westoncb

38 ms·

361.
by westoncb 7y ago
Intrinsic/relational may not be the best way of getting at it after all. It would likely regress into an equally involved question on defining "system". So let me try another approach. We need to distinguish between informati
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by westoncb 7y ago
> there are objective sufficient criteria to identify meaning You have just shifted the problem by now using a very specific, narrow definition of "meaning" rather than doing so with "information". The objective suffi
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by westoncb 7y ago
This is still just talking about a property of information that resembles one aspect of what's meant by "meaning". This is all still purely structural and independent of semantic content. The example given above about alter
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by westoncb 7y ago
What do you mean by 'abstraction' here? By the definitions I'm familiar with, functions would be abstractions of program segments, and variables would be abstractions of program data. With that understanding, the closest you
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by westoncb 7y ago
> I have always associated classes with inheritance. This is a common pattern I've noticed in discussions about OOP. There is a tendency to reduce it to "inheritance," which turns the conversation into a straw man: "h
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by westoncb 7y ago
This is something I come back to repeatedly when attempting to evaluate claims about certain technologies (e.g. programming languages) being extravagantly effective: people's sentiments about how great some technology is often seems ou
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by westoncb 7y ago
The AST is an intermediate format. Is it important to have an intermediate language ? Otherwise why does the AST not qualify? My understanding is that having something like LLVM’s IR, for instance, is part of its decoupling the compiler
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by westoncb 7y ago
As far as I can tell you are saying "just an interpreter" and referring to this as an "ast printer" because the output language is not machine code. I'm not sure why that would be so significant. Don't get me w
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by westoncb 7y ago
If A resembles B, it’s implied that B resembles A—or at least that was the usage I intended. The fact that we took inspiration from ourselves in developing computers only strengthens my original point.
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by westoncb 7y ago
It may be useful to consider either metaphor—humans as robots / humans as monkeys—as just giving some insight into what it means to be human, rather than defining what a human is. When it's pointed out that our minds are computer-
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by westoncb 7y ago
I think what you're describing here may be more about which domains are being modeled by software than it is about approaches to writing the software. You can't have a program that's like a mathematical proof if the concept f
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by westoncb 7y ago
Location: Tucson, AZ Remote: yes Willing to relocate: probably not Technologies: JavaScript, React, Java, Objective-C, real-time rendering / computer graphics: opengl / webgl / three.js. Résumé/CV: https://sym
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by westoncb 7y ago
> I don't think I've seen professional engineers in other fields choose methods which they know will fail under expected stresses simply because it's not considered an important project. There's still a safety factor.
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by westoncb 7y ago
> It's wildly misleading to use the same word for an app written by a few programmers in a couple of months (like the Iowa Caucus app) and the Space Shuttle control software (maintained by hundreds of people, with an average of 1 bu
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by westoncb 7y ago
> people still prefer to defer to libraries to do any non-trivial amount of DOM manipulation rather than actually use pure React to do it. Could you give an example of a commonly-used library that serves this purpose?
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by westoncb 7y ago
Kind of an odd title and book, but I think it may do a good job of what you're looking for: "Principles of Neural Design": https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Design-MIT-Press/dp...
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by westoncb 7y ago
> I can get things done in Lisp with 1/10th the effort it would take in any other language Should that be read as 1/10th the effort it would take you in any other language (because of your long history with lisp), or do you s
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by westoncb 7y ago
Maybe descendants of Paul Graham should be taught C if Carmack's kids are learning Lisp.
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by westoncb 7y ago
Very cool. Definitely curious to see this part: > I plan to add textual information on each step, to show how algorithm is "thinking"
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by westoncb 7y ago
That's a good idea. I should at least try, but tbh I've always just kinda figured they wouldn't take me seriously. Jetbrains seems pretty broadminded though....
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by westoncb 7y ago
Hey Emmanuel. Yep, it's a Java app. Pretty much just Java and OpenGL (via LWJGL—same lib minecraft used). It's built on top of a simple application framework I wrote largely in order to build Lucidity on top of: https:/&#x2F
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by westoncb 7y ago
I do wonder why more work hasn't been done in this area—especially on the run time side. I actually think a big part of it is something like a fixed perspective on what the process of computer programming has to be like that comes from
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by westoncb 7y ago
Hey dandelo, thanks for reaching out. Let's talk in email. I couldn't find your contact info. I have some here: http://symbolflux.com/contact
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by westoncb 7y ago
Thanks Reelin. This is some good food for thought. Some of those "Would it bother you if..." are definitely hard questions. Could you elaborate on: > be careful under what terms you accept contributions from the community
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by westoncb 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback ptrott. > ... - what do you have to lose by open sourcing it? That's pretty much my line of thinking as well. It seems like not much. Thinking about it more, part of what I've wanted to figure out by pos
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by westoncb 7y ago
Hmm, I guess it depends on how letter vs. spirit you'd like to interpret that in. It is still a project I spent years working on that I'd like to share with the community and get feedback on, so that I can potentially make it avai
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by westoncb 7y ago
Thanks, and glad to hear! Yeah... having it connected to IntelliJ was something that seemed always 'around the corner' for years. I think I will forever be annoyed working on projects without having something like this around—so h
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by westoncb 7y ago
There is a github repo for the project, it's just private still. I don't have any real experience with open sourcing projects outside releasing a few small things with MIT licenses (none of which had any real activity from others)
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by westoncb 7y ago
Author here btw. Happy to answer any questions.
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Show HN: Lucidity – an interactive program-state visualizer(symbolflux.com)
184 points by westoncb 7y ago|35 comments

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