HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mycl

45 karma · joined April 13, 2016

submissionscomments
mycl··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)
You say the math is more moonlighting, but you have a supervisor. Are you enrolled for a part-time degree while you work as a SWE?
mycl··on Ask HN: Most interesting, mildly impractical, well-written books on software?
The Art of Prolog is now open access: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-prolog-second-edition

You could think of it as "SICP for Prolog".

mycl··on Using a Piece of Paper as a Display Terminal – Ed vs. Vim
As to your second question: Yes, Bill Joy did that in 1976 when he added a visual mode to his line editor ex that was itself based on ed. The mode was called vi (for "visual") and updated the screen as you typed ex commands preceded by a colon. All vi descendants have this feature, including Vim. :-)
mycl··on Escaping strings in Bash using !:q
I think it was in ed already. The POSIX ed spec says: "Any character other than <space> or <newline> can be used instead of a slash to delimit the RE and the replacement."
mycl··on Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
The Yoneda Lemma is really some kind of "fundamental theorem" of elementary category theory. Then there are Freyd's Adjoint Functor Theorem, Kan extensions and probably others I'm forgetting...
mycl··on The Looming Bank Collapse
It says this:

> We already know that a significant majority of the loans in CLOs have weak covenants that offer investors only minimal legal protection; in industry parlance, they are “cov lite.” The holders of leveraged loans will thus be fortunate to get pennies on the dollar as companies default—nothing close to the 70 cents that has been standard in the past.

mycl··on Interesting Programming Languages
Interestingly, from the point of view of category theory, an isomorphism in a category is just a morphism with a two-sided inverse. A bijection is then just an isomorphism in the category of sets.
mycl··on List of Cognitive Biases
Can you expand on that? My impression is that Kahneman and Tversky "proved" that human cognition is not Bayesian and now much of cognitive psychology is turning around and saying, no, they didn't, and it is. As a layperson, I don't know whom to believe.
mycl··on The Birth of Prolog (1992) [pdf]
Peter Flach's "Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example" also deserves to be mentioned as a wonderful introduction to Prolog and computational logic in general. It's available as a PDF from the author (http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~flach/SimplyLogical.html) and also in an interactive version where the examples can be run in-browser, using SWISH: https://book.simply-logical.space/
mycl··on The Birth of Prolog (1992) [pdf]
Holy Cow, I had no idea. I have a physical copy, but now I can suggest this to everyone.
mycl··on The Birth of Prolog (1992) [pdf]
Turbo Prolog lives on as Visual Prolog: https://www.visual-prolog.com/
mycl··on Videos of Lectures at the ACAI 2018 Summer School on Statistical Relational AI
Conference website: http://acai2018.unife.it/
mycl··on A Couple of Meta-Interpreters in Prolog
Thanks for the pointers! I look forward to your postings.
mycl··on A Couple of Meta-Interpreters in Prolog
Sorry to be rude, but could you ask/beg Prof Muggleton to write a book on ILP and/or meta-interpretive learning? Something like an expanded version of his outline webpage (https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~shm/ilp_theory.html).

My go-to for trying to understand ILP theory is Nienhuys-Cheng and de Wolf, _Foundations of Inductive Logic Programming_ and De Raedt's _Logical and Relational Learning_ is a more up-to-date overview, but I feel like there's room for a more modern textbook. This new MIL stuff seems to be be an important unifying idea that also connects back to abductive logic programming, if I understand correctly.

Just a request; no offence intended!

mycl··on Open Source License Helper Tool
If I understand correctly, the issue is moral rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights). In some jurisdictions, including Germany, these rights cannot be waived.

For example, in such a jurisdiction, if I release a piece of code under a public domain equivalent license, you would have to give me credit as the author even if the license explicitly says you don't have to: the right to be identified as the author is a moral right that I cannot waive, legally.

mycl··on Common Lisp Standard Draft
ISO Prolog (ISO/IEC 13211) doesn't have a free standard and it has hurt the Prolog language immeasurably. In this case the last freely available draft is quite different from the final standard, which makes the situation worse because not everyone is aware of this.

I have noticed a lot of Prolog programmers don't know what's in the standard and what's not - you routinely see answers given on SO that are implementation dependent when they could easily have been expressed in strictly conforming ISO Prolog.

Of course, you can get pirated versions of ISO/IEC 13211-1 and 13211-2 but even saying these exist probably makes me complicit in piracy, let alone suggesting they should be widely shared in the Prolog community. The 3 technical corrigenda that update 13211-1 are freely available[0], or at least ISO allows you to "Preview" the whole document in each case.

[0] https://www.iso.org/standard/21413.html

mycl··on Barliman – real-time program synthesis to make the programmer's life easier
But generalising from examples has been a research topic in the Prolog community since at least the early 80s. The field is called inductive logic programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_logic_programming).
mycl··on Barliman – real-time program synthesis to make the programmer's life easier
The induction of logic programs in Prolog from examples was done by Ehud Shapiro's "Model Inference System" described in his PhD thesis, "Algorithmic Programming Debugging" (https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Program-Debugging-Disting...), in 1982.

This was one of the earliest inductive logic programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_logic_programming) systems.

mycl··on Show HN: Wit.ai Bot Engine beta
It's called case-based reasoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-based_reasoning).