Hacker News: tomstuart

New comment by tomstuart in "I found a seashell in the middle of the desert"

tomstuart — Sat, 30 May 2026 21:03:14 +0000

Among a strong field, this is the single most depressing comment I’ve ever read on Hacker News. Several grim components but it’s the “I don’t understand why” which seals the deal.

New comment by tomstuart in "Show HN: Twixt – transform one word into another in four moves"

tomstuart — Sun, 24 May 2026 10:17:14 +0000

The game’s difficult to understand so it’s too punitive to not offer even a single practice/example puzzle to use for learning. One puzzle a day is nice once you’ve got the hang of it, but it’s discouraging to “waste” today’s puzzle on learning the rules and not be able to try for real until tomorrow.

New comment by tomstuart in "Graphing how the 10k* most common English words define each other"

tomstuart — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 07:07:21 +0000

I had to look this up: https://doi.org/10.7155/jgaa.00370

New comment by tomstuart in "I see a future in jj"

tomstuart — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 19:07:18 +0000

Congratulations on the new adventure, Steve, and good luck!

New comment by tomstuart in "How does Turbo listen for Turbo Streams"

tomstuart — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 09:22:39 +0000

What do you mean by “Pagemorphs”? A quick Google search suggests you’re the only person using this term so it’s hard to know what you’re recommending. I think it must mean e.g. https://turbo.hotwired.dev/handbook/page_refreshes?

New comment by tomstuart in "Jujutsu for everyone"

tomstuart — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 17:49:37 +0000

Do you want another person (or yourself in the future) to be able to read your commits, in order, to get a clear account of what changed & why? If so, you should fix up those commits to address mistakes. If not, it doesn’t matter.

New comment by tomstuart in "Postgres UUIDv7 and per-back end monotonicity"

tomstuart — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 18:13:16 +0000

https://www.hyrumslaw.com/

New comment by tomstuart in "Bottles of OOP now available in Python"

tomstuart — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 23:29:52 +0000

Yes, it is.

New comment by tomstuart in "Rubocop-obsession: RuboCop extension focused on higher-level concepts"

tomstuart — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 06:00:23 +0000

This sounds intuitively true, but it’s a (very persistent) myth: https://www.viget.com/articles/just-use-double-quoted-ruby-s...

New comment by tomstuart in "Hotwire Native"

tomstuart — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 06:45:25 +0000

The branding is incredibly confusing, but: Hotwire (https://hotwired.dev/) is a set of ideas about how to build dynamic web UI (“HTML over the wire”), and the Turbo, Stimulus and Native frameworks are complementary implementations of those ideas in JavaScript and native mobile code. You can use all, some or none of them to build a Hotwire-style app.

The three frameworks originated in Rails apps, so they have good Rails integrations, but there’s nothing Rails-specific about them and you can use them in any environment where HTML is sent from server to client, even a static web site.

New comment by tomstuart in "Switch Ruby's default parser from parse.y to Prism"

tomstuart — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 21:46:28 +0000

Rails’ nightly CI already needed a fix: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/52937

Switch Ruby's default parser from parse.y to Prism

tomstuart — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 19:31:48 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/11497

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41559681

Points: 5

# Comments: 3

Switch Ruby's default parser from parse.y to Prism

tomstuart — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 13:32:00 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/11497

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41539693

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by tomstuart in "Ruby's official documentation just got a new look"

tomstuart — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 13:59:52 +0000

Here’s the PR. I don’t know whether it was discussed elsewhere. https://github.com/ruby/rdoc/pull/1157

New comment by tomstuart in "We need to liberate the Postcode Address File"

tomstuart — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 07:41:46 +0000

That’s the joke.

New comment by tomstuart in "Ruby methods are colorless"

tomstuart — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 13:35:46 +0000

I’m pretty sure you’re talking to an LLM.

New comment by tomstuart in "Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?"

tomstuart — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 11:43:51 +0000

Definitive reference: https://www.urbanautomaton.com/blog/2015/08/10/the-pledge-to...

New comment by tomstuart in "Show HN: I made a programmable computer from NAND gates"

tomstuart — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 16:34:38 +0000

I did read your comment but I don’t really understand what you mean by “the memory system”. A linear bounded automaton is by definition a finite state machine for a given input (i.e. fixed tape size) because the number of possible configurations is finite. A Turing machine’s infinite tape is what stops it being a finite state machine.

New comment by tomstuart in "Show HN: I made a programmable computer from NAND gates"

tomstuart — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 21:40:30 +0000

Real-world computers are equivalent to linear bounded automata, not true Turing machines, because they have finite memory. This technicality is mostly ignored because a computer with a large finite memory is a decent enough approximation to a Turing machine for practical purposes. But, for example, the halting problem is decidable for linear bounded automata — because there are only finitely many states, every computation must either halt or eventually revisit an earlier state and get stuck in a loop — so in theory it’s an important distinction.

New comment by tomstuart in "A Plea for More Mikado"

tomstuart — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 12:29:01 +0000

Mike Dalessio, the maintainer of Nokogiri, gave an excellent talk about this at Rails World 2023: https://youtu.be/USPLEASZ0Dc?t=939