Hacker News: pcfwik

New comment by pcfwik in "Clockwise/Spiral Rule (1994)"

pcfwik — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:32:54 +0000

I think this is a valid point. I would much prefer if the spiral rule were presented as a helpful mnemonic for remembering C operator precedence rather than something uniquely connected to declarations!

New comment by pcfwik in "Clockwise/Spiral Rule (1994)"

pcfwik — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:28:28 +0000

Being taught this rule in undergrad really hampered my appreciation of C. As I've said in a previous comment, the real key that unlocked understanding C declarations for me is the mantra "declaration follows use." You declare a variable in C in exactly the same way you would use it: if you know how to use a variable, then you know how to read and write a declaration for it. Once I understood this elegant idea, it became hard to enjoy using statically typed languages that eschew it.

It is explained in more detail at this link: https://eigenstate.org/notes/c-decl

New comment by pcfwik in "The Dark Night of Mathematics"

pcfwik — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 03:14:42 +0000

> When I was in mathematics, reading other people's work was always more rewarding to me than doing my own. [...] I really welcome the omniscient mathematician machine people are predicting.

Curious, as someone who relates strongly with both the OP and your first sentence: did it matter that you were reading "other people's work?" Or was it simply the satisfaction of understanding an answer?

Personally, one of the things that finally drew me to math as an undergrad (vs. high school where I thought of it as a stupid competition played by people who cared too much about showing off their smarts) was an instructor who helped me think of studying math as a conversation with a fellow human being many miles, centuries, languages, and cultures removed from me. Despite that distance, my mind was appreciating a creation that another human had cared for and poured years of their life into. There was a sort of romance to it, like the feeling of butterflies-in-the-stomach we get from seeing a multi-thousand-year-old cave painting, yet even more impressive because of the depth of the thought communicated.

I personally haven't been able to recreate that feeling from computer-generated math. Whenever I try to, I feel deeply uncomfortable (somewhat similar to the thought of eschewing human connection for an 'AI companion').

I'm more optimistic than the OP, especially when I think of new discoveries in healthcare. And I know there's enough "organic human-created math" from the last ~2k years that folks who feel the way I do can spend the rest of our lives studying only that. But it is sad to think that this multi-thousand-year project of "communicating human mathematical creations through time" has just ... ended? Or seems to be ending soon? Or at least greatly cheapened from a romantic dream into a sort of fun hobby, like recreational knitting? I can't help but share the OP's sadness that something seems to have been lost for future generations. Though a lot has been (and will be) gained as well, for sure!

Industrial Society and Its Future (Text of Unabomber Manifesto)

pcfwik — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:42:14 +0000

Article URL: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/unabom-manifesto-1.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49025389

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Why do we do astrophysics?

pcfwik — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:56:20 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10181

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48560212

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Stand and Deliver Revisited

pcfwik — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:35:32 +0000

Article URL: https://reason.com/2002/07/01/stand-and-deliver-revisited-2/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48351351

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

An Introduction to Objectivist-C

pcfwik — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:52:25 +0000

Article URL: https://fdiv.net/2012/04/01/introduction-objectivist-c

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48258899

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Rewrite System Showdown: Stochastic Search vs. EqSat

pcfwik — Thu, 21 May 2026 03:38:02 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19005

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48217582

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Left-Leaning Red-Black Trees Considered Harmful

pcfwik — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:20:38 +0000

Article URL: https://read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/notes/llrb.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47522621

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Report from Vietnam (1968) Walter Cronkite [video]

pcfwik — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:03:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcSeecx-Z1E

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47281709

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Logarithmic Mean

pcfwik — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:30:34 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_mean

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47156574

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Jim Roskind on C Ambiguity

pcfwik — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 02:21:19 +0000

Article URL: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/l/c/roskind.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46908199

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Stephenson Impersonator; Minor Update

pcfwik — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:54:25 +0000

Article URL: https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/stephenson-impersonator-minor-update

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901699

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Designing a Programming Language for the Desert

pcfwik — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:57:06 +0000

Article URL: https://futhark-lang.org/blog/2018-06-18-designing-a-programming-language-for-the-desert.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707469

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

250 Years Ago: Thomas Paine's Common Sense

pcfwik — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 18:25:07 +0000

Article URL: https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2026/01/250-years-ago-thomas-paines-common-sense/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568450

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Identity Theft in AI Conference Peer Review

pcfwik — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 02:15:34 +0000

Article URL: https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/identity-theft-in-ai-conference-peer-review/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46350644

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by pcfwik in "Show HN: Cdecl-dump - represent C declarations visually"

pcfwik — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 01:56:01 +0000

Since this is about C declarations: for anyone who (like me) had the misfortune of learning the so-called "spiral rule" in college rather than being taught how declarations in C work, below are some links that explain the "declaration follows use" idea that (AFAIK) is the true philosophy behind C declaration syntax (and significantly easier to remember/read/write).

TL;DR: you declare a variable in C _in exactly the same way you would use it:_ if you know how to use a variable, then you know how to read and write a declaration for it.

https://eigenstate.org/notes/c-decl https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775966

Fix: Externalizing network I/O in serverless computing [pdf]

pcfwik — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 01:15:40 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00205

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45817907

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by pcfwik in "Wren: A classy little scripting language"

pcfwik — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:25:52 +0000

Oh awesome, thanks for the pointer!

New comment by pcfwik in "Wren: A classy little scripting language"

pcfwik — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 02:57:26 +0000

I once considered Wren for a situation where I (to a first approximation) wanted to allow users to write 'plugins' that link against my internal C application symbols but using a language focusing more on ease of use (rather than C).

Unfortunately, neither Wren nor any of the other major 'embeddable scripting languages' (e.g., Lua) were really a good fit for this, because they commit fully to the 'all-numbers-are-floats' thing and generally don't seem to even try to provide a general equivalent to the C++ `extern "C" { ... }` thing.

Of course, I know this isn't really the target use case of Wren/Lua/etc., but if anyone knows of a good embeddable scripting language for this I'd love to hear about it. Eventually I went with CPython (which provides ctypes to solve my problem) but it's a huge pain to embed properly.