HN user

tomstuart

2,942 karma

Computer scientist, technical leader, Ruby & JS hacker, http://computationbook.com/ author, &c. https://tomstu.art/, hi@tomstu.art

Posts30
Comments312
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github.com 1y ago

Switch Ruby's default parser from parse.y to Prism

tomstuart
5pts3
github.com 1y ago

Switch Ruby's default parser from parse.y to Prism

tomstuart
3pts0
www.raspberrypi.com 3y ago

Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 released

tomstuart
141pts131
www.ruby-lang.org 3y ago

Ruby 3.2.0 preview 3 released

tomstuart
5pts1
blog.rubygems.org 4y ago

Making popular Ruby packages more secure

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189pts45
github.blog 4y ago

Improved verification of historic Git commit signatures

tomstuart
1pts0
tomstu.art 4y ago

Programming with Something

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62pts6
reactjs.org 6y ago

React v16.9.0 and the Roadmap Update

tomstuart
4pts0
ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com 9y ago

What isn’t an incredible journey?

tomstuart
1pts0
whyarecomputers.com 12y ago

Why Are Computers 1: A Fairly Deep Yak Shave

tomstuart
1pts0
codon.com 13y ago

Impossible Programs: uncomputability explained with Ruby

tomstuart
4pts0
computationbook.com 13y ago

Understanding Computation: computation theory explained with Ruby

tomstuart
18pts0
codon.com 13y ago

Building a Design Museum exhibit with Ruby, Rack and Faye

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3pts0
www.yosefk.com 13y ago

Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

tomstuart
355pts278
finalbullet.com 14y ago

Making Things Fast: make it, ship it, forget it

tomstuart
2pts0
www.psychologytoday.com 14y ago

The Cyclops Child

tomstuart
2pts0
ajax3d.sourceforge.net 14y ago

HTML5 Zarch (by Eben Upton of Raspberry Pi)

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5pts0
youtu.be 14y ago

Stop using Rails development mode [video]

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1pts0
finalbullet.com 14y ago

Why children learn to code: the challenge of living askance to instruction

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1pts0
www.songkick.com 14y ago

How Songkick (YC S07) uses OAuth for just about everything

tomstuart
3pts0
501manifesto.org 14y ago

The 501 Developer Manifesto

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224pts116
gofreerange.com 14y ago

Printer: an open source kit for exploring internet-of-things printing

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34pts10
github.com 14y ago

Active Resource removed from Rails

tomstuart
1pts0
experthuman.com 14y ago

Programming With Nothing: FizzBuzz in the lambda calculus in Ruby

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333pts52
blog.rubymanor.org 14y ago

Ru3y Manor tickets now available (one-day, zero-bullshit London Ruby conf)

tomstuart
2pts0
infovore.org 15y ago

Tower Bridge bot killed by Twitter, replaced with marketing

tomstuart
235pts45
blog.alpha.gov.uk 15y ago

A brief overview of technology behind Alpha.gov.uk

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23pts1
hackerspaper.com 15y ago

Issue 1 of Hackers is here

tomstuart
36pts18
www.douglasadams.com 16y ago

What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?

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25pts7
skillsmatter.com 16y ago

Thinking Functionally in Ruby [video]

tomstuart
4pts1

The game’s difficult to understand so it’s too punitive to not offer even a single practice/example puzzle to use for learning. One puzzle a day is nice once you’ve got the hang of it, but it’s discouraging to “waste” today’s puzzle on learning the rules and not be able to try for real until tomorrow.

Jujutsu for everyone 11 months ago

Do you want another person (or yourself in the future) to be able to read your commits, in order, to get a clear account of what changed & why? If so, you should fix up those commits to address mistakes. If not, it doesn’t matter.

Hotwire Native 2 years ago

The branding is incredibly confusing, but: Hotwire (https://hotwired.dev/) is a set of ideas about how to build dynamic web UI (“HTML over the wire”), and the Turbo, Stimulus and Native frameworks are complementary implementations of those ideas in JavaScript and native mobile code. You can use all, some or none of them to build a Hotwire-style app.

The three frameworks originated in Rails apps, so they have good Rails integrations, but there’s nothing Rails-specific about them and you can use them in any environment where HTML is sent from server to client, even a static web site.

I did read your comment but I don’t really understand what you mean by “the memory system”. A linear bounded automaton is by definition a finite state machine for a given input (i.e. fixed tape size) because the number of possible configurations is finite. A Turing machine’s infinite tape is what stops it being a finite state machine.

Real-world computers are equivalent to linear bounded automata, not true Turing machines, because they have finite memory. This technicality is mostly ignored because a computer with a large finite memory is a decent enough approximation to a Turing machine for practical purposes. But, for example, the halting problem is decidable for linear bounded automata — because there are only finitely many states, every computation must either halt or eventually revisit an earlier state and get stuck in a loop — so in theory it’s an important distinction.

I wouldn’t defend the idea that it’s “clear”, but the idea is to build a machine that combines the axioms of ZF set theory in all possible ways to generate all possible conclusions, checking each one for contradiction as it goes. If it never generates a contradictory conclusion from those axioms, it’ll run forever.

What is going on with this comment? It was clearly made a couple of days ago, and Simon’s reply was also posted a couple of days ago, and yet they’re both appearing on an article posted in the last day, and (on that post) showing as being a few hours old. Am I on glue?

The peculiar viewpoint you’re demonstrating in this comment is similar to Reddit’s. It’s not objectively wrong, but the calculus involved definitely looks weird from the outside.

How would you quantify the value of Hacker News to Y Combinator? You’re talking about it like it’s a cost centre, a charitable contribution to society; what proportion of Y Combinator’s revenue can be attributed to the brand and content marketing benefits which flow from the (almost) entirely unpaid contributions of HN users? The Firebase API now costs “quite a bit”; is that amount comparable to the income of a YC partner? How much should a third-party developer be compensated for the work of building a native client which brings HN to a wider audience or increases the engagement of its existing audience? How much should an HN user be compensated for their submissions and comments? Which people deserve to make money here and why? Who is “indirectly funding” whom?

I don’t think you’re misunderstanding anything, but to clarify, I’m talking about a more general notion of subtyping (e.g. structural, “duck typing” etc), not necessarily inheritance. Instances of A and B can (in Smalltalk parlance) respond to the same set of messages, and therefore be substitutable for each other, without having any inheritance relationship. In that case there’s no coupling of implementation, only the flexibility of being able to swap out an A instance for a B instance without its collaborators being any the wiser.