EdwardCoffin

12 ms·

91.
by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
Rekursiv [1], though I'm not sure how viable it really was. Edit: it's been discussed [2] here a few times before, and had an extremely colourful history. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rekursiv [2] https
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
For managing (storing) files I've concluded that it is impossible to find the ideal hierarchical structure for containing everything, so just go for reasonable structures that might have redundancy - for instance, accepting macos pho
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
A digression for anyone interested in Hashlife: I want to recommend Gosper's original paper [1] over the various other explanations of it. It is brief (6 pages), lucid, and was the paper that finally made me understand how hashlife wo
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
The page is not presenting right, I think. This HN comment from a few years ago [1] points to a script that purports to munge the files into modern HTML, but I have not tried it myself. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
The annotations are there in the RTF files, but there is something quirky about the format of those RTF files - perhaps they predate standardization or something. If you open one of the RTFs in a straight text editor like emacs or vi, you&
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
you have to open hugo.zip, or click on the view contents link beside it
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
In Dune, the villain is arguably the emperor, and we only find out what will happen to him on the last page, the last page of a whirlwind chapter that concludes all sorts of things that were building up for the whole book. So I don'
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I presume that you dislike Hamlet, Macbeth, Dune, and Children of Dune on the same grounds then? All of those end in similar ways.
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39404903
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The Deuce Editor Architecture(web.archive.org)
8 points by EdwardCoffin 3y ago|1 comments
101.
by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I really wish that Deuce [1] [2] got more attention as a source for ideas for Emacs alternatives. It sounds incredibly cool. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221002093520/https://groups.go... [2] http
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
Talking about Neal Stephenson's works always brings up several topics: endings and editing. He's responded to criticisms of his endings in various book talks, for instance his Author's at Google talk about Anathem [1] (prepo
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
The tweet cites a google groups post [1]. The title was extracted out of this paragraph from that post: On Plan 9, the rule tends to be: if feature(X) can't be implemented in a way that works for everything, don't do it. No spec
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
Smalltalk only allows the return from the block's lexically enclosing method, not an arbitrarily specifiable context like Common Lisp does. It's discussed a bit on c2.com [1] [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?SmalltalkBloc
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I think the best description of the kind of thing the lisp machines (the Symbolics ones, at least) supported is described in this thread mostly carried by Kent Pitman [1]. I'd at least read all of the comments he wrote as well as what
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
Bob Colwell touches on an issue that sounds like it is this one in his talk Engineering Lessons from the Pittsburgh Steelers [1] at around 1:05:02 (link prepositioned). I'll bet that he went into more detail in his book The Pentium C
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I haven't (yet) read the paper that they cite about this, but apparently though the journal it was published in is perhaps questionable, the authors themselves are respectable, having published other things in respectable journals. Pe
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
The first few pages of Part 3, when Kath 2 returns to the ring.
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
The third part of Neal Stephenson's novel Seveneves [1] has a neat application of this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
Butler Lampson's 2020 expansion of his 1983 paper Hints and Principles for Computer System Design [1] [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02455
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I read this book fairly carefully a number of years ago, found a lot of good stuff worth taking notes on. I'm glad to see it becoming more easily available. Stripe is also good. I have their printing of Hamming's The Art of Do
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I listened to this last night and found it worthwhile. I learned a few things I hadn't known before: he wrote parts of Dune in Haiku and other poetical forms, for the pacing those forms imposed, then expanded those parts into prose [1
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I recall an interview with someone about this - I think it was Tim O'Reilly - where it turned out that Bezos had a hard time getting the developers to even see the value in it. They kept putting in confirmation dialogs and he'd h
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
From the readme: This minimal installation gets completely loaded into memory.
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
By vouch do you mean upvote?
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I'm wondering what value you think has been lost through the book being a scan? Virtually all of the pages contain little more than handwriting, so a scan is the appropriate representation.
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
Anyone who likes this kind of thing might find Freeman Dyson's paper A Model for the Origin of Life [1] interesting. It's a purely statistical model, dealing with the most abstract properties of the component molecules. The sum
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I keep a big notebook (12" x 9" I think) that I write quotations I like in, with a fountain pen. I try to transcribe one quotation per day, from a computer file of such quotations. This keeps my hand in with respect to handwriti
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I only see the teacher's book at that link. Were the copy books elsewhere?
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by EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I think it isn't a constrained enough topic to write a textbook on. The conclusion section of the article under discussion summarizes the technique pretty well. I have encountered brief discussions of the technique in a few places tho

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