fermigier

Who could have guessed?

Whoa, good to know that Henri Cohen was involved in this story.

He is the co-creator of PARI/GP, the algorithmic number theoretic C library that I used for my thesis (https://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/) as well as four books in Springer's Graduate Texts in Mathematics (GTM 138, 193, 239 and 240 - most mathematicians achieve fame with just one book in this series).

Good. For a couple of seconds, I feared something like "The next step of our wonderful journey...".

Strawman argument. It would have been (semi) interesting if the title was "Software productivity can't be measured by lines of code" (but already very eloquently stated in https://folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html ).

"lfi is a lazy functional sync, async, and concurrent iteration library for JavaScript and TypeScript"

Looks good (I understand all the word and even the whole sentence).

But what is it good for? ("What's in it for me?")

What are the use cases? How is it difference / how does it improve on / when should I use it instead of / ... lodash, ramda, functional.js, RxJs, etc.?

So these "particles" are actually not particles, but "quasi-particles".

In other words, throw away scientific rigor as soon as you can get a clickbaity headline.

"We shut down the company at the end of 2019 and I felt it would be a shame if Helium simply disappeared from the face of the earth."

I appreciate the effort. Thank you M. Hermann.

I remember watching Intolerance (1916) by D.W. Griffith at the Avignon festival as a teenager in 1986, with a score interpreted by a live symphonic orchestra (https://festival-avignon.com/fr/edition-1986/programmation/i...). The movie in itself is definitively a masterpiece for its ambitious structure, innovative editing and grandiose production design (it was a flop at the box office in 1916.)

(Warning: Intolerance was Griffith's response to the widespread criticism of his earlier work, The Birth of a Nation (1915), considered "the most controversial film ever made in the United States" and "the most reprehensibly racist film in Hollywood history" - so we're stepping into controversial territory here).

Yeah. Don't fuck with scroll, don't fuck with crtl/cmd-click, don't fuck with copy/paste (specially in password fields), don't fuck with the back button, etc.

Not a comparison, but a fairly comprehensive list that I maintain, with github stars as a proxy for popularity:

https://github.com/sfermigier/awesome-python-web-frameworks

Note: as you probably know, popularity is not necessarily correlated with "actively maintained". For instance, Hug and Sanic are quite popular, but haven't seen a commit for quite a long time.

TL;DR: is this a cloud service or an on-premise thing?

"Contract programming for C++ was implemented back in the 90's."

-> Did the proposal authors contact you or refer to your work (or any other previous work)? It not, that would be a shame.

"It also appears in the D programming language"

-> Do people use it?

A reference for your dissertation?

The usefulness (or lack thereof) of contracts was famously discussed in 1997 in this paper: https://www.irisa.fr/pampa/EPEE/Ariane5.html (with additional comments here: https://www.irisa.fr/pampa/EPEE/Ariane5-comments.html ).

I have tried several times (a couple of decades ago) to introduce DBC in Python, using one of the many available libraries (for an overview: see https://lab.abilian.com/Tech/Python/DbC%20in%20Python/ ) but, like you, wasn't convinced.

I believe your argument on the performance penalty is right, and as a corollary, this implies that contracts are mostly useful if associated with a formal proof system. Contracts in production are probably a bad idea, in most cases.

Well, the basics, oversimplified, are this:

- In general, elliptic curves are solutions of P(x, y) = 0 where P is a polynomial of degree 3 in two variables. "Points" on the curve are solutions of this equation.

- If you intersect an elliptic curve with a straight line, you end up with a polynomial in one variable, of degree 3 (in general). Since a polynomial of degree 3 has 3 solutions (in the appropriate context), this means that if you have two points on the curve, and you draw a line through these two points, there is a third aligned with them which belongs to the curve. So we have an operation on the curve, which to every pair of points associates a third point. This can be explicitly calculated.

- It can be proven (again, by explicit calculation) that this operation is associative and commutative, and that there is a "zero" element, i.e. that this operation forms a "group".

Now we want to study these elliptic curves and their associated groups with one additional condition: that the points are rational, i.e. have coordinates that are rational numbers (a/b). For each curve with rational parameters (i.e. the coefficients of the polynomial are rational), we want to study the rational points of this curve.

For some elliptic curves, there is a finite number of points, so the associated group is a finite commutative group.

For other elliptic curves, however, there are infinitely many rational points, and mathematicians have wanted to classify their structure.

A foundational result in number theory known as the Mordell-Weil theorem states that the group of rational points on an elliptic curve over a number field (such as the rationals, ℚ) is finitely generated. In other words, although there may be infinitely many points, they can be expressed as a finite set of points (known as "generators") combined under the group operation. This structure forms what is called a "finitely generated abelian group", which can be decomposed into a direct sum of a finite subgroup (called the "torsion") and a free part of rank r, where r is called the "rank" of the elliptic curve.

