Hacker News: gloria_mundi

New comment by gloria_mundi in "On Rendering Diffs"

gloria_mundi — Sat, 30 May 2026 01:29:09 +0000

I don't understand the point of the inverse sticky technique. Scrolling too fast still breaks the experience (content refuses to scroll), and in a way that, at least to me, feels more disruptive than blanking for a fraction of a second. I might just be too used to blanking.

Also ... shouldn't browsers just be able to render the diff without any of the trickery? Is the browser's job actually that hard for long pages, or are they just not optimising for this? Or is there some other reason for the virtualisation (e.g. memory usage)?

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Show HN: Outperforming VByte for Large Integers Using Phi-Encoding"

gloria_mundi — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 17:43:53 +0000

I haven't read all of that, but the problem at hand seems significantly less complicated.

We're mapping the numbers from 1 to 1000 to distinct numbers up to 8258, and the README claims that we should expect 2.1% of the resulting numbers to be prime. I see no reason for this claim, and as I understand it, the 2.1% comes from pi(1000) / 8258, which seems like nonsense to me.

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Show HN: Outperforming VByte for Large Integers Using Phi-Encoding"

gloria_mundi — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 17:21:54 +0000

I'm not sure I understand the prime density thing. Of the numbers up to 8258, about 12.5% are prime. Accounting for the fact that about a quarter of these primes ends in 101, i.e. cannot occur, I would expect about 10.7% = 12.5% * (3/4) / (7/8), which is fairly close to the observed 9.4%.

The 2.1% in the README seems to be the density of primes < 1000 among numbers up to 8258. That's not what was counted.

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Functional languages should be so much better at mutation than they are"

gloria_mundi — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 00:16:13 +0000

Remember that transformers are "inside-out", i.e. `StateT (ExceptT e m) a` is isomorphic to `m (Except e (State a))`. If we want to keep state if an exception occurs, you need a `m (State (Except e a))` which is `ExceptT e (StateT m) a`.

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Functional languages should be so much better at mutation than they are"

gloria_mundi — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 22:20:26 +0000

Isn't mixing of effects exactly what monad transformers are for? AFAICT you want an `ExceptT e ST` for some exception type `e`.

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/mtl-2.3.1/docs/Control-M...

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Amber: Programming language compiled to Bash"

gloria_mundi — Wed, 22 May 2024 13:54:28 +0000

Both, since a transpiler is a type of compiler.

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Solving the minimum cut problem for undirected graphs"

gloria_mundi — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 00:54:49 +0000

Not actually all-pairs max flow, you can fix the source and consider all possible sinks. In the AoC problem we also know that the min-cut is 3, so we can abort the flow algorithm as soon as we have found a 4-flow.

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Show HN: Purl – A Simple Tool for Text Processing"

gloria_mundi — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 22:27:39 +0000

grep doesn't eat the colours, apt detects that it is not outputting to a TTY and suppresses the colours. Try `printf 'a \e[36mb\e[0m c\n' | grep a`, the colour is preserved just fine.

Some tools have an option to force coloured output regardless, e.g. GCC's `-fdiagnostics-color` or grep's own `--colour=always`, but apt doesn't seem to have anything like that.

In theory one could have a command in the style of nohup or stdbuf which sets up a PTY to trick the command into outputting colours. So one could run `fakepty apt search whatever | grep another` ...

New comment by gloria_mundi in "British Placename Mapper"

gloria_mundi — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:07:26 +0000

Recently came across something similar for Germany, although less versatile: https://dfiuhsfdfiu.neocities.org/

New comment by gloria_mundi in "British Placename Mapper"

gloria_mundi — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 23:56:18 +0000

Some switch around the "s" and "sh" sounds, so it is pronounced roughly like "shtratsiatella". "st" at the beginning of a word is pronounced as "sht" in German.

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Decimal Time"

gloria_mundi — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 14:47:13 +0000

The International Fixed Calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Nature: Programming language to experience the joy of programming"

gloria_mundi — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 01:04:38 +0000

It is, of course, still freely available if you plug the title into your favourite search engine.

From the US Defense Technical Information Center: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0296046.pdf

Also in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0296046

The mentioned quote is on page 22.

New comment by gloria_mundi in "An INI Critique of TOML (2021)"

gloria_mundi — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 20:44:14 +0000

Unicode is useful for languages other than English, and has nothing to do with anyone's libido.

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Show HN: exaequOS - a new OS running in a web browser"

gloria_mundi — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 18:29:35 +0000

Note that there's also a /usr/bin, with complete GNU coreutils (or at least most of them), and vim.

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands"

gloria_mundi — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 16:49:14 +0000

They also got the conversion wrong: 1.5 liters is 0.4 gallons, not 0.3.

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Asteroid crater 520km in diameter buried in southeast Australia, scientists say"

gloria_mundi — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 14:52:58 +0000

Another related Trek episode - the one I expected you to link: VOY's "Distant Origin" - https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Why is DNS still hard to learn?"

gloria_mundi — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 03:41:09 +0000

There are 13 root name server addresses, but most (all?) of these use anycast, i.e. there are actually several servers with the same address, and your traffic will usually be routed to the one closest to you. There are over 1500 root name servers.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Tor’s history of D/DoS attacks and future strategies for mitigation"

gloria_mundi — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 22:43:50 +0000

On the same site:

> Benefits of Tor over I2P

> ...

> - C, not Java (ewww)

It's a joke.

New comment by gloria_mundi in "Dynamic programming in Haskell: automatic memoization"

gloria_mundi — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 08:21:06 +0000

> To be absolutely clear, the expressions `seq f (putStrLn "hello")` and `seq (f undefined) (putStrLn "hello")` should both not evaluate anything and cause the string hello to be printed rather than raising an exception.

This does actually work here, because the array is created lazily.

> This often occurs in cases where the above hypothetical function `f` requires an intermediate value that's expensive to compute but only relies on the first of its two arguments. Then do you evaluate that expensive intermediate with a partial application of a single argument, or do you not? Neither is satisfactory and so this problem is best avoided.

Computing the intermediate value with a partial application does not actually take away laziness, it only adds sharing. (At least it can be done this way.)

New comment by gloria_mundi in "The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos"

gloria_mundi — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 04:31:44 +0000

That's just how government works in general though. [0]

"Why is someone privileged to arrest me but I can't keep them locked up in my house?"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence