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isaac21259

554 karma · joined October 16, 2018

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isaac21259··on The case against a C alternative
I was considering this for my programming language but I will most likely not use it because it makes optimisations and garbage collection harder, and the C would not be human readable (just look at the output of the chicken compiler for an example) so there's not a huge benefit. C-- could be an option but it isn't very active or well used.

In terms of relying on tested and supported infrastructure lots of these projects use llvm.

isaac21259··on The Fourth Operation: What Comes After Exponentiation
Exponentials come up quite naturally from differential equations because it's often suprisingly useful to talk about something's rate of change in terms of itself. As far as I know there's no similar connection with tetration.
isaac21259··on The Fourth Operation: What Comes After Exponentiation
To clarify where I live limits are introduced in high school, irrational numbers just much earlier.
isaac21259··on The Fourth Operation: What Comes After Exponentiation
That's a pretty far departure from the original "multiplication is just repeated addition". Regardless, I don't think any student would find it helpful to hear "Multiplying two real numbers is simply taking the limit of a sequence of multiplications between rational numbers that converge to the two real ones". In my country irrational numbers are introduced two or three years before limits so you couldn't teach it in schools effectively either.
isaac21259··on The Fourth Operation: What Comes After Exponentiation
What about irrational numbers? There's no neat way to view multiplication of two irrational numbers as repeated addition. And even if there were a way I don't think it's a useful way to think or teach after the first couple years because it makes obvious things like √2×√2 = 2 seem weird and mysterious.
isaac21259··on Book review: The Little Typer (2021)
Dependent type systems don't deal well with non termination. In general you can't prove a program will or won't terminate. The solution is to disallow recursion except through a few eliminators which do recursion in a well founded way that is guaranteed to halt.

The reason they don't work well with recursion is you could have something like: false :: _|_ false = false

Where false is a function we are defining of the uninhabited type.

For more complicated versions stuff like this see Girard's paradox.

isaac21259··on Ask HN: Books that made you fascinated to learn more mathematics?
The Little Typer by Daniel P. Friedman and David Thrane Christianse. It's basically one long book of examples building on each other to show the semantics of a dependently typed programming language. It inspired me to learn some type theory and made me interested in mathematical logic more generally.
isaac21259··on The Tardis Monad
Se also: https://tech-blog.capital-match.com/posts/5-the-reverse-stat...
isaac21259··on Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?
Everyone here has been talking about how blog comments add little value. On many blogs they are right. But John D Cook's blog regularly has interesting comments, some of which he'll make posts addressing later. Maybe it's because he has a bigger blog or maybe it's something else but blog comments are capable of adding a lot of value.
isaac21259··on With Category Theory, Mathematics Escapes from Equality (2019)
I was also considering writing some introductory stuff about HoTT but I don't think it's possible to avoid talking about topology, homotopy theory, and category theory in depth like you can with, say Haskell and category theory. This is because the stuff that makes HoTT so cool cannot be separated from it's mathematical foundations. How would you explain truncated types without going fairly deep into the math? Or the circle type? Sure both of these could be explained as instances of higher inductive types but that explanation is missing a lot.
isaac21259··on With Category Theory, Mathematics Escapes from Equality (2019)
Curious how approachable you think homotopy type theory is to people who think they know better than researchers? Simple type systems would be understandable (Haskell has type systems similar to System F and rust has an affine your system) but if anything being a programmer may add obstacles to understand HoTT since programmers (generally) have never had the opportunity to learn topology or anything else that HoTT builds on. Also not everything in HoTT has a clear computational interpretation, notably the univalence axiom.

That said I encourage everyone who's interested to investigate this but I don't think it's realistic without having a solid foundation in mathematics.

(And I also agree with the sibling comment that HoTT isn't really used as a foundation of mathematics.)

isaac21259··on Gas pumps happen to be about as insecure as your typical router
[1] Is what (I believe) they were talking about. Rather than configuring these in a sane way you just scan configuration barcodes. I didn't see anything on the list that was too dangerous but you could change the maximum input length or allow full ASCII encoding which could be dangerous if the programmers assumed that the barcode reader returns a fixed length string of numbers.

