a dev container, lock down file access, do not give the agent the power to start other containers or "docker compose up", restrict network access to an allow-list etc. Just running the agent in a container does little to protect you. (Maybe you know this, but a lot of people don't!)

felixyzon Hegel, a universal property-based testing protocol and family of PBT libraries

"didn't want to talk about it", absolutely. "dissolved metaphysics entirely", absolutely not.

felixyzon Postgraphile v5 Released

Great news and a long time coming!

felixyzon Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

The tech world knows this. They are raking in money off of these scams. People with a rudimentary moral compass leave, those without stay, which makes it even less likely that industry will self-sanitize. The rest of society, out of survival instinct if nothing else, will have to force it to stop anti-social and fraudulent practices. Same as many other industries.

felixyzon Mise: Monorepo Tasks

I've seen several Mac users have the same experience: going all-in on nix-darwin and then getting frustrated. But nix-darwin is one of the worst ways of getting into Nix, because its goal is to make your whole macOS system configurable with Nix, but macOS is a moving target and (unlike Linux) not built to be modular at all. I know people put a lot of hard work into nix-darwin, but it's simply not the main focus of Nix as a whole and sadly it might not ever become a seamless experience. (I'm not a mac user so not keeping up, but I do see colleagues trying it out from time to time.)

The solution here is: use Nix but don't use nix-darwin (at least not until you're generally comfortable with Nix for package management and dev shells). You do NOT have to use nix-darwin on Mac to reap 80% of the benefits of Nix (especially in a team setting).

After dropping nix-darwin, I think almost everyone will find that it's very easy to use Nix for sharing project setups with bespoke tooling. I just had a new team member onboard, knowing nothing about Nix, in a day or less, with several different languages and unusual tools.

felixyzon Claude Code 2.0

The way I do this is I task the agent with writing a script which in turn does the updates. I can inspect that script, and I can run it on a subset of files/folders, and I can git revert changes if something went wrong and ask the agent to fix the script or fine-tune it myself. And I don't burn through tokens :)

Also, another important factor (as in everything) is to do things in many small steps, instead of giving one big complicated prompt.

felixyzon My first impressions of Gleam

This is going to be very good for Gleam IMO. Having a super-easy on-ramp for using Gleam in Elixir projects will let people experiment with implementing eg more complex business logic in Gleam, and allow gradual adoption. Naturally, this is not the focus of the Gleam project itself, but for me, using Gleam for the core of a project while having access to the amazing Elixir ecosystem is a dream come true. I've been using mix_gleam but it's not perfect and since I started using Gleam pre 1.0, and it's a low-velocity project, updating became too complicated and I actually ended up moving everything to Elixir recently.

felixyzon Many hard LeetCode problems are easy constraint problems

You're a hero!

felixyzon What brain surgery taught me about the fragile gift of consciousness

> There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time

True. But then again, there is nothing that persists over time. Entities with enduring identities - of any kind - are just abstractions that we superimpose on experience.

> Consciousness is just something that living beings do

To my eyes, you're switching over to another meaning of "consciousness" here. Sure there's no enduring self, but that doesn't mean consciousness (the capacity for experience, rather than mere behavior) is just something we do. We can understand feelings, thoughts, emotions etc as fundamentally "impersonal", yes, but that doesn't mean that they are not states of being. To me such states are about as real as anything. Again, it's two separate issues: 1) the nature of a persistent self, 2) the nature of mental states, not taken as "possessions" of such a self.

(Still, psychologically speaking, the sense of self is baked into even our most basic acts of cognition. When you see an apple, there is always an implicit "you" in relation to the apple. In practical terms, it takes a lot of effort to separate one from the other - yet another topic!)

felixyzon Sly Stone has died

Wonderful podcast all-around!

felixyzon Sly Stone has died

The Swedish, rather short-lived but very influential, magazine Pop voted There's a Riot as the best album of all time in 1994. That list had a huge effect on a whole generation of Swedish music fans.

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidningen_Pops_lista_%C3%B6ver...

felixyzon Sly Stone has died

Out of JB, Sly, and George Clinton, Sly's my man.

felixyzon Why F#?

