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jsjolen

146 karma · joined December 3, 2016

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jsjolen··on What’s in that .wasm? Introducing wasm-decompile
That's just the pprinter working its magic :-).

Just read the standard, it's quite clear from the semantics that it's a stack machine: https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/exec/runtime.html#st... https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/exec/instructions.ht...

jsjolen··on Sweden to shut bars and restaurants that ignore coronavirus restrictions
I'm not saying that because the lockdown has been a failure you need to save face. Is there something unclear in my reasoning from the rest of my comment that you'd like me to re-word?
jsjolen··on Sweden to shut bars and restaurants that ignore coronavirus restrictions
It is absolutely not the same, since Sweden may change their position because they are not inherently opposed by some inherent moral absolutism to do so.
jsjolen··on Sweden to shut bars and restaurants that ignore coronavirus restrictions
>[...] but quietly so they don't have to admit it's a change of course.

Where exactly does this come from? Sweden has no need to save face. We've been transparent and had open discussion from the beginning with the spoken assumption that we may, in fact, not be doing the right thing and that we may have to alter course as the situation changes.

The ones who need to save face are the ones which are committing to full lockdown right now. They're the ones who are making a big sacrifice and need to motivate it with the fact that "it's a necessity", seeing Sweden succeed otherwise would be a big blow to their egos and their personal sacrifices.

I will also say that voluntary compliance is still occurring here, which is notable both in what private companies are doing in adapting to the situation, and how the average person has changed their behaviour. This doesn't mean 100% compliance for everyone, which is unfortunate.

jsjolen··on Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
Mutual intelligibility for the sake of information exchange is good, but we can have both. Most Europeans already have both. In the EU (the organization) it's Euro English.

The person above you has not said that mutual intelligibility is bad.

You want people to share their culture with you, yet you are fine with them throwing away something which acts as one of the backbones of their cultural history for the sake of an imagined increase in cooperation.

And also, why does everything have to be useful? The useless things in life are often the best. Like ice cream, poetry, wasting an afternoon away, or hacking. In fact that's why I work, to enjoy the useless things in life.

jsjolen··on Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
1. They can do both, learning a separate script that's as simple as the Latin one is not a huge investment.

2. You're talking about people who immigrate to an English speaking country, correct? Good advice for people living in Mongolia surely is available in Mongolian.

Mongolians today learn English, at least the guy who went to Sweden to work as a chef that I talked to a couple of years ago did.

jsjolen··on Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
Interesting! Would you like to expand on that argument?
jsjolen··on Language Design: Use [ ] instead of < > for Generics
I've never seen a computer scientist put a lot of effort into syntax. The POPL people are more interested in type systems and semantics than they are in syntax.
jsjolen··on Language Design: Use [ ] instead of < > for Generics
All of what the author said is what Scala does (author likes Scala).

I've written a decent amount of Scala, it's fine.

I've also written a lot of Common Lisp, where array access is done using aref. That was also fine.

jsjolen··on Vim rendered on a cube for no reason
Now we just need to render Emacs onto a tesseract.
jsjolen··on Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang
I have no issue with that decision at all and find it akin to Go forcing users to adhere to gofmt, and I don't use Zig. A good error message would be nice (EDIT: A zigfmt would be even better).

How many developers who try out new languages are even using Windows? I'd imagine most are on a UNIX-like. Regardless, I don't think it's a big deal either way. You could always make a merge request with a fix if you feel so strongly about it.

jsjolen··on Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
He shattered his spine? Was he 80 years old and his spine calcified?
jsjolen··on Native Applications with Racket
Sounds slow to use RPC with JSON for communication.

It seems that Racket does allow for C-to-Racket calls. You could write a glue program that generates C code that calls Racket functions and returns data, Swift code can then be generated to call that C code. That might be faster.

jsjolen··on Seven deadly sins of talking about “types” (2014)
Sure, but the general idea that you should disallow undefined operations are a core application of type systems.

You don't need too advanced of a type system to implement what you're talking about. With the caveat that doing it in Java would make the code tedious to write ;-).

jsjolen··on ABCL – Common Lisp on the JVM
Is it the type checking or the runtime that's slow?
jsjolen··on ABCL – Common Lisp on the JVM
Racket has Typed Racket, you might want to try that out!
jsjolen··on W3C recommends WebAssembly
I'm not sure that WASM actually is that analysis-resistant. It's more high-level in some aspects than the JVM bytecode for example.

For example, it doesn't support arbitrary computed goto:s. Instead it supports block-based control flow, where the semantics can either create blocks or jump out of them to lower down blocks. This makes it possible to construct a CFG statically, which isn't possible if it did support arbitrary computed goto:s.

jsjolen··on Startup failures are only a matter of point of view
That failure can be a teachable moment is well-known and is applicable in all aspects of life, it is not particularly interesting to read about that in this specific context. In some ways, it is also insulting.

For some there are real-world (often financial) consequences to failure, and that an article about why their egos shouldn't be bruised when facing a failure is the least of their worries.

jsjolen··on A new way to make quadratic equations easy
Yes, and apparently it's also used in Indian schools (see comments found here: https://www.facebook.com/poshenloh ).
jsjolen··on Facebook Libra Is Architecturally Unsound
An alternative company which actually seems to do good work w.r.t. safe languages is Alacris/LegiLogic. Though I haven't found the operational semantics of the language there is a public compiler that can be found here: https://alacrity-lang.org/codeeditor
jsjolen··on Apple Removes HKmap.live from the App Store
I disagree, I don't think we will ever do the right thing if the reward is big enough. I think the right way to go is to dismantle these unnecessary power structures that allow us to do the wrong choice and replace them with better ones.

For example, Apple can only do this because they have the power to remove apps from their store (fine) and because we do not have the power to install apps which aren't from their store (not fine).

If the latter is fixed, then there would be no issue. HKers would be able to install the map, and no one would be able to stop them - because no unnecessary power structure that can be abused exists.

jsjolen··on A German word for:“It only works when I try to show you how it does not work”?
It just means "demonstration effect", right?
jsjolen··on Green AI
There's a lot of work that I want to do that I cannot be paid to do, therefore those are the things I would be doing with my time instead.

Being paid is not a substitute for enjoying the fruits of one's labour.

jsjolen··on Why It’s Hard for Startups to Create Wealth in Europe
Really? Could you link me to Skatteverket where it says this? The only info I find is that you tax when you sell your stock.

I read most of this: https://www.skatteverket.se/privat/skatter/vardepapper/omakt...

jsjolen··on Using TLA+ for fun and profit in the development of ElasticSearch [video]
So to ensure that your system follows this state machine you need to write a proof for that in some other theory (like an abstract interpretaion of your program)?
jsjolen··on Trying to Convince People to Change (2016)
Now that's what I call applying a growth mindset to things. /s
jsjolen··on Kei – A small and expressive dependent language
Can someone read out to me how the Abstraction rule works?
jsjolen··on A Common Lisp library for solving linear programming problems
The author is paid by IBM to work on this. The author combines ML and classical AI to achieve explainability in ML.

This is one guy by the way, so not like a huge effort by IBM.

jsjolen··on People with unusually high IQ, why are you still unsuccessful?
>The drink lowers the effective IQ, bringing them into a much wider communication range. I had the same experience just the other day.

Frankly, I'd have to drink to endure anyone who thinks in this manner.

jsjolen··on Q-Learning
The table becomes unwieldy on much simpler tasks than that.

Consider a 3x3 board where each cell holds 3 bits of information (each cell can be in 2^3 states). Then for the board you have (2^3)^9 = 2^27 different states.

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