Hacker News: signaru

New comment by signaru in "Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen"

signaru — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 08:15:49 +0000

If it would be less trouble (because of customs and other external factors), and assuming it can help, maybe a phone keyboard can also be considered? An OTG cable plus a normal USB keyboard might also be a solution if portability is not a requirement.

New comment by signaru in "Vintage digicams aren't just a fad. They're an artistic statement"

signaru — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 16:00:40 +0000

While I gladly embrace the shift to solid state, I find the mechanical engineering in old electronic devices, cameras in particular, quite fascinating.

New comment by signaru in "Monocle: Optics Library for Scala"

signaru — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 00:58:32 +0000

The name, monocle, also further misleads those expecting the physics topic. They actually have a nice logo with a lens and the lambda symbol which is often the symbol used for wavelength.

New comment by signaru in "Why don't you move abroad?"

signaru — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 13:55:36 +0000

Entrepreneurship sure may be difficult as a whole. However, some difficulties are not really necessary. For me, it's a matter of seeing the end goal and removing as much obstacles as possible to get there faster (optimizing for time). I see the need to have a proper job or chase funding as additional obstacles if you are abroad.

New comment by signaru in "Why don't you move abroad?"

signaru — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 12:52:34 +0000

Opportunities that require big risks is also another factor. My academic acquaintances abroad may be doing well financially and travel-wise, but they all have to live their foreign bosses' ambitions despite being very bright people. It's far easier to take crazier entrepreneurial risks with the safety nets in one's own home-country.

New comment by signaru in "Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#"

signaru — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 02:35:32 +0000

Having built both desktop-native and browser-based apps, I think there is an efficiency in doing the widget layouts textually via code/markup once you get over the learning curve. I believe Qt and wxWidgets also have automatic layout features, but doing this on top of C++ maybe makes the experience less smooth. So far form designers in Visual Studio require manual pixel layouting, which becomes tedious as the GUI evolves to be more complex. This is great for beginners as dragging and dropping controls is so easy to learn. But as soon as you have a dozen or so controls, you start to notice the time spent manually dragging/aligning/sizing that is absent in markup-based or procedurally generated GUIs that do the layout calculations for you.

New comment by signaru in "A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT"

signaru — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 04:53:16 +0000

It gets worst when these users/students run to others when the AI generated code doesn't work. Or with colleagues who think they already "wrote" the initial essay then pass it for others to edit and contribute. In such cases it is usually better to rewrite from scratch and tell them their initial work is not useful at all and not worth spending time improving upon.

New comment by signaru in "Ask HN: What would you preserve if the internet were to go down tomorrow?"

signaru — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 05:27:33 +0000

My personal/work files for which the physical media of origin no longer exists. Source codes, mine and of others that I care about. Compilers. Lots of books and Wikipedia.

New comment by signaru in "Ask HN: How to Learn 'To Think'?"

signaru — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 09:15:24 +0000

Build/make something. Preferably something new to you and preferably on your own as much as possible (even if you're following someone else's instructions).

Making a Real Potato Camera [video]

signaru — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 11:29:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlWyKKJF0r4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41847403

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by signaru in "Stop Designing Your Web Application for Millions of Users When You Dont Have 100"

signaru — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 09:24:32 +0000

This also applies when calculating losses from paying third party services.

New comment by signaru in "Exercise May Be the Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known"

signaru — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 04:53:11 +0000

I think there are evolutionary arguments for it, besides avoiding sickness:

* Generally, the opposite sex is physically attracted to fit individuals.

* Finding food prior to agriculture or paying others.

* As for sugar, I'm not so sure, but maybe the plant's benefits also have to be considered (e.g. propagating seeds through fruits).

New comment by signaru in "Ask HN: Could early 80s computers have had better software given today's CS?"

signaru — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 19:14:50 +0000

Maybe cheating a bit if we allow compilers to run on more powerful machines, different from where the program will run. It could be possible to utilize more modern or "ergonomic" programming languages or rely on convenient libraries (assuming they are also efficiently coded). Programming languages in the 80s would not be as fun as what we have today partly because they were designed for limited hardware and partly because there's not a lot of other languages to learn from yet. IDEs, tooling and libraries have also come a long way.

Knowledge access is also something that has improved significantly. Programmers back then may not have had all the information that could have improved their work.

New comment by signaru in "Free Text-to-Speech App with natural voices"

signaru — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 13:38:55 +0000

I believe Audible is already using non human speakers as well and just making up names for the narrators. I can tell since sometimes pronunciations are wrong and sound similar to TTS mistakes.

New comment by signaru in "Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch"

signaru — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 13:11:27 +0000

Have read the first few chapters and it expects that you either read the accompanying source code or implement your own and pass the tests. The pseudo code presented in the book often look like function calls with the inner details not there in the book. Furthermore, as already pointed out in another comment, the available implementation is in OCaml, which is probably not something many C programmers have experience with.

Nevertheless, I think I'm learning more from this book than most other books I've tried before that are far more theoretical or abstract. I'm still eager to reach the chapter on implementing C types. I think it's a good book, but it requires more effort than something like Crafting Interpreters or Writing a Compiler/Interpreter in Go, while also covering topics not in those books.

New comment by signaru in "Foobar2000"

signaru — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 23:50:56 +0000

I use Audacious on Ubuntu as I can almost get the same UI configuration as foobar2000, tabs of playlists which can be made on the fly or from saved files. A music player app is something I always use on the background, so all the fancy visualizations or album art are not so useful for me. It's also sad that the default music player on Ubuntu (Mate) doesn't have a volume control out of the box.

New comment by signaru in "Railroading the Pascal Language"

signaru — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 13:53:45 +0000

It might be fun to look at the last few chapter's of Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" for a deep dive and similar looking diagrams.

New comment by signaru in "Crafting Interpreters"

signaru — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 09:34:45 +0000

Thorsten Ball's books are the closest thing to Crafting Interpreters. Not just by topic, but also with how the code is presented. By far these are among the few books I know that take the effort to guide the reader to programming something complex from scratch, while also being testable as the program grows. This means that previously presented code changes along the way as new features are added.

A lot of other "code yourself" books, on the other hand, simply slice already finished codebases, and there's no way to test a simpler incomplete version of the program unless the reader makes extra effort and go beyond what is presented in the book.

While there is a lot of overlapping topics in Nystrom's and Ball's books, there are also enough differences to learn something new from the other. Ball's books uses the same parser and AST as front ends to both tree-walking and VM interpreter. CI, on the other hand, skips the AST for the VM interpreter, and also teaches extra topics like implementing garbage collection, dictionaries/hashtables and class-based OOP.

New comment by signaru in "Ask HN: Do AI-generated images ruin technical posts for anyone else?"

signaru — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 18:40:38 +0000

I find memes to be more annoying as the meme stock images are far less likely to be relevant and to add any value. AI generated images, on the other hand, are sometimes used to illustrate something useful. Given a choice, I would personally still prefer non AI images though as I appreciate the effort and the "personal touch".

New comment by signaru in "Python with Braces"

signaru — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 04:03:28 +0000

begin/end might be more familiar. Some languages don't even have the equivalent of (Pascal's) "begin" since other keywords are already associated with starting a block.