tpetricek

Joined 13 years ago

Karma

491

Submissions

Member since

May 29

Academic at Charles University in Prague. Interested in new ways of thinking about programming and history & philosophy of computing. Did a lot of things around F#.

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 9 months ago

There is an entire paper looking at the history, meaning and cultural significance of the foo, bar, baz words: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-019-00387-2

Comment · 2 years ago

Carbon paper was also a key part of Samizdat production in the Eastern bloc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat (which is why my family still has piles of it in the attic somewhere...)

Comment · 3 years ago

Should be fixed now!

Comment · 3 years ago

The videos are now up again.

Comment · 3 years ago

Fixed now!

Comment · 3 years ago

For anyone interested in the slides & videos, those are now accessible again! Sorry for the technical issues (it was not the HN effect, but a migration to a new disk...).

Comment · 3 years ago

Yes, this is fully open - I'm posting all the materials and videos as the course goes (but the server is down at the moment - should be back up soon).

Comment · 3 years ago

Seems like someone needs to restart some server somewhere. I'll investigate. Videos should be back up soon :)

Comment · 4 years ago

The article uses TfL signage from Kings Cross as an example of clear and crisp direction. This is a bit funny, because Kings Cross signate (specifically) sometimes directs you to take a longer path (hoping to avoid overcrowding in peak times). In some cases, you're better off going in the very opposite direction.

Comment · 5 years ago

Thanks for a nice comment!

Comment · 5 years ago

I was looking through the comments to see if someone mentioned Jean Bartik already! Just to add to this comment, she also wrote an autobiographical book, which is worth reading: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Compute...

It is clearly a very personal and biased account, but I think there are good reasons to believe many of the things she is saying, even when they go against the commonly accepted history "written by the winners".

Comment · 5 years ago

For those who want to compare this 1971 article with a 2018 talk by the very same person (and see that his arguments remain relevant): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-qAPvYdXgM

Comment · 6 years ago

I think a useful reference here is the idea of "wicked problems", which is a kind of problem where the structure of the problem makes it hard to solve - because you cannot even know what a solution is until you make your problem statement more precise (but by that point, you have already determined a solution). This is not the case for all "large" problems, but it's definitely a case for organizing a liberal democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

Comment · 6 years ago

Author here - there are better emulators (I used this one myself for testing things out: https://www.retrodevops.com/c64.html).

You are absolutely right that my POKE is not like the real one - because for that, you actually need to emulate quite accurately the C64 memory. So, anything related to POKE is not accurate - and this misses the experience you get as a hacker discovering tricks you can do.

However, my point was more about the interaction that combines text editor and REPL into one - and I think for that, it works well enough.

Comment · 6 years ago

This is very odd! I handle the input myself (so that it can look like C64 console), but this is done via pretty simple "window.onkeypress" and "window.onkeydown" - so if it receives random inputs, it's either odd events or some glitch elsewhere (I'm using Firefox myself, but on Windows). I'm not sure how to debug this - but if you have any insights, let me know!