Hacker News: ptrott2017

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Poly/ML – A Standard ML Implementation"

ptrott2017 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 02:13:06 +0000

StandardML is a rather nice modular high level functional programming language with algebraic datatypes, pattern matching, compile-time type checking and type inference etc. Poly/ML extends this with strong proven multi-core and cross platform support including Posix threads, parallel garbage collection, FFI etc. Poly/ML has been around a while, but it is still actively maintained by Dave Mathews et al (most recent release June 2026) has good windows and X11 support. Poly/ML is a great way to explore the world of StandardML and is used to build Isabelle and HOL theorem provers. Definitely worth a look!

New comment by ptrott2017 in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

ptrott2017 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:37:00 +0000

Not eries (obviously) but if you switch out shareholder for stakeholder i.e. maximise stakeholder value, you gain a wider set of responsibilities more aligned with Eric's comment. This is in itself not a new idea, it partly emerged out of the work of R. Edward Freeman. His original book on stakeholder management was published in 1984 and over the last decade has become at least a regular discussion topic at many business schools. However, the idea needs to gain far more momentum. Hopeful Eric Reis's new book also helps move the discussions forward - looking forward to reading it.

New comment by ptrott2017 in "All Lean Books and Where to Find Them"

ptrott2017 — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:16:04 +0000

@atomicnature - thank you for posting this. I saw the title and wondered if it was books on lean startups or lean manufacturing, very happy to find a collection of links to books on the Lean programming language (and the rest of the site is well worth a read). This made my morning!

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE"

ptrott2017 — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:39:00 +0000

Valid concern which should not be downvoted. For some this will be too early to garner interest or confidence. For others, especially those interested in the Pascal language family or building a compiled language with QBE, there is a lot of things in this project that justify taking a close look. (Not least of all, Graeme's proven track record in the Pascal community). Glad the project is getting some deserved attention and looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE"

ptrott2017 — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:22:26 +0000

You can use Lazarus from a C interface - via liblcl. There are bindings for Go and Nim that use this method. Given the QBE backend, this may be one possible route for Blaise but needs investigation.

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Life and Land in Anglo-Saxon England"

ptrott2017 — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 14:48:15 +0000

Historic crane populations crashed due to hunting and then loss of habitat as wetlands were drained and agriculture and housing expanded etc. Today you can find cranes in the wild in Norfolk, Suffolk and the Fens district which are all regions with sizeable wetland habitats due to active protection and reintroduction programs. There are small groups of other breeding pairs elsewhere in the UK as well. See following for a quick backgrounder:

https://www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happening/news/the-great-crane...

New comment by ptrott2017 in "AMA: I'm Dave Greene, an accidental expert on Conway's Game of Life"

ptrott2017 — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 01:07:30 +0000

and if you want some additional explanation:

https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

New comment by ptrott2017 in "An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)"

ptrott2017 — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 01:10:45 +0000

Factor provides support for both file and image based workflows. Factor is image-based and uses files when sharing, loading or refreshing vocabularies. however, just like lisp and Smalltalk, you can also save, share and restore system state via an image. For example you can save the whole state of Factor with the word

save-image

and you can restore that image using ./factor -i=path-to-image

This image workflow and interaction via the inspector provides a very similar workflow experience to both Smalltalk and Common Lisp.

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Why Ireland's housing bubble burst"

ptrott2017 — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 11:19:17 +0000

Not the OP but suspect the source is this:

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cpr/censu...

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Nvidia Is Simulating a Copy of the Earth"

ptrott2017 — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 06:35:30 +0000

For those outside US where content is currently not available at your location:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=451xJqNGFqU

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Ross Anderson has died"

ptrott2017 — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 16:12:00 +0000

22+ odd years ago I emailed Ross out of the blue. At the time I was working at a small startup attempting to build mobile banking infrastructure for rural poor in South Africa and elsewhere. I was after a copy of a paper he had mentioned in a talk and Ross replied with a blunt to the point email about how hard he thought the problem domain we were trying to tackle was (along with a pointer to the paper I had asked about). I remember being slightly annoyed by the initial tone of his response, but it got me thinking - then thinking a lot more. There were some very well thought out reasons behind his arguments. I replied a few days later with a detailed list of how we were addressing his concerns along with some others he hadn't mentioned but also acknowledging the areas we needed to dig into further. I didn't really expect an answer, after all, I didn't know him, but he had got me to think hard on key problems and I wanted to acknowledge that.

We got a lot more than a simple reply. We got his focused feedback, constructive criticisms, pointers to other work he thought was relevant, general support, some key follow up conversations on the phone, followed by introductions to folks he knew in industry who he thought could help (who would have never entertained us at that stage otherwise). While the startup eventually didn't make it, many of the ideas we worked on did. Of the folks that we met through that whole adventure, Ross was one of the standouts. Yup, he was very good people indeed and will be sadly missed!