[1] https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/b/5/0/e/e/DY_Scan_Setting_Ma...

isaac21259··on Bringing the Framework Laptop to more of the world
Do you think a significant amount of people who want to run Linux will want it preinstalled for them?
isaac21259··on Ask HN: How does Common Lisp deal with side effects?
I would assume that it manages it the same way every other impure functional language manages side effects. I assume common lisp would be quite similar to ML, Ocaml, and Scheme in the way it manages side effects. Those languages don't make side effects part of their type system and more or less leave it up to the programmer to not make mistakes. Note that I've never done anything of significance in common lisp so this is just a best guess.
isaac21259··on Annotated equations for increased readability and understanding of papers
I believe this is basically what programming with APL looks like.
isaac21259··on Ask HN: Could my Facebook childhood memory be real?
Definitely possible. Steam had something similar a while back caused by caching issues [1]. I have no idea about Facebook specifically though.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/12/25/steam-is-...

isaac21259··on Ask HN: Qubes OS or just separate VMs for separating work and private files?
Have you considered nix os? I personally don't use it but I think it could fulfill your needs. You could have a work user with the home directory encrypted and a seperate personal user. Then you can install packages in a user independent way and you won't have any cross over between your users.
isaac21259··on Show HN: Dependently typed language for proofs that you can implement in one day
Sorry but you cannot implement this in a day. I've written my own language very similar to this and from my experience it takes way longer. Implementing type checking for just lambdas, pi types, universes, unit, and absurd would take a day or two on it's own. Not to mention Sigma types, co-product types, w-types, identity types, natural numbers, and lists. You also have type inference and evaluation. Also the time spent coming to grips with what all of this means. It's a really cool project but I expect it would take a week minimum to implement this and have a solid understanding of everything you've done.
isaac21259··on Ask HN: Books that teach you logic building skills
Not exactly what you asked for but I would highly recommend "To mock a Mockingbird".
isaac21259··on The most underused browser feature: reader mode
The text to speech goes through speech dispatcher which by default probably uses espeak. I believe there are better text to speech engines like festival which you should be able to have speech dispatcher use quite easily but I've never tried this.
isaac21259··on Recfiles
See also: https://labs.tomasino.org/gnu-recutils/
isaac21259··on Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources
What? Scanning your phone is exactly what Apple is doing. They say they won't scan anything not put on the cloud but you have no control over that and it is subject to change at anytime. They've already weakened their systems at the request of the government so it wouldn't be at all unexpected for them to scan photos not uploaded to the cloud. End-to-end encryption is completely useless if you have spyware installed on one of those ends.
isaac21259··on Is π the Same in Every Universe?
For those wanting to read more about this this is exactly how the real numbers are defined in the lambda calculus.

https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/2272/representing-neg...

isaac21259··on All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
Of copilot were open source I wouldn't have an issue with it. However it is closed source and a later version it's intended to be sold.
isaac21259··on The Friendship Paradox
Any chance you remember what the paper was called? I'd love to read it.
isaac21259··on Evolution of Random Number Generators
If your value of size is a power of two you could just encrypt x with a block cipher where the block size is equal to size and the key is your seed.
isaac21259··on Scientists Achieve Real-Time Communication with Lucid Dreamers in Breakthrough
Some techniques require you wake up in the middle of the night before going back to sleep. Personally I've always had far higher success with these methods than others.
isaac21259··on The Enduring Myth of Stranger Danger
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/795/

Although I do agree the risk of stranger danger is overblown.

isaac21259··on JPMorgan still has its Python 2 issues
Why doesn't the 2to3 tool that ships with python work for them? I rarely write python but I've had to convert from python 2 to 3 several times and it has always work fine. Are there gaps in 2to3 which I haven't encountered that can't be fixed?
isaac21259··on VideoLAN is 20 years old today
If your looking for a good music player on Linux I highly recommend Lollypop.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Lollypop#

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