Hacker News: Apanatshka

New comment by Apanatshka in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

Apanatshka — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:05:55 +0000

I'm implementing different parsing algorithms (for programming language text to syntax tree purposes). There are so many papers published on different algorithms... I'm just slowly reading it all, and implementing the algorithms and improvement ideas, sometimes combining ones from different papers. At the moment I'm constraining myself to LR-based algorithms to not drown even more in the sea of publications.

I have a recursive ascent code generator with a bunch of optimisations that I wrote about [1,2]; it's a linear-time parser for LR(1) with reduced overhead. I have an RNGLR implementation (a polynomial-time parser for any context-free grammar), that's still a table-based interpreter like more LR-based parsers out there. I've extended that implementation with special code to handle cycles more efficiently. Some day, I'll take some time to write a paper on that and publish it. Currently, I'm trying to combine the two ideas and create a generalised recursive ascent code generator. If I succeed I'll write another blog post again, it's been a year since the last one...

[1]: https://blog.jeffsmits.net/optimising-recursive-ascent/ [2]: https://blog.jeffsmits.net/optimising-recursive-ascent-part-...

New comment by Apanatshka in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)"

Apanatshka — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 07:51:37 +0000

Reading literature (academic and otherwise) on parsers, writing blog posts about what I learn, trying to implement the things I learnt. I've written about basic finite automata (for regular expressions), LL, LR (including the difference between SLR, LALR, and LR(1)), detoured into some optimisations for LR from the 80's, then generalised LR (RNGLR in particular). I'm now implementing these things, RNGLR is not easy to implement despite having understood it well enough conceptually to write a blog about it (https://blog.jeffsmits.net/generalised-lr-parsing/). I've read far more than I've written about, trying to keep that straight in my head as well / planning the next... probably year of writing ^^'

New comment by Apanatshka in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)"

Apanatshka — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 07:43:05 +0000

Is that legal in your country? In mine (Netherlands) there are way too many people with doorbell camera aimed right at the street even though it's illegal to record a public space like that. Most folks are ignorant about it though, or think that surely the internet-connected gadget sold by some anonymous corporation won't be abused....

(Right-Nulled) Generalised LR Parsing

Apanatshka — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 14:05:22 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.jeffsmits.net/generalised-lr-parsing/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42673617

Points: 61

# Comments: 2

New comment by Apanatshka in "Optimising LR Automata"

Apanatshka — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 09:25:28 +0000

Author here, feel free to ask me whatever you like.

New comment by Apanatshka in "Dutch Drug-Related Text Classification Model by NOS"

Apanatshka — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 12:18:54 +0000

The Dutch Public Broadcasting Foundation (NOS) published these models along with an article about the millions of drugs ads on Telegram, and responses by the Dutch police, Telegram, and some of the drug dealers. The article is in Dutch over here: https://nos.nl/artikel/2506160-miljoenen-drugsadvertenties-o...

Dutch Drug-Related Text Classification Model by NOS

Apanatshka — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 12:18:54 +0000

Article URL: https://huggingface.co/nosdigitalmedia/telegram-drugs-classification

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39128743

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by Apanatshka in "Inkscape 1.2.2"

Apanatshka — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 02:51:05 +0000

You've given up on Gimp? What's wrong? Did I miss some news?

New comment by Apanatshka in "Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]"

Apanatshka — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 08:41:15 +0000

That's because trains get taxed, while flights _still_ get subsidised. It's maddening.

Eelco Visser Has Died

Apanatshka — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 08:53:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tudelft.nl/en/2022/eemcs/in-memoriam-eelco-visser-1966-2022

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30954802

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by Apanatshka in "OrganicMaps is Android and iOS offline maps for travel without trackers or ads"

Apanatshka — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 12:25:20 +0000

There's an app called StreetComplete (recently discussed on HN) that allows you to easily contribute missing information like local business information to OSM. If you can find the time, you can use that to solve some of the issues you have and help others at the same time! :)

New comment by Apanatshka in "Pesticides are killing the world's soils"

Apanatshka — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 08:08:42 +0000

An important and sometimes forgotten thing about democracy is that it isn't as simple as the majority rules. It's the majority rules while taking minorities into account. In a well functioning representational democracy this is kept in mind my career politicians. In a hybrid between representational and direct like in Switzerland, the population can overrule and just go with majority rule.

For example, the Swiss pension system is similar to others in Europe, where the current working population pay taxes almost directly towards pensions of the retired. Since this system will break down if taxes aren't increased like crazy or pensions lowered, politicians have been trying to change the system. But there are too many people soon to be retired or already retired that care less about their country's youth and future than their own pension, so they keep blocking changes. So every democratic system has its tradeoffs...

I learned this from a young Swiss when I was visiting Switzerland and praising their way of democracy. It was a few years ago though, so maybe this info is no longer accurate. And I didn't fact check, it was just an example brought up in casual conversation.

New comment by Apanatshka in "Putting an Ultra-Tiny Linux Board in a Phone Charger Eventually"

Apanatshka — Sat, 08 May 2021 08:45:51 +0000

Make sure to test your RPi 0W with the Bluetooth speaker you had in mind asap. Mine won't connect to my soundbar, which is complicating my setup for connecting my projector and soundbar wirelessly :(

New comment by Apanatshka in "75 Years Ago, 'War of the Worlds' Started a Panic. Or Did It? (2013)"

Apanatshka — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 18:38:13 +0000

The article mentions Radiolab. I remember listening to a Radiolab episode about War of the Worlds, but that must have been a later revision, because in that episode they go into how the first airing of the play did not cause a panick, but other airings of the play in other places certainly caused panick and violence.

New comment by Apanatshka in "Still alive"

Apanatshka — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 10:01:57 +0000

That excerpt made me think of Romantically Apocalyptic, which is a... visual novel / web comic? I read it for a while, really enjoying the art and the strange and absurd conversations, characters and events. It felt a bit unplanned and all over the place though, but that might just be my prejudice towards web comics combined with the style of writing.

New comment by Apanatshka in "Malware on My Android Phone"

Apanatshka — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 08:36:12 +0000

My Firefox on Android has a QR code scanner, I typically use that even when I know it's not a website. When you open a new tab and select the address bar you get to see the button for the QR code scanner.

New comment by Apanatshka in "LLVM merges machine function splitter for reduction in TLB misses"

Apanatshka — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 11:07:23 +0000

I've seen a poster presentation at the student research competition of a PL conference where the student created a tool to do this after the fact on binaries. It looked quite promising, but I think preliminary results were single digit percentage speedup for most benchmarks. I'll have to see if I can find it again.

New comment by Apanatshka in "Hash Array Mapped Tries (HAMT) to the Rescue"

Apanatshka — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 19:41:42 +0000

Happenstance really, he briefly joined our research group. I'll send him a link to this thread.

New comment by Apanatshka in "Hash Array Mapped Tries (HAMT) to the Rescue"

Apanatshka — Mon, 07 Sep 2020 13:09:07 +0000

Haven't implemented it myself, though I mean to try one day. But I've spoken to Michael before and used his implementation: https://github.com/usethesource/capsule

New comment by Apanatshka in "My Favourite Diff"

Apanatshka — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 08:45:54 +0000

A similar example is in a "filtering" operation. I mostly have this in functional programming where you pass a predicate to filter on. But what's the perspective of the filter? Are you filtering poison from your water, or are you sifting the water looking for gold nuggets. I prefer to use functions remove and retain (respectively) to be more explicit.