svat

82 ms·

751.
by svat 6y ago
I wrote a program in Shakespeare once: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/123378/golf-my-... It was a lot of fun, and I recommend the experience. You get to figure out control flow (if you've never
752.
by svat 6y ago
This is trolling, but as most of the HN comments here mention the dragon book and a careless reader may get the same impression, let me reply seriously anyway, and point out that the Turing award is not for that: https://awards.a
753.
by svat 6y ago
Just a note about the name of the algorithm: Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming indeed uses letters for algorithms, but the intended convention is that, for example, this algorithm be called "Algorithm 4.3.1D" (that&#x
754.
by svat 6y ago
> Good thing you didn't bother, because it's absolutely not worth it. The biggest thing LuaTeX gives you is variou hooks and access to various data structures used internally by the typesetting engine, so that you can work with
755.
by svat 6y ago
I should have been clear: I don't think people's behaviour is remarkable here (I've done the same, with LaTeX years ago, and with many other tools); what I found remarkable is the history / state of affairs, where a fini
756.
by svat 6y ago
But you can enforce it in many ways; for example you can set `\emergencystretch=\maxdimen` (or any reasonably large value) and you'll never have overfull boxes (what you called margin overruns), unless of course you have a single unb
757.
by svat 6y ago
Ah, clicking the footnote numbers worked for footnotes 1 to 4, but not for 5 and 6. BTW, for the question “Where do the constant values 0, 6, 10, and 1 come from?”, though it's implicit in the post, it is useful to note explicitly that
758.
by svat 6y ago
This is a nice post; thanks for writing it! (A minor thing: the margin notes completely disappear on mobile, i.e. at width of 760px or less.) You probably know this already, but I'd think of this the following way. There are two main m
759.
by svat 6y ago
There is a question on Stack Exchange about exactly this: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/188133/bentleys... I haven't looked into it yet (whether the benchmarks are comparable) but it would be i
760.
by svat 6y ago
(Disclaimer: I have no interest in this matter; my interest here is only in the structure of the argument.) If you follow the link to the 2018 "startling claim" ( https://archive.is/QAa5x ), what's presented th
761.
by svat 6y ago
This is also how the TeX program works. Of course it has lots of variables (hundreds of "global" variables in fact), but for everything whose size may vary (boxes, lists of characters, lists of tokens for macros, …), it has two gi
762.
by svat 6y ago
> I might have learned about this via Knuth; I think there is a mention of it in some passage in TAOCP. Indeed, see Volume 1, section 2.4 (Multilinked Structures). Page 426 has the example of the statement “MOVE CORRESPONDING DATE OF SAL
763.
by svat 6y ago
Last year I wrote a couple of similar "local" PDF tools that run in the browser with no network requests. Each is just a single HTML file that will work offline: - https://shreevatsa.net/pdf-pages/ is for ext
764.
by svat 6y ago
One of the problems with literate programming is that everyone who wants to write literate programs seems to want to write their own literate programming system. This was the conclusion of a short-lived (running to 5 issues) column of liter
765.
by svat 6y ago
Are you trying the same Mark Text app ( https://marktext.app/ , https://github.com/marktext/marktext )? Here is a screenshot I just took, trying out things: https://i.imgur.com/bvE0FyM.pn
766.
by svat 6y ago
Direct link to specifically Ullman's lecture, in context of the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmnQoDjsWDA&list=PLOdeqCXq1t... Direct links (if your browser/workflow supports it) to the transcript o
767.
by svat 6y ago
"Mark Text" ( https://marktext.app/ ) seems to be one. (HN thread from Nov 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21462832 — I asked for other editors like this and got no other answers AFAICT.
768.
by svat 6y ago
This is an example of how you can change the meaning completely by dropping the right words. The part that you quoted as “Kuroda [...] didn’t find any correlation” is actually “Kuroda […] saw that previous research […] didn’t find any corre
769.
by svat 6y ago
About the choice of Pascal for TeX in 1980… was it the case that Pascal was the most widely available language at the time (at least at universities and the like where TeX would be used)? Is that why Pascal was chosen as the language for th
770.
by svat 6y ago
To retrace my steps: I searched on google for [ascii tree generator] and, alongside many results about generating output for directory trees / folder structures (like that of tree: http://mama.indstate.edu/users/ic
771.
by svat 6y ago
Whether or not you canonicalize your prefix code is orthogonal to whether you think of it as a tree or not. (And any prefix code can be viewed as a tree.) In fact the very article you linked says: > The advantage of a canonical Huffman
772.
by svat 6y ago
The position taken in that post is an even more severe indictment of "postmodernism" than anything Chomsky (or even anyone in this thread) wrote: it is saying, basically, that postmodernists intentionally adopt a dialect and &quot
773.
by svat 6y ago
Seems to have been Jim Dunlap (James R. Dunlap), who wrote many Fortran compilers. Just posted a comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25955227
774.
by svat 6y ago
Based on a not-very-clever search ( https://www.google.com/search?q=knuth+digitek ) the answer is likely Jim Dunlap (James R. Dunlap), one of the three founders of Digitek, and who was behind their Fortran compiler(s). In 200
775.
by svat 6y ago
Someone (Randall Neff) from the Computer History Museum has scanned a lot of the documents from Knuth's personal collection; search for "Dijkstra" on this page: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources&#x
776.
by svat 6y ago
Also I guess Fabien Sanglard's "Game Engine Black Books" (on Doom and Wolfenstein 3D: https://fabiensanglard.net/gebb/ ), and John Aycock's book "Retrogame Archeology: Exploring Old Computer Gam
777.
by svat 6y ago
To be clear about the "(2014)", although Knuth gave this talk in 2014, this transcript of the talk is from the upcoming (February 2021) issue of Communications of the ACM. The whole sequence of articles/talks is interesting:
778.
by svat 6y ago
Probably doesn't matter much here but I try to always use a permalink when linking to Wikipedia, as a matter of policy. This is because: 1. The permalink is the link to the Wikipedia page as I actually saw it (and can sort of vouch for
779.
by svat 6y ago
Wikipedia article on this OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Incompatible_Time... See also the lesser known west-coast alternative: WAITS (at Stanford): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index
780.
by svat 6y ago
I looked up TAOCP ( The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth), and (unsurprisingly) this trick is mentioned there, and already by the time of the first edition this trick was folklore, with its origins lost to antiquity: the last exercise

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