New comment by ptrott2017 in "BlenderBIM – add-on for beautiful, detailed, and data-rich OpenBIM with Blender"

ptrott2017 — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 15:58:40 +0000

Blender Apps are on the medium to long term plans for the Blender foundation (i.e. planned on roadmap but not currently under active development). The Blender team currently have a lot of projects on and are resource bound so have prioritized focus on finishing developments such as Evee Next, GPU compositing etc before starting other projects such as Apps.

For more detail see: https://www.blender.org/development/projects-to-look-forward...

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Glisp: A Lisp-Based Design Tool Bridging Graphic Design and Computational Arts"

ptrott2017 — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 21:01:09 +0000

This is very cool - recommend checking out the demo and examples:

https://glisp.app/commit:e7fbaae/

- its a very nice UI experience - try hello world then move the circle and see the code update automatically.

If you are interested in lisp and creative coding this is well worth experimenting with - really nice work!

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Lucid – software architecture for scalable Laravel projects"

ptrott2017 — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 21:32:49 +0000

I found the docs a better starting point:

https://docs.lucidarch.dev/

https://docs.lucidarch.dev/concept/

https://docs.lucidarch.dev/principles/

https://docs.lucidarch.dev/micro-vs-monolith/

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Intel’s First 4nm EUV Chip, Ready Today: Loihi 2 for Neuromorphic Computing"

ptrott2017 — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:04:20 +0000

Super excited to see this and thanks Mikhaed for posting!

Intel's Loihi and Manchester's APT SpiNNaker (http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/hardware/) are two extremely interesting projects and architectures that could drive new generation of machine learning apps (and migrate software based models into hardware)

Very much hoping Loihi2 (and a SpiNNaker descendent) will be eventually packaged into a format that enables researches and devs to start embedding it into systems though sadly looks like that wont be till late 2023 or more likely 2023 for Lohi2 at earliest. Still great to see progress.

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Story of Mint"

ptrott2017 — Sat, 21 Aug 2021 21:30:57 +0000

Anton Commissaris was one of the founding team at Mint - now part of Intuit. His recent book: Mint - The Arc of the valley (https://www.amazon.com/ARC-VALLEY-Silicon-Soaring-Success/dp...) is an insider’s view of the entire journey from start up through acquisition. As an engineer have you ever wondered what BizDev does? Or have you wondered what it is like building a company that everyone thinks could be a unicorn for plans to change for the most unexpected of reasons? Or what the inside of an acquisition process looks like? While the Arc of the Valley gives great insight to all these questions - its far more than that it is a great read about a pioneering startup and everything that happened there.

Story of Mint

ptrott2017 — Sat, 21 Aug 2021 21:30:57 +0000

Article URL: https://indiereader.com/book_review/arc-of-the-valley-the-inside-story-of-mint-silicon-valley-soaring-success-and-selling-out/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28260739

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Enzian is a research computer built by the Systems Group at ETH Zurich"

ptrott2017 — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 04:12:44 +0000

Great to see this - Barrelfish is a very interesting OS and its really good to see ETH Zurich continue its history of creating original intriguing hardware for research and teaching. Hopefully Enzian can can get enough traction in the R&D community to enable wider interest.

New comment by ptrott2017 in "The Oberon+ Programming Language"

ptrott2017 — Sun, 18 Jul 2021 07:47:25 +0000

As it says on the website: Oberon+ is fast statically typed, compiled, general-purpose, procedural, object-oriented, garbage collected programming language in the Pascal tradition, with support for generic programming.

Syntax wise it will be familiar to anyone who has used Pascal or Lua. Semantically it will feel familiar to anyone who has used Go. Its a lot of fun to use and leverages some of the nice aspects of Oberon matched with the performance of LuaJit, with some elegant extensions.

The IDE is easy to use and the code base is fun to work through. The examples give a great idea of the language and speed. Both code written in Oberon+ and the core IDE /compiler src code are very easy to read. There are lots of good ideas in here worth exploring further.

Rochus Keller the developer behind Oberon+ has a lot of interesting projects on his Github site which warrant further investigation but Oberon+ is especially worth exploring.

New comment by ptrott2017 in "Scientists Catch Jumping Genes Rewiring Genomes"

ptrott2017 — Thu, 13 May 2021 18:08:29 +0000

Leonid Zamdborg et al published a good paper on this a few years ago and it has a very good overview of related previous work. All the referenced papers in the background and related works section are all worth reading:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4353400/