Hacker News: kilon

New comment by kilon in "Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?"

kilon — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 19:54:59 +0000

Here you go https://pypi.org/project/pylivecoding/

New comment by kilon in "Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?"

kilon — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 14:46:20 +0000

Built a live coding library for python that allows me to reload code I edited while it was executing. It has repl and debugger support and it can be run even for embedded python. It's pretty granular so it can reload modules or even individual objects. Unlike the existing module reload python function it can change object references to the updated code and delete old objects and their references from memory. This way in the next call only the latest code is executed. I built something similar for C code too.

New comment by kilon in "Google outage – resolved"

kilon — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 12:00:27 +0000

youtube greece is down returns "oops" error but i can still playback a 2 hour video that I was already watching before it went down. Trying to open any other video or channel returns this error.

New comment by kilon in "What is the core of the Python programming language?"

kilon — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 08:47:08 +0000

A possible approach is to use Cython to convert Python code to C code and then compile that code to WebAssembly. I would not be surprised if there is a tool for that already

New comment by kilon in "Ask HN: What do you use to keep track of bookmarks/notes/snippets?"

kilon — Sat, 04 Apr 2020 20:48:07 +0000

Colored pencils, pens and notebooks. Excellent opportunity to rest my eyes away from the computer screen.

New comment by kilon in "Will VBA Die? (2019)"

kilon — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 17:27:42 +0000

Well judging from the fact that my first computer my father bought back in 1988 Amstrad CPC 6128 is still alive and kicking with very active community and more development tools than it ever had, I think its safe to assume that software never dies. Only thing it takes is a small dedicated community and it can last for centuries. Partly because father and mothers infect their sons and daughters with their passion for the technology and the the loop never ends. What else never dies is necrophilia in software , apparently people are addicted to declaring software dead prematurely. Oh and of course clickbait because some people are desperate for views. It started with Java back in to 2000s and still going strong. I am not fan of Java but I am also not that delusional to declare Java dead. So no I think its pretty safe to assume VBA is not going anywhere.

New comment by kilon in "Exploit custom codecs to write inline C in Python"

kilon — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 12:54:56 +0000

Python syntax can be heavily and easily manipulated via the ast module. An example of this is hylang https://github.com/hylang/hy

New comment by kilon in "Emu: Language for Programming GPUs in Rust"

kilon — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 07:45:03 +0000

Rust is very unpopular. Popular being besides the usual suspects Assembly, Visual Basic, Delphi, Objective C , Swift etc. Finding the popularity of a language is actually pretty easy, ignore all the blog posts and opinion pieces of any kind and focus on third party libraries availability, documentation and benchmarks. Even on benchmarks Rust score very low making its “as fast as C” claim speculative to say the least. Strictness of a Rust also makes it highly unlikely that the language will become popular any time soon. Judging from the fact that innovation of any kind is one big reason for users to stay as far away as possible, even if that innovation ends up being part of all programming languages out there. Explains why innovation has stagnate the last century in software. So my rule of thumb is “if many people talk about it then most likely it’s popular if a ton of people talk about then it’s most likely unpopular”. So it’s definetly an indicator in a bell like curve.

New comment by kilon in "IT Runs on Java 8"

kilon — Fri, 10 May 2019 20:17:14 +0000

IT runs on a wide array of technologies. Desktop games and 3D graphics which the area I focus and obviously a massive part of the software market if we include consoles and mobile devices , C++ still is king. Most games nowadays use either Unity or Unreal, which is C# or C++. Java is almost completely absent apart of course from the Android. Of course native iOS is still Objective C and Swift. AI another field that interests me is dominated by Python. Also if we venture outside the commercial part around 40% of software is written in languages that you will never hear anything about them . Mainly because are small projects where using any language is not an issue. Generally a vast majority of the IT is definetly not Java but a wide group of highly popular languages mercilessly bombarded by thousands of unknown languages struggling to gain a fraction of a percentage in terms of growing their community. Essentially strength in numbers. Software is chaotic field of countless of technologies. Even something as big as Java has no hope of dominating because it’s impossible for a language to excel in billion different scenarios. So don’t worry Java won’t be conquering the Software world any time soon.

