catpolice

6 ms·

1.
by catpolice 6y ago
This is a very strange claim. Just off the top of my head, this definition of "mainstream mathematics" would exclude, for instance, Gödel's more famous theorems, a good bit of Grothendieck, some of the Bourbaki collective, an
2.
by catpolice 6y ago
I'm not usually one to poke fun at these things but my friends who study formal logic/model theory/category theory/homotopy type theory/etc. will be excited to learn that they are not in fact doing mathematics.
3.
by catpolice 6y ago
Yeah, I think there are reasons why a lot of big compilers use some recursive descent variant (even a few like gcc used YACC-generated parsers for a long time and switched back to hand-written recursive descent parsers) and error message ge
4.
by catpolice 6y ago
Related: I made https://j-s-n.github.io/WebBS/index.html#splash which is designed to look like an MSDOS era GUI application
5.
by catpolice 6y ago
A mess of my personal life
6.
by catpolice 7y ago
She presumably waited until 101 so as to die in her prime.
7.
by catpolice 7y ago
I like this a lot, not as an alternative to MVC but as a kind of conceptual refactoring of the same ideas behind good MVC implementations that's very easy to explain and doesn't have as much ambiguity. I've posted a version o
8.
by catpolice 7y ago
Last year I decided to write a WASM-targeting compiler in Javascript, completely by hand. The idea was to compile a vaguely C-like toy language to WASM without any external dependencies. Part of the motivation was that while I've writt
9.
by catpolice 7y ago
Fun fact: the creator of RSS, RDF and Schema.org is Ramanathan V. Guha, a former leader at Cycorp (currently at Google).
10.
by catpolice 7y ago
1. There are internal and external factors when it comes to Cycorp's secrecy. The external factors come from the clients they work with, who often demand confidentiality. Some of their most successful projects are extremely closely gua
11.
by catpolice 7y ago
Java _code_. It's madness, though I'm assured it made sense at the time.
12.
by catpolice 7y ago
These answers are very personal to me. I joined Cycorp because Doug Lenat sold me on it being a more viable path toward something like AGI than I had suspected when I read about it. I left for a number of reasons (e.g. just to pursue other
13.
by catpolice 7y ago
Yes, I probably can't talk about them though. There are companies that use Cyc as part of processes for avoiding certain kinds of risks and the financial impact (by the company's estimation, not Cycorp's) is an unfathomably l
14.
by catpolice 7y ago
All the programmers at Cycorp, and most of the ones who've gone on to do other things, have a dream of re-writing the inference engine from scratch. Its just that those dreams don't necessarily align in the details, and the codeba
15.
by catpolice 7y ago
I'm not sure I'm able to answer that in a satisfying way just because my memory is fallible. The degree to which the system is unsure of something (to the degree to which that can be coarsely represented) certainly shows up in the
16.
by catpolice 7y ago
I don't work there anymore, though I know some folks that do. I suspect that they're reading this and don't want me to air out their dirty laundry too much. Here's what I'll say: the degree of isolation between diff
17.
by catpolice 7y ago
If there are current employees reading, they might be able to give a better answer than me. Basically, the project is to build a huge knowledge base of basic facts and "common sense" knowledge and an inference engine that could us
18.
by catpolice 7y ago
Cyc has a few ways of dealing with fallibility. Cyc doesn't do anything Bayesian like assigning specific probabilities to individual beliefs - IIRC they tried something like that and it had the problem where nobody felt very confident
19.
by catpolice 7y ago
Yes, quite a few. The prerequisite is basically that you have to be able to do formal logic at the first order level and also Doug has to be in a good mood when you do the interview.
20.
by catpolice 7y ago
1) The money situation has changed over the years, and they've had times where things have boomed or busted - it's been a while since I left but I think they're still in a "boom" phase. There are a lottt more projec
21.
by catpolice 7y ago
I worked for Cycorp for a few years recently. AMA, I guess? I obviously won't give away any secrets (e.g. business partners, finer grained details of how the inference engine works), but I can talk about the company culture, some high
22.
by catpolice 7y ago
I love articles about writing parsers by hand - it's really fun and teaches you a lot. Last year I decided to write a complete compiler in Javascript, completely by hand. The idea was to compile a vaguely C-like toy language to WASM wi
23.
by catpolice 7y ago
RIP screensavers
24.
by catpolice 7y ago
A while back I wrote a solver that uses no backtracking, just constraint propagation, and it wasn't substantially more complex than this. One of the key insights comes from noticing a feature of groups of numbers in cells. For example,
25.
Show HN: WebAssembly Basic Syntax (an online pedagogical compiler)(j-s-n.github.io)
1 points by catpolice 7y ago|0 comments
26.
Show HN: WebBS (an educational toy language that targets WebAssembly)(j-s-n.github.io)
4 points by catpolice 7y ago|0 comments
27.
by catpolice 7y ago
"For syntax highlighting, any form of OT or CRDT is overkill; the highlighting is a stateless function of the document, so if there's a conflict, you can just toss the highlighting state and start again." I first became inter
28.
by catpolice 7y ago
A few years ago I implemented a vaguely similar image compression algorithm just for kicks. I basically did a separate binary space partition for each color channel of the image, with the splitting points determined by minimizing an error f
29.
by catpolice 7y ago
I think the churn rate is higher with front-end stuff, but I don't think it's really due to any special property of the technology. Honestly, I suspect that the rate of change in a given ecosystem is roughly correlated with the nu
30.
by catpolice 8y ago
A lot of the listed problems are basically verbose repeated patterns, which is pretty much what macros are for.

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