Hacker News: lindig

New comment by lindig in "Why Janet? (2023)"

lindig — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:03:18 +0000

> Instead of regular expressions, Janet’s text wrangling is based around parsing expression grammars. Parsing expression grammars are simpler, more powerful, and more predictable than regular expressions.

I would dispute that this is the case. In PEGs, alternatives are not commutative, unlike in regular expressions. This can lead to quite frustrating debugging. While a valid choice, the advantage over REs is overstated.

New comment by lindig in "Coalton is an efficient, statically typed Lisp with ideas from Haskell and OCaml"

lindig — Fri, 29 May 2026 10:17:16 +0000

> native ocaml repl has landed

What does this refer to? Most people use the OCaml `utop` REPL which isn't okay for some printf debugging but nowhere near what a Lisp could do.

New comment by lindig in "Zed Editor Theme-Builder"

lindig — Sat, 09 May 2026 18:25:27 +0000

The repository link on that page does not work. Is there a preview?

New comment by lindig in "Show HN: When is the next Caltrain? (minimal webapp)"

lindig — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 17:37:28 +0000

The public transport service in Hannover/Germany once had a screensaver that you could configure to show the next departure from your nearest station. I thought that was clever marketing. Today you probably could implement this as a web service.

New comment by lindig in "The Yin and Yang of Programming"

lindig — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 20:41:36 +0000

I like the idea mentioned in the article of exploring limited higher-order functions: functions that can only take functions as argument that themselves are not taking functions as arguments. But what simplification does this buy (in the implementation of such a language) over a language that is fully functional? It is not explained in the article.

New comment by lindig in "A worker from Berkeley's Urban Ore has opened a museum celebrating wingnuts"

lindig — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 15:38:13 +0000

This makes you appreciate curation in a museum. Why are these objects shown together? Historical period, size, design feature, material, production method? It looks completely arbitrary.

New comment by lindig in "Interval Parsing Grammars for File Format Parsing (2023) [pdf]"

lindig — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 07:04:23 +0000

The main feature of interval parsing appears to be that it can jump over content such that a later part in a file does not depend on knowing everything that comes before it. Has Dogma similar expressiveness?

New comment by lindig in "I moved my blog from IPFS to a server"

lindig — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 20:42:34 +0000

Filecoin, which is based on IPFS, creates a market for unused storage. I think that idea is great but for adoption it needs to be as simple as Dropbox to store files. But visit https://filecoin.io/ and the dropbox-like app that you could be willing to try is nowhere to be found. So maybe it is an enterprise solution? That isn't spelled out either. So I am not surprised that this has little traction and the article further confirms the impression.

New comment by lindig in "Why is everything so ugly?"

lindig — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 12:20:20 +0000

"Show, don't tell" is lost on the authors. They only talk about visual ugliness.

New comment by lindig in "A Simulated Annealing FPGA Placer"

lindig — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 19:26:25 +0000

The argument for annealing in the original paper is that accepting regressions is essential to escape from local minima.

https://www2.stat.duke.edu/~scs/Courses/Stat376/Papers/Tempe...

"Annealing, as implemented by the Metropolis procedure, differs from iterative improvement in that the procedure need not get stuck since transitions out of a local optimum are always possible at nonzero temperature. A second and more important feature is that a sort of adaptive divide-and-conquer occurs. Gross features of the eventual state of the system appear at higher tempera-tures; fine details develop at lower tem-peratures. This will be discussed with specific examples."

New comment by lindig in "A Simulated Annealing FPGA Placer"

lindig — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 18:39:30 +0000

My understanding of simulated annealing is that solutions that are not improvements are still accepted with some probability in early steps but that this probability decreases as "temperature" drops. Looking at your description (but not code) I did not see that aspect but it looked like you would only accept improvements of the cost function. Is this correct or where does your solution accept slight regressions with some probability, too?

New comment by lindig in "Vale.sh – A Linter for Prose"

lindig — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 18:39:40 +0000

Links are unreadable in that blog post on iOS/Safari.

New comment by lindig in "The Elements of Style [pdf]"

lindig — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 13:45:16 +0000

For covering the subject of writing, the typesetting of the PDF is remarkably poor. The mix of serif and sans serif, the font sizes don't match the structure of the document, and enumerations have inconsistent indentation - to point out just a few blemishes.

New comment by lindig in "Stripe Account CLOSED for no reason and with no explanation"

lindig — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 13:44:42 +0000

What does your business do? Stripe might not have listed your business model explicitly but could still prefer to not have you as a customer if it is an edge case.

New comment by lindig in "Implementing Value Speculation in OCaml"

lindig — Mon, 08 May 2023 12:38:16 +0000

Since list traversal is very common in OCaml, could the compiler emit code that pre-fetches the next element?

New comment by lindig in "Notepad Calculator"

lindig — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 17:13:07 +0000

Suggestion: parse any number like 12:03 as 12 minutes and 3 seconds (and 04:12:03 with hours) and represent it as seconds. It makes working with durations a lot easier. This is just an additional parsing rule (could also use 12m3 or 4h12m3) like 1e3 for 1*10^3 but is typically not implemented.

New comment by lindig in "“The Suck” (Learning Anything by Writing It Out by Hand)"

lindig — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 08:36:46 +0000

This guy needs a copy editor. The meandering writing is off putting when someone is writing on the subject of becoming efficient at a task or process. He is in love with his own writing, maybe considering it entertainment, which he proclaims not to do.

New comment by lindig in "Google Timer is gone"

lindig — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 17:15:40 +0000

That's a great service. I can think of various features to support more use cases:

* provide an optional label - for the use case where several clocks are used and shared.

* start and share several stop watches from a single page: start them one by one or together. For a race with multiple participants that either start sequentially or together.

* Support taking split times.

* Combine timer and stopwatch: count down from a set time, then start the stopwatch at zero. It currently does this already. This supports races like sailing where the actual start is preceded by a countdown period.

New comment by lindig in "Show HN: We made a fast audio editor for podcasting"

lindig — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 16:02:36 +0000

> I actually really wish I had something similar for video...

Try this: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

I am using the binary on macOS. The UI is a bit idiosyncratic but it works quite well and is ideal to cut a video down to the essential parts without loss of quality.

New comment by lindig in "PR to Merge Multicore OCaml"

lindig — Fri, 24 Dec 2021 11:29:33 +0000

> A much better effort, for anyone interested, would be to vastly simplify the OCaml build and package management story to be more Go-like.

OCaml's package management and build system is not complicated for consumers and builds are very fast. What do you feel is complicated about opam and dune?

What is complicated (but got better) is submitting packages into the official package repository. However, this ensures that packages have correctly versioned dependencies, which is good for consumers.

Go does not rely on a central package repository and this makes it easier to use by essentially just pointing to GitHub. OCaml and Go differ in the way they try to use updated dependencies for a build. OCaml by default is aggressive whereas Go prefers stability.