cben

7 ms·

31.
by cben 3y ago
Reminds me of this android gqme: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.DmitryLomak...
32.
by cben 3y ago
I'll add The Unix Programming Environment, by Kernighan and Pike. Like K&R, the examples it picks "happen" to teach so much more than you came to learn :), e.g. anatomy of version control, some language design, basics of
33.
by cben 3y ago
I seriously nominate Lauren Ipsum by Carlos Bueno as a _better_ Alice story. It's exlipictly about CS, but is also chock full of math, philosophy and some life advice. It's almost a GEB for kids.
34.
by cben 3y ago
The author of Oil Shell has some of the best writing on why unix shells are an important niche to push forward. Unix (and later the internet), by enforcing "narrow waists" [1] like a flat stream of octets for all communication, is
35.
by cben 3y ago
#!/usr/bin/env python3 Mere `python` will remain ambiguous for years whether you'll get 2 or 3, but explicit `python3` doesn't have that problem.
36.
by cben 3y ago
A list I built once of such options for commands: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/3164#issueco... You are right, very little consistency :-( In some cases you really need the \0 delimiters fo
37.
by cben 4y ago
Sorry, i misspoke about "Church numerals". The book uses them to represent non-negative integers by lambdas but here that wasn't necessary, TypeScript allowed a simpler representation of N as a the type of an N-deep nested
38.
by cben 4y ago
There are 2 components here. One is the "type metaprogramming" - (mis)use of the type system to implement to do compile-time computation, mainly by using parametrized types as kinda-functions + type inference for kinda-pattern-ma
39.
by cben 4y ago
https://3fx.ch/typing-is-hard.html is a neat summary, and yes the situation is worse than most programmers would guess: Most industry languages, including "boring" reliable ones like C++, Java or Rust have _undeci
40.
by cben 4y ago
Wikipedia has nice summary of "Atomic battery" designs that are not simply RTGs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery#Non-thermal_c...
41.
by cben 4y ago
Due to price, when you buy motors/sensors/hubs, you'd want them to be compatible with future buys. LEGO used to have several systems but now pretty much converged to one "Powered Up" interface: https://b
42.
by cben 4y ago
also https://echa.itch.io/pocket-robots-test-chamber
43.
by cben 4y ago
"Understanding Computation: From Simple Machines to Impossible Programs". I knew many of topics and enjoyed it nonetheless. Highlights: + Very insightful chapter on different flavours of language semantics, and specs vs implemen
44.
by cben 4y ago
A much smaller in scope but pretty fun introductory game: https://echa.itch.io/pocket-robots-test-chamber
45.
by cben 5y ago
Funny — I've been recently re-leafing through it to find _just_ the Babylonian infodumps. (though I failed at "skip ahead 5–10 pages whenever there is an action scene", because they're too good :-) For me the blurring o
46.
by cben 5y ago
See https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/3164#issueco... for incomplete but large survey of NUL flags. Takeaways: (1) There is no consistency in flag names, even --long ones (2) impressively many t
47.
by cben 5y ago
The point of oil that there are really basic things like safe quoting that shells should do well, yet none of the posix shell do! Functional: there are interesting shells like Elvish. But it really goes PowerShell by adding internal rich d
48.
by cben 5y ago
On a type to be named _separately_. To-be-named-at-runtime is simply dynamic typing. It's polymorphism without static typing. Generics based on type erasure, e.g. Java, wrap that with a type system hoping* to prove safety at compile
49.
by cben 6y ago
A) monitors do report physical size to the OS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identificatio... > 21 Horizontal screen size, in centimetres (range 1–255). If vertical screen size is 0, landscape aspe
50.
by cben 6y ago
It makes a big difference when a language spec (such as Scheme) requires it. If only some implementations have it, and you can't assume it when coding, then it's "just an optimization". https://en.wikipedia
51.
by cben 6y ago
Yes and no. Learning UNIX is a bit like learning LISP - the parentheses don't look "exteremely pleasant" but having (1) a shared serialization format (2) common programmatic interface (3) a culture of REPLs makes everything
52.
by cben 6y ago
https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/ explains in detail _how_ it's so fast, and is a great reading on practical performance engineering. The interface is nearly 1:1 with `ag` (and the older `ack`). One notable dif
53.
by cben 6y ago
I agree with everything you say, except I have a lower bar of "meaningful". > one possibility is simply that “dynamic type checking” is meaningless. If I take your quotation out of context, this was the assumption of some peopl
54.
by cben 6y ago
When we were forced to start use Jira a year ago it was kinda maybe acceptable, but every week someone in the organization adds a new custom field to issues, so it's growing scarier than bugzilla...
55.
by cben 6y ago
Behind the scenes, stashes _are_ branches! It's just UI on top of them, optimized for specific use case. You don't have to use it if you don't like it. Now staging (aka index) is special behind the scenes, making the model
56.
by cben 6y ago
We at $CONTENT_FARM fell in love with this envsubst-as-a-service paradigm, and built our own with A/B testing. We then discovered we can apply it not only to our content but also to our bash codebase! Now looking for funding to add ev
57.
by cben 7y ago
the "black" frixion pen we use on elfinbook is a bit grey, not full black, but no problem seeing at all - like a regular pencil. a blue one actually looks even better, seems to have thinner strokes. We only did 1 clearing cycle s
58.
by cben 7y ago
TeXmacs is also completely distinct from TeX! It does use TeX-inspired layout algorithms, with modifications to make them better fit real-time typesetting as you type. It's also striving to be an environment for interaction with other
59.
by cben 7y ago
Well, with `gzip --rsyncable` and similar (most compression tools have such a mode), it's technically possible to compress first then dedup! To be precise it's "chunk first, then compress", which still admits a 2nd &quot
60.
by cben 7y ago
Mermaid recently added this, still "experimental": https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/README?id=git-graph-e... But I want more control — name the commits "A", "M" instead of rando

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