My current preference is to use Elixir and its great ecosystem as the shell for my project, and implement the core business logic in Gleam.

felixyzon Roald Dahl on the death of his daughter (2015)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles:_A_Dangerous_Illness

> "Measles: A Dangerous Illness" is an open letter written by the children's writer Roald Dahl in 1986 in response to ongoing cases of measles in the United Kingdom at that time despite the introduction of an effective measles vaccine in 1968.

felixyzon Turner, Bird, Eratosthenes: An eternal burning thread

Lovely!

felixyzon Show HN: SmartHome – An Adventure Game

Excellent! This scenario has a precursor in Philip K. Dick's "Ubik" (1969). It's just a sub-plot there, but the parallels are striking.

felixyzon Shine with Gleam

Scala is known for being multi-paradigm and quite complex, with competing factions promoting different Best Ways of Doing Things. Gleam is designed to be small and simple with a single clear path for getting things done. Apart from that, Gleam leans heavily on Erlang's actor model, which IMO is one of the greatest successes of language design to date.

felixyzon Rediscovering the Small Web (2020)

Wow, I remember discovering your page in the late 90s. Never thought I'd find it again!

felixyzon Postgres feature you're not using – CTEs a.k.a. WITH clauses

Any particular macro system you have used or created? If so, did you use an existing pre-processor, or just coded something up from scratch?

felixyzon Show HN: PgQueuer – Transform PostgreSQL into a Job Queue

With a partitioned table you can painlessly remove old rows. Of course, you then have to maintain your partitions, but that's trivial.

felixyzon Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

TypeDb is a practical Datalog-based database system [1] (with a different syntax). TerminusDb is a project in a similar vein [2], but actually an RDF store at its core. If you want to experiment with the connections between Datalog, relational algebra, and SQL, check out the Datalog Educational System. And if you want to jump into the theory, Foundations of Databases (the "Alice book") is very thorough but relatively readable [4]! Oh, and there's a Google project, Logica, to do Datalog over Postgres databases [5].

[1]: https://typedb.com/ [2]: https://terminusdb.com/ [3]: http://www.fdi.ucm.es/profesor/fernan/des/ [4]: http://webdam.inria.fr/Alice/ [5]: https://github.com/evgskv/logica

felixyzon Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

You are definitely on to something here. OOP has some common roots with formal ontologies and knowledge representation (not so much the programming languages, but object oriented modeling). OO fails at this for various reasons, whereas logic is tailored for this specific purpose. Check out ErgoAI (formerly Flora-2), it's the most advanced Prolog flavor for representing and reasoning over knowledge. https://github.com/ErgoAI

felixyzon Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

Shameless plug: you should check out my podcast The Search Space for a view of the broader landscape of Prolog and logic programming: https://thesearch.space/

I don't publish episodes often but I have a lot of good interviewees lined up :)

In general, I would advice you to look beyond Prolog and explore Answer Set Programming, the Picat language, and the connections between logic programming and databases (SQL, RDF or otherwise). Not instead of Prolog, but in parallel. Prolog is awesome!

felixyzon Relational Algebra Primer

Bmg, the Ruby implementation of relational algebra, has been around for 10 years. We're making and effort to create comprehensive documentation, and as part of that effort we put together a primer on relational algebra. It aims to be a bit less theory-heavy and more hands-on than the typical introductory material you find online (which tends to be university course materials). Relational algebra isn't just interesting background theory, but was created for programmers and has very tangible benefits.

Any questions, suggestions, comments or criticisms would be appreciated!

felixyzon Rete algorithm

Clara is a good one.

http://www.clara-rules.org/

Self-plug: my interview with its original author. https://thesearch.space/episodes/2-ryan-brush-on-retaking-ru...

felixyzon Learn OTP with Gleam

Gleam reimplements (a large portion of) OTP and is interoperable with Erlang/Elixir code that uses OTP, rather than providing bindings.

felixyzon In the gut's 'second brain,' key agents of health emerge

Regular, reasonable person here.

> Your body is your mind and your mind is your body. Full stop.

This is completely unwarranted judging from the rest of your post ("in the very infancy", "nearly completely unknown", "mostly in the dark", "haven't the foggiest idea"; although I appreciate the frankness).

If people made bold statements like "There is no such thing as X" in any other field at a similar stage of development, their claims would be rightly dismissed as pseudoscience. ("There is no such thing as a graviton. Full stop.")

Your claim is not a finding of your field of expertise, or any other branch of science. It's metaphysical belief. You're entitled to it. It's a widely shared belief. It might be a belief with a lot going for it. Metaphysical claims are fun! They can be discussed! But I wish people wouldn't confuse them with scientific knowledge.