Hacker News: FranklinChen

New comment by FranklinChen in "Leanstral 1.5"

FranklinChen — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:27:40 +0000

Huh, I haven't found the weights either.

New comment by FranklinChen in "Math Academy, part 1: My eigenvector embarassment"

FranklinChen — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 03:16:50 +0000

Whoa, Liboff, that book... I only vaguely remember it now (took QM in 1988). I took "math for mathematicians" (Math 25) instead of "math for physicists" (Math 22?), but remember my classmates who took first year "math for physicists" got eigenvectors very quickly right off the bat in the pre-published book they used https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/course-in-mathematics-f...

New comment by FranklinChen in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Logical Verification [pdf] (2023)"

FranklinChen — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 20:28:24 +0000

There's also a 2024 edition https://github.com/blanchette/interactive_theorem_proving_20...

New comment by FranklinChen in "Ask HN: Any good examples of learning through games/puzzles, for adults?"

FranklinChen — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 14:07:02 +0000

The Incredible Proof Machine for learning various logics: http://incredible.pm/

New comment by FranklinChen in "Transducers are coming to Clojure"

FranklinChen — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 04:08:31 +0000

More precisely:

  -- Left reduce
  type Reducer a r = r -> a -> r

  -- Here's where then rank-2 type is needed
  type Transducer a b = forall r . Reducer a r -> Reducer b r

New comment by FranklinChen in "Ask HN: Have you taken 6 months to 1 year break to do self study?"

FranklinChen — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 17:03:56 +0000

After I dropped out of a theoretical physics Ph.D. program a long time ago, I decided to try to become a computer programmer. I had not taken a single computer science course in college. I was lucky that my parents allowed me to live at home for a year while I spent my entire time teaching myself programming. A friend told me to learn Scheme, so I went through all of SICP using my sister's Mac (I did not own a computer at the time). Then I started to learn C and Unix, hacked a bit with that, learned C++, and applied for jobs after doing some open source work so that I could have something to show. I got hired as a software engineer a year after I started my self-study.

New comment by FranklinChen in "Ask HN: How do you "learn" a new programming language?"

FranklinChen — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:03:23 +0000

I'm early in the stages of learning Clojure, so here's what I've done so far and what I plan to continue doing.

- I recently joined a local Clojure group on meetup.com and started attending meetings.

- I know the main web sites for the language, including a great searchable documentation site I use.

- I already know Scheme and Common Lisp, so my focus is on grasping the differences with Clojure.

- I just completed the Clojure koans I forked from GitHub.

- I started reading a Clojure book.

- I have played around with the REPL.

- I have started using a serious development environment including Leiningen.

- I will look into a testing framework to use as I experiment further.

- I have some specific tasks I want to try to implement in Clojure involving concurrency to get a feel for what I can usefully get out of this language.

- I'll look at people's code, of course, to get an idea of good and idiomatic practices.

New comment by FranklinChen in "CoffeeScript is not a language worth learning"

FranklinChen — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:01:09 +0000

Exactly what I was saying in my blog post: that it's all OK, and everyone should just get along already.

New comment by FranklinChen in "CoffeeScript is not a language worth learning"

FranklinChen — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:41:12 +0000

I still believe that people love or hate CoffeeScript mainly because of the differences in syntax: http://franklinchen.com/blog/2011/11/06/the-real-reason-for-...