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gb

682 karma · joined August 21, 2007

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gb··on Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?
The half-edge data structure, used in computational geometry.

I remember when I first discovered it, it drove home the point that choice of data structure can really matter - it made a bunch of problems I'd been working on much easier to solve, as it gave a different way of looking at things.

gb··on PureScript and Haskell
PureScript isn't just for business logic at all - it has its own UI libraries, React bindings, DOM API bindings, and so on. It is more often used for front-ends than anything else that I've seen.

You only need to use one of spago or bower (spago being the recommended choice now), and that's because npm style dependencies are not suitable for PS.

As for why you'd choose it over TypeScript... well, you'd do so if you want to use a functional language that doesn't allow arbitrary effects and has a sound type system.

gb··on How Not to Deal with Murder in Space (2020)
It's a joke about Among Us.
gb··on Show HN: Random Roads
Really nice. I tried something like this many years ago in Flash, but the results this can produce are far more impressive!
gb··on This DX7 Cartridge Does Not Exist
If you scroll down a bit there's more info: https://www.thisdx7cartdoesnotexist.com/#faq
gb··on Learning Haskell is no harder than learning any other programming language
I don't know whether this is true or not, but either way, working with Haskell makes my job more enjoyable than if I was writing some other language anyway.
gb··on Smartphones and Dematerialization
The article did mention it:

> Dematerialization is an idea that goes back at least as far as the 1920s (with R. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of “ephemerialization”)

gb··on PureScript 0.13 Release
Life! :)

He still uses PS and chimes in on some issues, but doesn't really have time to work on the compiler anymore: https://twitter.com/paf31/status/941745900426215424

gb··on 339 Bytes of Responsive CSS
Also related, the link/background colour combination fails WCAG contrast guidelines.
gb··on A Case for a New Language
https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang seems like it might have been a suitable candidate here also.
gb··on Standardized Ladder of Functional Programming [pdf]
I don't think it's mentioned anywhere in the poster, but it's also perhaps worth noting that this came out of a survey, it wasn't just dreamed up by one person / a few people.

(A tweet thanking survey respondents: https://twitter.com/lambda_conf/status/803695274896093184)

gb··on How to stop functional programming
An advantage of using the most general signature possible is it restricts the things you can actually do with the values involved, which can make it easier to provide correct implementations.
gb··on Elm in the Real World
There's some work towards that in PureScript: https://github.com/kRITZCREEK/psc-ide provides an interface for multiple editors, seems like Atom, Emacs, Vim and VS are available currently.
gb··on Java Developers
The main advantage is when doing something like this is Haskell the code you pass around can't have arbitrary side effects, so you don't actually need to worry so much about where it is called.
gb··on What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
Perhaps no evidence was found because people from the future have seen this paper and therefore know not to reveal themselves this way!
gb··on How We're Feeling: Tweet sentiment
There's a similar project from 2005, based on blog posts: http://www.wefeelfine.org
gb··on David Cameron: TV crime dramas prove we need warrantless electronic surveillance
The exact quote from the linked BBC article is:

"In the most serious crimes [such as] child abduction communications data... is absolutely vital. I love watching, as I probably should stop telling people, crime dramas on the television. There's hardly a crime drama where a crime is solved without using the data of a mobile communications device."

gb··on The Scientific 7-Minute Workout
Lifting for strength and lifting for large muscles are actually quite different. It is likely a huge bodybuilder type will be strong relative to the average person, but that's not their primary goal, and correspondingly you can be strong without that look too.
gb··on AMD denies killing off big cores (Kaveri, Steamroller, and Excavator)
The article has been amended:

"Updated 11/19/2012@10:15am: AMD contacted us with an official denial of the story and stated that Kaveri and the big cores are still on track."

gb··on Writing Fast, Memory-Efficient JavaScript
Certainly delete can be useful, but nulling a property has almost the same effect (apart from hasOwnProperty still returning true) - if you're looking at optimising at the level this article is talking about avoiding delete might well be sensible.
gb··on Cell: Lisp in Javascript
Coincidentally I just started working on one last weekend too. http://github.com/garyb/fiction

It's more Scheme influenced (but not at all RnRS compliant) and as of about half an hour ago has working define-syntax/syntax-rules style macros.

The code isn't as nice though ;). I just wanted to get it working so I could rewrite it in itself.

gb··on How can a programmer learn to design websites that don’t suck
Also the text is fully justified, which is generally not the way to go on the web.
gb··on Thoughts on Paul Rand
I didn't read it is arrogance, he's contrasting the praise he was receiving at the time with his own opinion of Paul Rand's genuis.
gb··on CoffeePhysics: A JS/CS Physics Engine
Clearing or filling large areas of <canvas> is cripplingly slow in every browser I've tried so far, so I'd assume it's that.

Hopefully that'll be worked on at some point in the not too distant future as it's one of the biggest problems I encounter when dealing with canvas at the moment.

gb··on No, Graphic Designers Aren't Ruining the Web
If designers are to blame at all, it's as much the fault of clients that won't back down when asking the designers to add more and more to every page.
gb··on Plink, a multiplayer HTML5 music game
Pretty sure this the pentatonic scale actually - so all black notes. It almost certainly woule be more cacophonous even if it was just all white notes, never mind the full scale.
gb··on Hyperpolyglot: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby
I don't disagree with what you're saying, but it does mention in the comment that x is not mutated.
gb··on Stop writing milliseconds and hating JavaScript's setTimeout & setInterval
I'm not disagreeing with your general point, but this does seem a little overkill when you could achieve a similar effect with a few constants:

  5 * MINUTE
  3.5 * HOUR
etc.
gb··on Disciple: A Strict Dialect of Haskell
The "strict" refers to the fact it's not lazily evaluated.
gb··on Why You Should Never Center Align Paragraph Text
Justified text is hard to get right as it needs typographic attention to prevent rivers or loose lines appearing - something that's not going to be realistic in the flexible layouts of the web.

Also, apparently dyslexic people have a particularly hard time reading justified text, but I don't have any good sources for that.

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