This rank "r" essentially measures the "size" of the free part of the group and has deep implications in both theoretical and computational number theory. For example, if r=0, the group is finite, meaning that the set of rational points on the curve is limited to a finite collection. When r>0, there are infinitely many rational points, which can be generated by combining a finite number of points.

So the challenge is to find a curve with a large number of generators. All of these computations (for a given curve at least) are quite explicit, and can be carried out with a bignum library (the numbers tend to get quite large quickly). I used PARI/GP for my thesis.

This discovery was already commented a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41475177

As I wrote in the comments, I was the record holder, twice, in the 90s:

Fermigier, Stéfane - Un exemple de courbe elliptique définie sur Q de rang ≥19. (French) [An example of an elliptic curve defined over Q with rank ≥19] C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris Sér. I Math. 315 (1992), no. 6, 719–722.

Fermigier, Stéfane - Une courbe elliptique définie sur Q de rang ≥22. (French) [An elliptic curve defined over Q of rank ≥22] Acta Arith. 82 (1997), no. 4, 359–363.

I hope they keep flamethrowers handy in case any Norwegian dogs start acting funny...

Fun fact: Audrey Tang, creator of Ethercalc, went on to become Minister for Digital Affairs for the Taiwanese government.

"it becomes incumbent on you to have a disaster recovery plan should that service suddenly become unavailable to you." -> It's already hard when you are a seasoned IT professional. I don't know a single person in my family who has the faintest idea where to start, even if I've lectured them several times on this topic.

AIDE has been around for 25 years: https://aide.github.io/

IMHO the right thing would be to use another name.

Title should say it's 13 years old and currently unmaintained.

BTW: a modern, maintained alternative (With Python instead of Lua) would be Pyxel (https://github.com/kitao/pyxel -> discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40899520).

I'm worried about the license.

Flyon contains code from Preline which is "dual licensed" under the MIT license and a proprietary "fair" license.

> Preline UI is free for both personal and commercial projects, released under dual license terms "MIT" and "Preline UI Fair Use License".

See: https://preline.co/docs/license.html

They don't explain if "dual license" means "and" or "or". I suspect "and", because otherwise, it wouldn't make sense since MIT is one of the less restrictive open source licenses.

If it's the case, neither Flyon nor Preline are open source.

43 years of actors: a taxonomy of actor models and their key properties (2016)

From the abstract: The Actor Model is a message passing concurrency model that was originally proposed by Hewitt et al. in 1973. It is now 43 years later and since then researchers have explored a plethora of variations on this model. This paper presents a history of the Actor Model throughout those years. The goal of this paper is not to provide an exhaustive overview of every actor system in existence but rather to give an overview of some of the exemplar languages and libraries that influenced the design and rationale of other actor systems throughout those years. This paper therefore shows that most actor systems can be roughly classified into four families, namely: Classic Actors, Active Objects, Processes and Communicating Event-Loops.

-> http://soft.vub.ac.be/Publications/2016/vub-soft-tr-16-11.pd...

I wasn't raised (as a technologist) by the internet, but by cassettes, floppies, magazines and books. But we share at least one experience: the horrors of ndiswrapper.

20 years later, I recently tried to install Ubuntu on an old Intel MacBook Pro that I got somehow, and I realized that in 2024 you still can't install Linux on a laptop (at least, on laptop of a certain popular make) without jumping through hoops, due to, IIRC, lack of support for the particular Wifi chipset this computer uses.

Never been much into BF nor esoteric languages in general, but I love this attitude!

Regarding the comments at the top of https://github.com/bf-enterprise-solutions/ed.bf : I believe a modern-day developer comparable to Ken Thompson might be Fabrice Bellard, WDYT? Any other names that pop to mind?

In French, we call it "Le cycle en V" and we think it's beautiful.

I guess I thought that I could make a bigger dent in the universe as an open source entrepreneur than as a mathematician. Also, the fact that, at the time, the decision to switch course was not irreversible, given a new French law that had passed shortly before (i.e. I could go back to the university where I was already tenured if I didn't succeed in 6 years).

Running an open source software business... Founded https://nuxeo.com/ and now https://abilian.com/

I broke the record back in 1992: Fermigier, Stéfane - Un exemple de courbe elliptique définie sur Q de rang ≥19. (French) [An example of an elliptic curve defined over Q with rank ≥19] C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris Sér. I Math. 315 (1992), no. 6, 719–722.

And again in 1997: Fermigier, Stéfane - Une courbe elliptique définie sur Q de rang ≥22. (French) [An elliptic curve defined over Q of rank ≥22] Acta Arith. 82 (1997), no. 4, 359–363.

Noam Elkies was already a major contributor to the field at the time. I dropped math to do computer stuff :)

Thanks. So, as I suspected, the gap between 7 and 8 is quite huge (16 years).

Why "1320" ?

Could it be because, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1320 "In France, a large group of common people band together in Normandy on Easter Sunday to begin a crusade, after a teenage shepherd says he was visited by the Holy Spirit" (my emphasis).