Hacker News Reader

pebblexeon Optimizing Rust Struct Size

Wow, thanks for mentioning that. I am used to being impressed by people on here, but the idea that he is this talented and blind is beyond my comprehension.

Man I suck as a programmer; I complain about every little thing and barely ever program.

pebblexeon Sony’s e-paper tablet is a great example of Weird Sony

The idea of it registering as a printer is ingenious.

pebblexeon Turtles on the Wire: Understanding How the OS Uses the Modern NIC (2016)

FreeBSD also has netmap https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=netmap&sektion=4

pebblexeon Smalltalk to get a second crack at the whip

Hopefully they introduce namespaces (like matriona) and the type system of strongtalk with gradual typing.

edit: just realized this was an april fools :(

pebblexeon Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

The best book I know about research is "Apprentice to Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty":

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801847575

It's a fantastic book.

pebblexeon Making a good diff algorithm

I remember seeing this posted here and I was really impressed by it: https://github.com/yinwang0/ydiff

pebblexeon Henry Rollins on defining success

This video of him is fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkvEpoqFx6c

pebblexeon Red programming language 0.6.2: LibRed and Macros

I remember reading somewhere that there is funding/support from China. I can't find any support for that.

I stumbled upon this site in my search though http://red.reb4.me/

pebblexeon A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

What's the difference between 'determines' and 'influences'? I mean isn't that just a sliding scale? If a concept is incredibly difficult to formulate in a given language, could it not be said that the language has limited my thinking?

pebblexeon A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

Do you have to manipulate text? Perl is probably better than C for that.

Do you have to write a program that operates on lists? Lisp probably is better than Java.

Do you have to write a formal proof? Coq is probably better than Python.

Do you have to write distributed networking code? Erlang is probably better than PHP.

How can the strengths of each language not be direct support for linguistic relativity? All that means is that certain concepts are easier to manipulate and understand in certain languages.

pebblexeon A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

Where is it written that programming languages can't support the theory of linguistic relativity?

pebblexeon A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

Are you kidding me?

Are you claiming the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn't true on ycombinator?

This is a forum famous for talking about blub languages and lisp. And if it's true for artificial languages, that's a strong indicator that it's true for human ones.

But sadly there are very few studies comparing programming languages and I've never seen one comparing human languages qualitatively.

pebblexeon Futhark – A small programming language that compiles to efficient GPU code

Sorry about the title. Thank you mods for fixing it.

pebblexeon Evolution Strategies as a Scalable Alternative to Reinforcement Learning

You're right, I'm sorry.

pebblexeon Lisp Quickstart

I don't mean to imply that I've done this (aside from copypasting from that wikibook). I just think that understanding why it's easy to do this for lisp is important.

pebblexeon Writing a Linux Debugger Part 2: Breakpoints

Does anyone know of an easy way to interact with performance monitor counters in Linux? I've been reading stuff by Brendan Gregg about DTrace and the importance of PMCs, and it made it sound like Linux doesn't have the equivalent.

pebblexeon Evolution Strategies as a Scalable Alternative to Reinforcement Learning

"A Field Guide to Genetic Programming" (https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Genetic-Programming/dp/14...) is one of the better books I've read on the matter (but I've yet to read anything by Koza). W. Langdon's webpage (http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/W.Langdon/) has a lot of great information.

pebblexeon Lisp Quickstart

I agree entirely with that.

pebblexeon Lisp Quickstart

The only thing you need to do to understand lisp's entrancement is to write an interpreter for it, and in doing so you'll see why it's easier to write a lisp interpreter than it is for any other language. All you need to understand the appeal is a look at https://github.com/kanaka/mal.

Personally I learned the appeal of lisp while following this tutorial on writing a scheme in Haskell: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_.... There's a reason there'll never be a tutorial like that for a toy Haskell interpreter.

pebblexeon Arachnids eat as much animal food as all humans

You can read the full research article here: https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00114-017-1440-1

pebblexeon Arachnids eat as much animal food as all humans

I've always thought that without spiders vertebrates would never have had a chance to become dominant.

pebblexeon Turing Learning breakthrough: Computers can now learn from pure observation

As the paper notes, this is a different perspective on generative adversarial networks:

  Goodfellow et al. (2014) proposed generative adversarial nets
  (GANs). GANs, while independently invented, are essentially
  based on the same idea as Turing Learning.

pebblexeon Futhark: APL on the GPU

I found this while trying to remember the other APL derivative that was posted here: http://arcfide.github.io/Co-dfns/

pebblexeon Show HN: A Go Library for Better Access Control

Reminded me of this fantastic video from Zed Shaw: https://vimeo.com/2723800

pebblexeon Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Reminds me of this: https://fatiherikli.github.io/language-evolution-simulation/

pebblexeon Ask HN: Emacs Users, what's in your .emacs file? (2017)

For me it's a simple undotree toggle:

  ;; undotree
  (defun undo-tree-visualizer-toggle ()
    (interactive)
    (if (get-buffer undo-tree-visualizer-buffer-name)
        (undo-tree-visualizer-quit)
      (undo-tree-visualize)))
  ;; Represent undo-history as an actual tree (visualize with C-x u)
  (setq undo-tree-mode-lighter "")
  (require 'undo-tree)
  (global-undo-tree-mode)
  (global-set-key [f8] 'undo-tree-visualizer-toggle)

pebblexeon Fossil SCM

I wish it supported AJAX and the client UI was decoupled from the repository.