olivia-banks

Can you expand on why .NET 10 is a great language runtime? I haven't looked at .NET at all very much, besides checking out the Roslyn sources to see how their compiler was architected.

From when I (tried to) learn Haskell, I thought `do` was cool, so that's interesting to hear. I'll give it a shot!

Interesting! We're building a bindings generator for a C++ library, and the current prototype is written in OCaml. I might shift it over to F# and see what's up.

I have to use it (C#) for a required class in college, and I've been pleasantly surprised. I'm always a little suspicious of platforms backed by large companies, but I think at this point that's sorta an unavoidable reality.

I use OCaml, occasionally, especially for data/transpiler work. I've always wanted to try F#, but it being .NET sort of scares me away. I've always sort of admired the pragmatic beauty of the OCaml ecosystem--at least as much as one can call an ML-derivative 'pragmatic'--though I don't get that same feeling from F#.

Task expressions look neat though, and might give me a reason to try.

Looking through the code is really interesting! I've always wondered how the code for these sorts of embedded devices worked (namely microwaves).

libtcc doesn't give you much control AST wise, you basically just feed it strings. I'm using it for the purpose you mentioned though--scripting language backend--since for my current "scripting-language" project I can emit C89, and it's plenty fast enough for a REPL!

    /* add a file (either a C file, dll, an object, a library or an ld script). Return -1 if error. */
    int tcc_add_file(TCCState *s, const char *filename);

    /* compile a string containing a C source. Return non zero if error. */
    int tcc_compile_string(TCCState *s, const char *buf);

TCC is fantastic! I use it a lot to do fast native-code generation for language projects, and it works really really well.

I don't use Apache, but I think I'm going to set something similar up for the non-client facing services I run.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with this. The example that comes to mind is text rendering in browsers. You can define a website, and how it will look, pretty well but not perfectly. There’s going to be some minor differences, like in the text rendering pipeline.

I think it’s more productive to chart all of these systems, LLMs included, on a line of abstraction leakiness. Even disregarding their stochastic nature, I think they’re a much too leaky abstraction to find any use in compilers. There’s a giant mismatch that I think is too big to reconcile.

I'm glad that I'm not the only one this is happening to! I don't believe I've ever even expressed interest in using anything Intuit, at least consciously. Perhaps its the accidental download-app dialog that's mimicking engagement?

I agree, and did the same thing. It also makes me wonder what exactly is going on here from a technical perspective. Surely this shouldn't be possible? On the very rare occasion I get other ads, no such thing happens. Is Intuit paying for this to happen?

I have the opposite experience, very few of the articles are behind a paywall, which is the main reason why I stick with it. That, and I'm a fan of Apple News Quartiles, and their crossword UI is nice :-)

That's hardly a reason to stick with News+, but it's already in my bundle.

Also, I probably split my non-tech news time between News+, the NYT App, and Reeder (I'm in the process of moving more to RSS).

I wouldn't be surprised if it has, or is currently in the process of, doing so. The results are good enough at this point that I think you could probably drop a few songs into a popular Spotify playlist and someone who didn't listen too closely would be fooled. I assume someone is already doing this.

Perhaps it's your sphere; I know many musicians (mostly Jazz and people in punk bands) and they aren't thrilled to say the least. Like most things, it's contextual.

I've an avid Apple News user, and while I haven't seen the sorts of ads in the article, I do gets lots of ads for tax filing software. Namely, Intuit TurboTax. They are the only ads I ever get.

What's more, if you even touch them while scrolling, it triggers the "download app" screen, even if I don't explicitly tap. This is new as of a few weeks ago.

I'm not sure I would call either PostgreSQL or SQLite "tiny."

Oh, yes, that's one of my points! I think Postgres is a great way to deal with tons of data, and it's really the only thing I use to do any sort of analysis or informatics (that and Parquet + Dask).

Who cares what we store so long as we do it quickly?

I do agree, I don’t know why more people don’t just use Postgres. If I’m doing data exploration with lots of data (e.g., GIS, nD vectors), I’ll just spin up a Postgres.app on my macOS laptop, install what little I need, and it just works and is plenty fast for my needs. It’s a really great choice for a lot of domains.

That being said, while I think Postgres is “the right tool for the job” in many cases, sometimes you just want (relative) simplicity, both in terms of complexity and deployment, and should use something like SQLite. I think it’s unwise to understate simplicity, and I use it to run a few medium-traffic servers (at least, medium traffic for the hardware I run it on).

I really enjoy this as a concept! I run a service for away-ordering food from vendors at my University, and I need to do a lot of web-scraping to facilitate this. The code example on the website looks a lot cleaner than any of my BS4 code...! Even with the minimal primitives implemented, this seems useful.

Most of my webscraping code is in Python, do you have plans to implement bindings to other languages?

I agree with you, it's infuriating. I think it's been loading faster recently (maybe?), but it still takes like 10 seconds.

To set file association stuff more easily than with the Finder GUI, you can run (with https://github.com/moretension/duti):

  duti -s com.apple.textedit public.${whatever} all

Where ${whatever} is in {plain-text, json, source-code, ...}. I'm sure there's a way to automate this through parsing `lsregister -dump`, but have a script I run on every Mac I have that sets TextEdit as the default instead of XCode for a bunch of file types :-)

I think this is a really cool project! The syntax here is interesting. I was wondering if you could shed some light on it, I wasn't able to find what `[@] : ` or `[%] : ` meant.

Also, can I ask why the source code for the interpreter looks like that? This is an honest question. I thought it might have been machine generated (via a sort of self-hosting G transpiler) but the comments at the top dissuade me from this view.

I'm not sure if I understand your comment, but they were able to grow and propagate scHPXV in their lab. Link the sequence? Sure, it's on NCBI

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1

As for getting the nucleotides themselves, there are numerous services for ordering oligonucleotides which you can "stitch together." I think this used to be done with phosphoramidite synthesis, but the article I linked says they used plasmid synthesis, and ordered from ThermoFisher.

https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/cloning...

I'm not sure what the price would be on this (I would imagine very high?), but it has to be cheaper than phosphoramidite chemistry. Nevertheless, the price of doing this sort of things w/ plasmids is plummeting.

Paywall-free link: https://archive.today/Toq4Y

> Construction of an infectious horsepox virus vaccine from chemically synthesized DNA fragments

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?

Vaccinia is very different from Smallpox. Or perhaps I misunderstand you?

This one about a singly-wired switch is in the same vein:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

I agree with this. This problem is only going to get worse once these people enter academia and facing needing to publish.

I don't think you understand what replication means in this context.