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pldrnt

30 karma · joined January 29, 2012

@pldrnt on twitter too, if you need to send a message
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pldrnt··on Baidu Takes FPGA Approach to Accelerating SQL at Scale
I've been working with FPGAs for 4 years and shortly on ASICs before that, did software in a previous life (and still do), do you have something specific in mind?
pldrnt··on FPGA Webserver
Looking forward to where this goes... For work I had to implement arp, icmp, udp and our protocol on top of udp, for 10G ethernet, in an fpga, it would have been fun to add dhcp and tcp but the time and priority weren't there.
pldrnt··on So You Want to Write Your Own Language (2014)
My thoughts exactly, as someone who has spent quite some time creating a (usable and readable) LALR syntax that can do everything modern C++ does (plus named arguments, a null-coalescing operator and extension methods) and is currently writing a transpiler based on it, I hope more people share your concern :)
pldrnt··on How to succeed in language design without really trying [video]
"Notation matters"

"If a language is useful, you will want to generate it by program"

well said

pldrnt··on The Brick Wall of C++ Source Code Transformation
I read that paper a long time ago and it was certainly an inspiration :)

Originally, the language started out quite different but I can now see why SPECS looks the way it does, I do not agree with everything they did and my effort these days is towards making it simpler and smaller but there's some convergent evolution indeed.

pldrnt··on The Brick Wall of C++ Source Code Transformation
Yes, that is the idea.

Dealing with the preprocessor is a lost cause, so I just don't, the idea at the moment is to let the preprocessor do its thing and pipe the output into ctags (and if a better ctags comes out in the future it will be trivial to put that in instead), the result is not 100% perfect but is good enough to capture most of the declarations present in the included headers and make them visible to this language.

If a library absolutely requires preprocessor macros to be useable, someone will have to make equivalent hygienic macros in this language but at least you won't have to make a huge wrapper for everything.

pldrnt··on The Brick Wall of C++ Source Code Transformation
So, my after-work project these days is a language that transpiles to C++ and can do all that current C++ can do.

The grammar is completely regular, and the syntax maps 1:1 with the ast in memory, I can generate one from the other idempotently.

The main reason I am doing this is that I wanted a language that is easy to build tooling for (including of course code transformations) while being compatible with existing C++ libraries out there.

This kind of articles give me hope there might actually be demand for my crazy thing once it grows up.

pldrnt··on C++: Using Variadic Templates Cleanly
Incidentally, this is exactly what I am working on, grammar and parser are mostly done (the grammar is _regular_ and programs can rewrite themselves starting from their AST, because I really want something like `go fmt` one day), doing the transpiler at the moment, it's... interesting to say the least.

(it will be foss of course but nothing is published yet)

pldrnt··on Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
I work there.

It is indeed expensive but salaries can change wildly depending on your position.

I think I could afford to go out and eat out but I decided not to. This way I save money to bootstrap my own thing afterwards and I can find some free time to teach myself the skills I will need to do so.

The procedure to start a venture depends on the canton, expect to put in at least 10k to start, plus whatever the notarial fees will be. I do not think I will be incorporating here.

pldrnt··on Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement
For what it's worth, that is exactly one of the things I am building. Glad to read I am not the only one needing it.
pldrnt··on Show HN: Tock, a Time Tracking Tool by 18F
I wrote mine, but I track tasks and milestones rather than time spent.

Time tracking makes sense for freelancers and other people who bill by the hour but personally I tried rescuetime & co. and I do not see the point in knowing how long I was on facebook or how long I spent editing a particular file.

Milestones require manual input but I find that information much more relevant.

pldrnt··on Python without an operating system
This is EXACTLY what I needed right now for a project. Does it already have a module to do the equivalent of an lspci? If not, where would I have to look to learn how to implement such a feature?
pldrnt··on Go's Declaration Syntax (2010)
This hits home, I have spent many evenings designing a language that is semantically equivalent to C++ (in fact, it's made to transpile to C++11) but with a LALR grammar (using just flex and bison). Glad to read that none other than Rob Pike agrees with many design choices in my language :)
pldrnt··on Show HN: Node.js, Twitter, Instagram-powered e-paper picture frame
I see it runs Linux, do you make the OS available?
pldrnt··on Doing: command line tool for keeping track of what you’re doing and have done
I've been tracking my work for over a year now with a tool similar to this and now I would not live without (I should finally package it up and ship it...)

Some ideas, you can do very nice things through bash autocompletion, for example:

- immediate jumping between timelines (I have hundreds, by topic-project-task and so on)

  $ tau jump proj tau<TAB><TAB>
  /projects/taulog
  /projects/taulog/android
  /projects/taulog/appengine
  ..and so on..
- autosuggest for todo lists:

  $ tau done<TAB><TAB>
  [ 1] setup JTAG probes
  [ 2] write script to control probe
  ..and so on..
And after you use this for a while you realize it can do more than manage log messages and todo lists, the same interaction can be used to quickly access bookmarks, reference material and local paths you often have to `cd` into :)
pldrnt··on Poll: Do you actually use the product you are working on?
Same here, good luck!
pldrnt··on Ask HN: Help. I need to go away from here
Italian working in Switzerland here, I've also worked in France and Germany before, they're all very doable. I do not understand what OP is asking for, an obvious first step for a student would be to take a semester or more abroad, or finding an internship (I've done both, several times, and I suggest it wholeheartedly). OP, having a European passport gives you access to so many possibilities compared to millions of others that all you have to do is find someplace to go and leave.
pldrnt··on Ask HN: How do you do your To-Do list?
Whoa the price is... interesting, may I ask what has been your experience with pricing over 9 years and how you decided to set it at $45?
pldrnt··on Ask HN: How do you do your To-Do list?
I have up to four lists per task (tasks themselves form a hierarchy):

- todos: for the immediate future

- goals: for longer term objectives

- ideas: for spontaneous 'eureka' moments

- gotos: related bookmarks and local folders

Whenever I'm done with an item, it goes from the list into the task timeline where I journal all other progress.

I manage them all with a tool I wrote myself, called tau (shameless plug, http://signup.tau.la)

pldrnt··on Ask HN: What is the problem you try to solve?
I LOVE this question (and it's the first thing I usually ask to myself and to others) so:

- Study scientific papers by deconstructing them through a wiki-like interface.

- Filtering news feeds, automatically removing stories and tweets I don't care about.

- Keeping an updated journal for each of my projects in the fastest and least intrusive way.

- Learning languages by cutting and pasting single expressions from podcasts into a personal audio library.

- Aggregating my soundcloud, beatport, bandcamp, youtube and shoutcast 'likes' into a single cloud playlist.

pldrnt··on MLWorks: SML compiler from Harlequin returning from the dead as open source
It still is!
pldrnt··on Killing Productivity by Measurement
Indeed, I have been looking for a decent time and progress tracker for ages until I decided to build one, then unlike OP I found myself doing more, not less ;)
pldrnt··on CommaFeed - Open-source bloat-free Google Reader clone
Newsblur can filter by tag, author and title keyword(s). I only have a few dozen feeds but the popular ones spew so much content that I honestly could not touch them until I switched to NB.