trealira

44 ms·

691.
by trealira 3y ago
This isn't about Terry Tao specifically, but proof assistants can help you manage a proof when it's gotten too big or complex to manage in your head without making mistakes. There was this project to use Lean to prove a theorem of
692.
by trealira 3y ago
You aren't mistaken. I used to use Spotify for that purpose as well. I had an account with Spotify premium, which allowed you to download playlists to listen to offline. On my computer, I would select a local song to add to a playlist,
693.
by trealira 3y ago
Yeah. Although I'm not trying to discount what others experience, I'm always confused to hear that Firefox is slow, because it seems just as fast as Chromium on my computer.
694.
by trealira 3y ago
I don't know if that's still true. I have no data, but just anecdotally, I'm pretty sure almost everyone knows what a web browser is and what an ad-blocker extension does nowadays.
695.
by trealira 3y ago
There is a lot of stuff related to literature, history, and art that could be posted on HN if being "intellectually gratifying" is the only criterion for being "on-topic." Yet all that's posted here is tech stuff an
696.
by trealira 3y ago
Cases when you might prefer a garbage collected programming language rather than Rust: - When garbage collection is the optimal or near optimal memory allocation pattern for your program. - When you care less about minimizing memory usage t
697.
by trealira 3y ago
That makes sense. I've heard that sentiment about "teaching languages". I wonder how Pascal ever became so popular given that it was regarded as a teaching language. It was clearly a contender in industry for a while; for exa
698.
by trealira 3y ago
> For the reason that it was the only reasonably available language for a while Weren't there other popular, cross-platform programming languages in the 1990s and late 1980s? Like Pascal, and Basic? Those both seem like simpler lang
699.
by trealira 3y ago
Why do you say the Java applications at banks and financial institutions so bad? I'm not trying to contradict you or say you're wrong; I just want to know why. Not having ever seen this kind of software, I would assume that the ex
700.
by trealira 3y ago
In a way, it seems to have similar problems to those of unstructured programming (i.e. rampant use of goto instead of procedures and loops), just to a lesser degree (since jumps that always return are still easier to understand than ones th
701.
by trealira 3y ago
I don't understand why Google counteracts indirectly. Why can't they just ban adblockers from the Chrome Web Store? If that's not possible, why not just remove specific adblockers one by one? Removing the big ones would proba
702.
by trealira 3y ago
> I want to have variables that only exist within an `if` block. That is something C99 got right. C89 allowed you to declare variables at the top of any block, not just functions, so you could declare variables that only exist within in
703.
by trealira 3y ago
I can't imagine it will ever become mainstream to store source code using anything but plain text unless we stop using Git and representing files and directories in the classical Unix fashion. The alternative to plain text is programmi
704.
by trealira 3y ago
> The problem I've seen with this idea is that in order for it to work, you have to be willing to add more metadata to your program, because programs themselves don't have the necessary data in them. You can make it mandatory t
705.
by trealira 3y ago
> I don't think "class mobility" is a thing that we have to have. I don't think its a problem that needs fixing. Really? If there were zero class mobility, that would mean that no matter how hard someone works, no mat
706.
by trealira 3y ago
I knew about the Pascal "with", but I didn't know JavaScript had the same construct. That kind of "with" is a lot less intuitive to me. I was responding with Python's "with" because it sounded like th
707.
by trealira 3y ago
> A knife manufacturer ships sharp blades despite the possibility that a chef might cut themselves with it. This is usually said about necessary but dangerous or easily abusable features, like the use of raw pointers, C++ templates, or g
708.
by trealira 3y ago
Those are fair critiques. Thanks for the response.
709.
by trealira 3y ago
Hideous? Why? Are the "do ... end" blocks really that bad? It's surprising for me to hear this, because IMO, Ruby is among the most aesthetically pleasing programming languages.
710.
by trealira 3y ago
I genuinely didn't realize Pascal was recognized as providing having a strong type system. I guess there is Brian Kernighan's "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language," where he complains that there's &qu
711.
by trealira 3y ago
I think it also makes sense in Python, where it can be used to automatically close a file, or with open(filename) as my_file: data = my_file.read() Or with acquiring and releasing a lock: lock = threading.Lock() with lock
712.
by trealira 3y ago
They're not hideous. Overshoots sage there because at normal reading sizes sizes, or on poster sizes read from far away, if letters like o, n, O, A, etc. don't have overshoots, then they'll look too small compared to the othe
713.
by trealira 3y ago
I doubt that by modern standards, Pascal seems to work if it compiles, compared to languages like Java or Go. They were comparing it to writing spaghetti code with GOTOs everywhere in BASICA, so no wonder their code seemed more reliable. No
714.
by trealira 3y ago
Aren't there other ways to solve this that are easy to refactor? For example, writing a standalone function for just the common parts of the horse and donkey neigh implementations, and if suddenly some things stop being common to both,
715.
by trealira 3y ago
If I had the skill, I would want to create my own C compiler that tried not to optimize things like this, e.g. don't optimize away infinite loops, don't optimize away signed overflow checks or do incorrect algebraic simplification
716.
by trealira 3y ago
Well, as one particular American, who has spoken to many, many other Americans in their life, I can only tell you what I think. Something I find interesting is that Americans say the a in the word taco (a word borrowed from Spanish) with th
717.
by trealira 3y ago
Or it means I simply made a a mistake. > mix up without notice aren't interchangeable. Sometimes I have accidentally written "chick" when I wrote "chic" due to autocorrect, just not during this conversation. Rega
718.
by trealira 3y ago
In many societies, the rights of women have declined from one period to the next, although I guess "women" don't constitute a "large, militarily powerful" group. For example, in Korea during the Joseon/Chosŏn p
719.
by trealira 3y ago
Here's an example of a decline in living that persisted in the long-term, although it was a long time ago: Britain experienced an economic collapse in the early 5th century AD after the Roman Empire left. Economic activity and urban li
720.
by trealira 3y ago
You're implying I subconsciously view them the same and pronounce them the same. But I don't. Maybe your dialect of English is different than mine, but I am not you. And it was there for a while because I use Hacker News on my pho

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