seagreen · HackerTrans

seagreen

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Satisfies Never Off by One

nicklawler.website

1 pointsby seagreen5개월 전0 comments

Igneous Linearizer: semi-structured source code

domain-j.com

75 pointsby seagreen2년 전40 comments

Latency of old school landline calls vs. modern video calls?

8 pointsby seagreen2년 전8 comments

Son – A minimal subset of JSON for machine-to-machine communication

github.com

47 pointsby seagreen9년 전70 comments

Son: A Minimal Subset of JSON

github.com

1 pointsby seagreen9년 전0 comments

Page-Forkable Wikis

housejeffries.com

1 pointsby seagreen11년 전0 comments

Ask HN: Is there a JSON format for specifying a test case?

3 pointsby seagreen12년 전2 comments

Show HN: Language agnostic katas on the command line

github.com

2 pointsby seagreen13년 전0 comments

The Setup (Contacts and Calendar)

housejeffries.com

1 pointsby seagreen13년 전0 comments

Baudelaire - A modular Evernote-style system using Markdown files

github.com

2 pointsby seagreen13년 전0 comments

Show HN: Share wishlists with your family

gifts.housejeffries.com

7 pointsby seagreen14년 전9 comments

Ask HN: Is there a way to post to both PadMapper and Craigslist?

2 pointsby seagreen14년 전0 comments

Ask HN: Standard format for common data types other than contacts?

1 pointsby seagreen14년 전0 comments

Yahoo tries to stop users exporting contacts that originally came from FB

2 pointsby seagreen14년 전1 comments

MIT will offer certificates for online courses

nytimes.com

7 pointsby seagreen15년 전0 comments

Ask HN: What's the best article against SOPA for posting on social media?

2 pointsby seagreen15년 전0 comments

Ask HN: What practical steps have you taken against SOPA?

8 pointsby seagreen15년 전8 comments

Ask HN: Is writing text-based games a good introduction to programming?

3 pointsby seagreen15년 전6 comments

Ask HN: What's a good notetaking program that allows tagging?

4 pointsby seagreen15년 전10 comments

comments

What a great idea. I believe in this a trillion percent, due to the personal experience of watching myself and a stronger developer tackle similar problems at the same time. I relied on my brain and the standard tools of my system. He of course did the same, but also made a custom visualizer for the core of the algorithm. Night and day improvement!

So I'm a believer in the principles. But I'm also curious about throwaway743950's question. What are the things in the Glamorous Toolkit that concretely make it better for this style of programming than traditional tools? You say "[it] just happens to be a nice system of tools that make it easy to make more little tools", but that's got to be downplaying it. Switching environments is an agonizingly costly thing to do. What rewards await those who make the jump? Rubies? Emeralds? Custom views-with-nested-sub-custom-views? Curious (but not yet won over) readers want to know.

2년 전discuss

All credit to Conor White-Sullivan for making links cool again.

> unordinary direction

Hahaha, this is a very polite way to put that=) But I do appreciate it.

2년 전discuss

> I imagine the problem with that is that Obsidian by default stops dealing with Wikilinks inside fenced code

Exactly. Interestingly enough autocomplete is still triggered by [[ inside of a code block which is kind of funny. So writing code blocks works fine, it's just that they won't display with links.

> A different direction to explore might be to explore proportional font coding techniques that rely less on whitespace.

I'm definitely open to proportional font coding techniques being interesting, but in this case with all leading indentation unusable I doubt they'd be enough to get a normal experience. Unless you only write assembly so you can stick to the left margin <taps forehead>.

2년 전discuss

I had't seen it! The "clones" feature is cool, it sounds like they're way ahead in figuring out how to use transclusions effectively when coding.

Previously I'd thought of using transclusions for things like long-lived documentation. Now reading about Leo it seems like they'd be just as useful for creating short-term views into one's code. Eg start a refactor PR by transcluding all the relevant definitions into a doc. Now you can start writing PR comments in that doc before you even begin coding, and when you do all the relevant code is right there.

2년 전discuss

That's it. And the linearizer is only one way-- you write text with [[links]] and turn that into plaintext.