New comment by kilon in "For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection"

kilon — Thu, 09 May 2019 18:35:17 +0000

The irony of the thing is that in manual memory management languages you end up doing your own garbage collectors and in garbage collector languages you end up doing your own manual management. Unfortunately if you look in a language to solve such complex problems you are heading straight to severe disappointment land. Same shit different package. I still prefer dynamic languages by a long margin because of their ability to do decent metaprogramming and reflection which is essential for managing any form of data. Pick your poison and enjoy the hype while it lasts.

New comment by kilon in "Ask HN: How do you secure your Mac?"

kilon — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 07:28:46 +0000

I don’t. I keep my super sensitive data in my head. I never believed in computer security and never will. But the I never believed in security in general. Why on earth you would need an antivirus for a Mac ? I don’t even remember the last time avast gave me a virus warning on Windoom 10. Nowadays it’s mostly worms, ransomeware and spyware , rarely a Trojan horse. The age of virus has long gone after the start of the age of not slow internet.The only thing I do is to backup my data via Dropbox and megasync.

If you really need security, get a computer , disconnect it from the internet. The end.

New comment by kilon in "America’s Cities Are Running on Software from the ’80s"

kilon — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 14:59:58 +0000

If the sofware is from the 80s that is very good news, it means it runs on simpler hardware and the code will be simpler and easier to fix. Which is what made it viable for us to code in Assembly back in the 80s and early 90s with the same ease someone codes in c# nowadays. Coding in Assembly now is pure insanity.

Sure you could still write super ugly code but super ugly simple code is far better than super ugly complex code. Even if it comes with a forest of gotos.

New comment by kilon in "Ask HN: How to be productive with big existing code base"

kilon — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 10:08:09 +0000

The only thing it gets in my nerves is lack of comments and documentation. The fallacy that code can be remotely as easy to understand as natural language text. The rest I can endure and tolerate.

New comment by kilon in "The Lonely Life of a Yacht Influencer"

kilon — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 15:59:50 +0000

I will take the money for the Yacht and buy a submarine. Enjoy the depth before we completely ruin them via climate change and pollution.

New comment by kilon in "Why has Plan 9 chosen statically linked binaries instead of dynamic ones? (2004)"

kilon — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 15:46:06 +0000

I guess I am heretic for breaking my project to a collection of DLLs. Ironically I am doing it over a 2 mil lines of code statically linked code base. The statically linked code base takes 150 seconds to build and my much smaller project only 4 seconds.

I have also designed it that way to do live coding in C and I have made a similar library for live coding python .

I am addicted to DLLs , send help :D !

New comment by kilon in "Machine Learning Music Composed by Fragments of 100s of Terabytes of Recordings"

kilon — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 12:18:49 +0000

Nothing impressive but its a start

New comment by kilon in "Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome"

kilon — Sat, 08 Sep 2018 19:53:02 +0000

Why is this a problem ?

New comment by kilon in "Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node"

kilon — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 19:07:42 +0000

there are tons of services only that will allow you to code online using any language eve C , C++ and Assembly. From inside the browser of course. Of course I am not recommending a beginner to start from any of those languages but it shows that JS does not have the monopoly of in browser coding. If you have to stick with browser no matter what.

Ideone is a popular example https://ideone.com/

New comment by kilon in "Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node"

kilon — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 14:53:06 +0000

That's debatable. It's not as if downloading Python and making your first app will take you more than a few seconds, minus download time.

Set up is rarely an issue, once you set up a language even as complex as C++ its completely automated. You press a button and magic happens.

If the biggest selling point of a programming language is that it comes preinstalled with the OS of your choice, its not much of a selling point when the average user downloads and installs GBs of data just to play the latest game hype like Fortnite.

The only people who mind installing stuff are predominately web devs. 99.9% of users out there are fine with it for more than 6 decades now and that wont be changing any time soon.

New comment by kilon in "A Road to Common Lisp"

kilon — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 00:41:16 +0000

I have implemented live coding via DLLs for C , it’s not hard to do and can easily replace gdb. I don’t think that gdb offers live coding outside the box. Inspecting live state and to an extend REPL abilities do exist in GDB.