HN user

lfnoise

151 karma
Posts0
Comments47
View on HN
No posts found.

This person is not a sailor. Sailing orthogonal to the wind, a "beam reach", is the fastest point of sail due to the lift of the sail.

Taking ships over vast distances to new worlds, meeting alien cultures, imperial conquests. That was the age of sail. It will never happen again like that.

When COVID hit, my American Airlines flight got canceled and when I went online to ask about getting credit, I got connected to a bot. When I asked to be connected to a real person instead of a bot, the person came online and said: "My name is Eliza. How can I help you today?" At this point, I was very skeptical, but she was indeed a person.

I saw Sun Ra and the Arkestra sometime in 1988 at Liberty Lunch in Austin, Texas. I believe it was just a few days before the "Live at the Pitt Inn" album was recorded in Japan. One of the best concert experiences I've ever had.

I'd like him to make a more firm next step. He sometimes brings up some of the difficulties he has expressing things that would be simple in another language. I point this out. He understands that but still prefers to work in Scratch. One factor may be that he has a social network on Scratch.

My son, 17, learned to program in Scratch, and wrote a lot of games in it. Since then he has learned Python, Lua (in which he wrote a space invaders), and Java in both high school and during the summer at Cornell. He can write in these languages, but the problem is, he thinks in Scratch. He always goes back to write things in Scratch. In Scratch he has written a number of ray tracing and path tracing renderers which can model roughness, specularity, ambient occlusion.. He teaches me stuff about rendering that he reads from papers. Right now he is working on an NES emulator in Scratch that necessarily includes a 6502 emulator. It can load and play Mario games. But I can't get him move his ideas to a textual language.

Try to get an AI to render an upside down face. In my attempts, they can't do it at all. Deformity results. It is outside the training data.

Smalltalk uses periods. One thing I like about C is that I can write .1 or 1. , but most languages these days force me to add the zero: 0.1 or 1.0 .

I find it ironic that you can't reverse a mistake on a site dedicated to a software that is all about reversing mistakes.

The legitimacy of a car title is backed by a government agency. What legal entity backs an NFT? To what authority do you go to enforce your ownership of a JPEG if there is a dispute? Will courts recognize an NFT in a case of disputed ownership?

You parse the s-exprs and execute them in the context of a namespace of data constructors. Then you can have whatever data structures in memory that are defined by the constructors. This is NOT equivalent to having one data structure to cover both as Lua does. It is having one text format that can construct any kind of data structure in memory for which you have constructors defined.

Yes. I never understood why JSON over s-exprs. The absence of maps is not a negative. S-exprs can represent maps. There are no maps in JSON, really anyway. It is just text. How that data is represented in memory is the output of parsing. You could just as well parse (dict (a 1)(b 2)(c 3)) into a hash table if you wanted. You could also have sets (set 1 2 3) or whatever other data structure.

Any programming language that has string operations as regular functions or methods that can be used unqualified, but puts math functions into a "Math" namespace so you have to write "Math.sin", has made a decision to prioritize string processing over math. That decision weighs a lot when I consider whether to use a language, since I do mostly math and very little string processing. Smalltalk had math functions as methods with the number as receiver.