Hacker News: hatmatrix

New comment by hatmatrix in "Data Manipulation in Clojure Compared to R and Python"

hatmatrix — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:15:55 +0000

Julia's Tidier.jl ecosystem is getting there too. It uses macros to mimic this 'special' evaluation framework of R, so the code is also readable in a similar way.

New comment by hatmatrix in "Data Manipulation in Clojure Compared to R and Python"

hatmatrix — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:13:03 +0000

There was XLISP-STAT before R, but the scientists have spoken. They don't like the parentheses.

New comment by hatmatrix in "Show HN: Email.md – Markdown to responsive, email-safe HTML"

hatmatrix — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:41:43 +0000

cries in org-mode

New comment by hatmatrix in "Julia: Performance Tips"

hatmatrix — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:46:27 +0000

Do you have an idea whether these are specific types of problems that is giving Julia poorer performance? From what I recall, people were reporting better speeds with Julia than with Numba (e.g., [1]). My impression was that you are basically able to bring more of your code to LLVM with Julia than Numba, so it would make sense.

[1] https://gerritnowald.wordpress.com/2022/10/03/simulating-rot...

New comment by hatmatrix in "Prism"

hatmatrix — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 01:17:38 +0000

That study must have compared beginners in LaTeX and MS Word. There is a learning curve, but LaTeX will often save more time in the end.

It is an old language though. LaTeX is the macro system on top of TeX, but now you can write markdown or org-mode (or orgdown) and generate LaTeX -> PDF via pandoc/org-mode. Maybe this is the level of abstraction we should be targeting. Though currently, you still need to drop into LaTeX for very specific fine-tuning.

New comment by hatmatrix in "I Like GitLab"

hatmatrix — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:26:29 +0000

Yeah I started using GitLab for the same reason and also that FSF "approved" of its CE version. But doesn't hosting private repos on GitLab and using public repos on GitHub just give GitHub that much more monetizable value?

New comment by hatmatrix in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

hatmatrix — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 08:47:32 +0000

But then you lose the readability that is the core defense of MATLAB/Octave. Ok so NumPy is readable, but less pleasantly so.

New comment by hatmatrix in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

hatmatrix — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 02:34:15 +0000

It's one of those languages that outgrew its original purpose, as did Python IMHO. So non-matrix operations like string processing and manipulation of data structures like tables (surprisingly, graphs are not bad) become unwieldy in MATLAB - much like Python's syntax becomes unwieldy in array calculations, as illustrated in the original post.

New comment by hatmatrix in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

hatmatrix — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 02:26:19 +0000

An understated advantage of Julia over MATLAB is the use of brackets over parentheses for array slicing, which improves readability even further.

The most cogent argument for the use of parentheses for array slicing (which derives from Fortran, another language that I love) is that it can be thought of as a lookup table, but in practice it's useful to immediately identify if you are calling a function or slicing an array.

New comment by hatmatrix in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

hatmatrix — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 02:19:48 +0000

Indeed, there are many high-quality alternatives (sometimes described as "MATLAB clones" back in the day) that never gained bigger traction.

Among modern alternatives that don't strictly follow MATLAB syntax, Julia has the biggest mindshare now?

GNU Octave, as a superset of the MATLAB language, was (is) most capable of running existing MATLAB code. While Octave implemented some solvers better than MATLAB, the former just could not replicate a large enough portion of the latter's functionality that many scientists/engineers were unable to fully commit to it. I wonder whether runmat.org would run up against this same problem.

The other killer app of MATLAB is Simulink, which to my knowledge is not replicated in any other open source ecosystem.

New comment by hatmatrix in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

hatmatrix — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 02:04:22 +0000

What's the business model?

New comment by hatmatrix in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

hatmatrix — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 01:47:39 +0000

fft.m is the more obvious example of the closed source algorithm here. You open it and it just says

% Built-in function.

The algorithms written in C and compiled by mex are the "built-in" ones that are not viewable.

New comment by hatmatrix in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

hatmatrix — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 01:43:57 +0000

How about fft? If you open fft.m, you get just a commented file that ends with

% Built-in function.

If the algorithm is implemented as a compiled mex function, then you cannot inspect its details.

New comment by hatmatrix in "Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?"

hatmatrix — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:42:58 +0000

The move to USB-C is actually great for compatibility across machines. Europe has a directive for companies to implement USB-C to reduce e-waste from chargers.

New comment by hatmatrix in "Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R"

hatmatrix — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 08:54:02 +0000

It's worth considering what nextgen really would be, but probably VSCode and its forks will dominate for the time being. I recall Steve Yegge predicting that the next IDE to beat be the web browser, and this was around 2008 or so. It's not the reality, but took about 10-15 years for it to actually happen, even though there were earlier shots at it by like Atom.

New comment by hatmatrix in "Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine"

hatmatrix — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:18:41 +0000

There is an AI-integrated IDE called Erdos...

https://www.lotas.ai/erdos

New comment by hatmatrix in "Racket v9.0"

hatmatrix — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:16:38 +0000

What are some difference between the education tooling around Racket and that which enables "industrial" applications Common Lisp is known for?

New comment by hatmatrix in "Lenses in Julia"

hatmatrix — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 11:33:20 +0000

As for the tooling, julia-snail on emacs is supposed to be like SLIME for Lisp. But sounds like that isn't your main gripe. Having to load so many packages is a indeed a pain, but it does suggest the core language is rather minimal...

New comment by hatmatrix in "Why can't transformers learn multiplication?"

hatmatrix — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 07:49:37 +0000

Does this also apply to commutative operations in general?

New comment by hatmatrix in "Are hard drives getting better?"

hatmatrix — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 21:36:02 +0000

Do we have enough rare earth metals to provide storage for the AI boom?