dunham
Joined 17 years ago
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Comment · 5 days ago
The table-driven aspect is nice when you have user defined operators. I've used it inside a combinator based parser for a language with mixfix operators (e.g. _≡⟨_⟩_ ).
Lean4 takes this to an extreme and has "syntax categories" (e.g. expression), each of which has something like a pratt parser. Ambiguity is broken by taking the option that makes the most progress, and it is made efficient by memoization. You can add syntax at compile time, down to the lexing level. There is an example that adds HTML-like syntax and uses it later in the same file.
https://github.com/leanprover/lean4/blob/0f2eaa6e776255083f9...
(I'm not saying changing the language on the fly is a good idea, but it's interesting that they pulled it off.)
Comment · 5 days ago
> It was around December 2023. A few other editors and I were chatting on Wikipedia’s Discord server, and we had all seen very strange articles with the same odd characteristics.
I was afraid of that. I grabbed a 2024-04-20 copy as a backup, in case it turned to slop, but I suspected it might be tainted already.
Comment · 7 days ago
I still enjoy Morrowind. And I've replayed Ultima IV, although it does get grindy at one point. (For one of my play-throughs as a kid, I got the grindy part and simply boosted everybody to level 8 by editing the save file.)
But, as an adult, I don't really make the time for games anymore. I've been sitting on Baldur's Gate 3 (maybe an hour or two in) for years.
Comment · 12 days ago
Have you seen this one: https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js
It's TeX in wasm implemented by writing a pascal to wasm compiler, which seemed like a novel approach. (TeX is written in pascal and typically translated to C before building.)
TeX itself is a 500kb wasm file (compresses to 90k), but the images get much bigger with things like LaTeX pre-loaded.
(The author uses it to run tikz in a browser in this repository: https://github.com/kisonecat/tikzjax)
Comment · 16 days ago
I found it immediately (on a model 3) and the car started bitching at me for using the wrong door release. It took me longer to find the "correct", electronic door button.
Comment · 16 days ago
Back in college I played a similar game by drawing septagons with a straightedge and compass. They're not constructable, but a length within a three significant figures is easily constructed, and that's more accurate than I am with a compass.
Comment · 16 days ago
You're right. I don't see any evidence of what I claimed. It doesn't look like it was ever whitespace sensitive. This would have been in the 90's, probably Linux. I feel like the compatibility issue involved case statements, maybe it was the parenthesis thing.
Comment · 17 days ago
On most news sites, the ads are annoying and the sheer weight of the third party tracking and ad javascript make them unusable.
But I've found that a lot of news sites are bearable with javascript disabled. On chrome desktop, you can do that per site via the site settings in the location bar. On iOS, I'm using Quiche browser. It's subscription, but it can disable javascript per site and has auto dark mode functionality.
Comment · 18 days ago
I also remember old school bourne shell wanting tabs in some places (case statements?), but bash doesn't have that issue.
These days, I try avoid them outside of makefiles.
Comment · 19 days ago
Yeah. On a similar note, without the computer aspect, I once had a prof tell me that he did not like character theory. If I remember right, there you calculate some numbers from a group and can prove some properties about it. But you gain no understanding of why those properties hold.
Comment · 23 days ago
I think of those as emacs keys. Glad they work everywhere, but I suspect that someday they will go away.
Comment · 25 days ago
The author of esbuild used Rust and later switched to Go. He describes some of his experience here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336284
It is one person and one project, but I found it interesting to read about his experience.
I like Go, but I probably would have tried Rust first because I want pattern matching when implementing languages.
Comment · 27 days ago
John August has also talked about using plain text for movie/television screenplays, specifying a format based on markdown and hollywood standard: https://fountain.io/
Sharing aside, I imagine a plain text format would also be helpful for version control.
Comment · 1 month ago
I also enjoyed Muse[1], which was made available in the iOS app store, and is now being maintained as "Allume"[2] (an unnamed company bought the Muse name).
Essentially a digital pinboard, it was an interesting experiment in "designed for tablet" UX and was developed far enough to be an app. The gesture based UX, nested board, PDF reader, and transclusion of PDF fragments are all interesting ideas.
[1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/muse/ [2]: https://allume.com/
I'm interested in programming language theory, compression, and cryptography. Recently I've been helping out with the Idris2 language and wrote the dependent typed language Newt.
https://dunhamsteve.github.io