2년 전discuss

I wish you could just use Obsidian Publish to host sites, but due to the indentation issue you have to control the rendering, which is a bummer.

Obsidian Digital Garden[1] is FOSS, so it might be modifiable parse and output the code pages correctly.

[1] https://github.com/oleeskild/obsidian-digital-garden

2년 전discuss

Of course! I should have just guessed they'd already have something like this.

We either need to port ALL of Glamorous Toolkit to mainstream langs or we need to convince all our employers to switch to Smalltalk. I am not certain which of those is possible or easier.

2년 전discuss

> I hope the author continues down this path and writes more about the experience.

I appreciate it=) I definitely want to write some more stuff up, in particular how code organization changes when you can tag and add attributes to definitions.

2년 전discuss

Hazel and Unison are two of the big ones. I'm friends with some of the Unison folks so I'm biased, but I really like how few features there are in the language. In general I'm just a huge sucker for subtractive improvement: if you can have a small number of awesome things (eg abilities) instead of a bunch of special case things (exception handling, monad trickery, dependency injection machinery) sign me up.

I know less about Hazel, my understanding is that it's source-code-in-CRDTs, which is definitely structured source code though may not technically be in a database.

2년 전discuss

> As a language-agnostic thing, I suppose you need to prevent the machinery from pulling in keywords and variable names accidentally (or the insides of strings or comments).

Exactly. But zacgarby's right that you would want some auto-linking, so this is where language-specific plugins come in.

The difference from today's world would be that those plugins would leave their results explicitly serialized in the source medium, so they wouldn't have to keep being reconstructed by every other tool.

> I like the idea (also a fan of Unison's approach to code-in-the-db), but I worry about the potential issues that come from effectively having a single global namespace. Could be that I just don't have the discipline for it, though.

I have lots of thoughts on this. I was initially disappointed that Unison kept a unique hierarchy to organize their code-- that seems so filesystem-ey and 1990s.

However, I'm now a convert. The result of combining a unique hierarchy with explicit links between nodes is a 'compound graph' (or a 'cluster graph', depending, getting the language from https://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~biblio/downloads/these...). These are very respectable data structures! One thing they're good for is being able to always give a canonical title to a node, but varying what that title is depending on the situation.

I think that for serious work the linearizer would want to copy this strategy as well. Right now it's flat because that's all I need for my website, but if you were doing big projects in it you'd want to follow Unison and have a hierarchy. In the `HashMap` folder you'd display `HashMap.get` with a link alias that shows plain `get`, but if that function is being called from some other folder it would appear as the full `HashMap.get`.

You could still do all the other cool stuff like organize by tags and attributes using frontmatter, but for the particular purpose of display names having a global hierarchy is useful.

EDIT: What matters more than what the linearizer does is what Obsidian displays, so it's there that the "take relative hierarchical position into account when showing links" logic would have to occur. That could be a plugin or maybe Obsidian's relative link feature, I haven't used the latter.

2년 전discuss

> this is great! i’ve been thinking about exactly this (though styled after Logseq rather than Obsidian) but not gotten as far as implementing anything.

Thank you! I think [[links]] will work out of the box with Logseq since they're the same as Obsidian. Transclusions will be in the wrong format since Obsidian transclusions look like `![[this]]`, but it would be quick to modify the linearizer to handle them.

You may not want transclusions though since transcluding code into other code is... very weird. I'm curious what use cases people come up with for it though.

2년 전discuss

I love Smalltalk, and have done a reasonable amount of messing around with Cuis (which is awesome and everyone should try it).

However this gives you two things that Smalltalk doesn't:

1. It's language agnostic (boring I know)

2. It promotes keeping your code and written texts in the same system where they're both first class. That way they can link between each other, transclude each other, be published together, be organized the same way, etc. I really think this is the most interesting thing about the project, it really feels important to me.

Caveat: right now my written documents can link to/transclude code, but it doesn't work the other way yet. This is because the linearizer will see a link from code to documents as another definition and try to jam it in the source file. This would be an interesting use case for typed links, but Obsidian doesn't a have them AFAIK. Kind of cool since I haven't seen many other use cases for typed links in the wild.

EDIT: It occurs to me that I've never used a Smalltalk notetaking or word processing program. Are there any that are integrated with the System Browser, so that they can link to (or even better embed) code? If anyone has more info please let me know!

2년 전discuss

That video is wonderful. And thanks for all the other information as well, it's very helpful.

2년 전discuss

Thank you for the information!

> Circuit switched analog POTS has been dead for a long time, but delays were limited to amplifier delays (almost nothing) and speed of light in wires or radio.

Two questions about this: it sounds like there are still a fair amount of landlines around if this article is accurate: https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/05/tech/landline-phone-service-p... Do you mean that people still have landlines, but they're no longer circuit switched analog? And would that only be for long distance, with local landline calls still using circuit switched analog, or would it be for both?

Also, as to your latter point about old school POTS having almost no delays other than speed of light: does that hold for long distance calls as well? I get the impression that there could be added latency for long distance POTS calls (but have had trouble finding sourced numbers on anything yet).

2년 전discuss

Link to the mentioned section of De Architectura by Vitruvius: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20239/20239-h/20239-h.htm#Pa...

2년 전discuss

The odd thing is unison started purely as a language. Now there's a platform.

I often find the best way to understand complex things is to dig all the way back to when they were being thought up. In this case there's a blog post from 2017 that I still find useful when thinking about Unison:

https://pchiusano.github.io/2017-01-20/why-not-haskell.html

Key quote:

Composability is destroyed at program boundaries, therefore extend these boundaries outward, until all the computational resources of civilization are joined in a single planetary-scale computer

(With the open sourcing of the language I doubt it will be one computer anymore, but it's an interesting window into the original idea)

Personally I find there's a lot to this. It's interesting that we're really, really good at composing code within a program. I can map, filter, loop and do whatever I want to nested data structures with complete type safety to my heart's content. My editor's autocompleting, docs are showing up on hover, it's easy to test, all's well.

But as soon as I want cron involved, and maybe a little state-- this is all wrecked. Also deployment gets more annoying as they talk about a lot.

So I think Unison always had to have a platform to support bringing this stuff into the language, even though they built the language first.

I'd love to hear some opinions from outside Unison about how they like using this language, tooling and hosting.

I'd like to hear this too.

Also, it would be great if there was something like https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/ or https://todomvc.com/ for platforms that we could use to compare Unison, AWS, etc etc. Or is there already a 7GUIs for platforms that I don't know about?

3년 전discuss

> Open contributions project.

That's a useful distinction and a good term.

So in total projects can be classified as:

    - Source available or not
    - Open source or not (a subset of source available)
    - Open contributions or not (also a subset of source available)
    - BDFL or community driven

That's a lot of variation and may explain why so many conversations about open source sound like people are talking past each other-- they're talking about different kinds of projects!

PS: Regarding:

> 1: Yet hell will freeze over before Github lets maintainers turn off the PR tab which would lessen this problem a bit.

I wish there was a standardized way of declaring this, I always feel so awkward writing the "no PRs" disclaimer on my toy projects.

3년 전discuss

I watched it, thought "this feels very last generation", and then saw it came out 13 years ago!

Sidestepping the meaning of the word "theft", our situation is as follows. There are 3 ways to finance intellectual work:

    1. $
    2. ads
    3. nothing (and rely on gift-style work)

I have a really, really strong opinion that one of these is terrible. So I think we should do whatever we can to encourage the others, especially the one that lets people pay for food.

EDIT: I should note that I don't think the anti-copyright movement was bad during its time. They were definitely on the right side of things like Authors Guild v. Google. But I think the internet economy has gotten more mature and we now need more nuance than they provided.

3년 전discuss

Did not expect docs to be this exciting...

    On July 3, 1940, as part of Operation Catapult, Royal Air Force pilots bombed the ships of the French Navy stationed off Mers-el-Kébir to prevent them falling into the hands of the Third Reich.
    This is Austral’s approach to error handling: scuttle the ship without delay.

3년 전discuss

Definitely. I'm not actually looking for reassurance myself (I've already switched).

I was more asking about the tactics of the situation since it seems really different than the modal "would anyone even want this?" startup. It does seem like "show don't tell" is a good move.