fouronnes3

6 ms·

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by fouronnes3 21d ago
What's stronger than Haskell?
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by fouronnes3 4mo ago
I recently came across the existence of Penrose string diagram after curiously and naively researching the existence of index free notation for linear algebra. This seems to be a very interesting paper in the very same category of things I&
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by fouronnes3 4mo ago
Is a paper that publishes a 0.01% improvement of something at the cost of 5 times more power really an improvement? I believe that every single computer science measurement metric should have Joules or Watts in the denominator. If you are t
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by fouronnes3 4mo ago
I work on differentiable geometric optics with PyTorch. Seeing a list like this is really illustrative of the power that PyTorch provides when you start considering it like a general purpose GPU-enabled state of the art numerical optimizati
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by fouronnes3 5mo ago
That's a very cool idea :) It was proposed as far back as 1968 (!) in a paper by none other than the legend of floating point himself: Wiliam Kahan https://interval.louisiana.edu/historical-preprints/1968-Kah...
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by fouronnes3 5mo ago
You should use two tolerances: absolute and relative. See for example numpy.allclose() https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.allcl...
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by fouronnes3 5mo ago
Thanks! Arbitrary precision arithmetic is definitely something I'd like to learn more about, yeah. Haven't had time to study it so much yet unfortunately.
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by fouronnes3 5mo ago
Interesting! I'm not familiar with IEEE 1788. The TypeScript library (not-so-float) that I wrote which powers the calculator uses the JS Number type which is double precision IEEE 754. Outward rounding is not supported by JS so I used
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by fouronnes3 5mo ago
I don't handle it, ahah. You are right that if you take any classical numerical computing algorithm and replace the floating point reals by interval unions, most of the time the number of intervals in the unions in each of your variabl
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by fouronnes3 5mo ago
Yeah it's super interesting. Like you said, I learned that the IEEE 754 spec actually requires that complete implementations of floating point numbers expose a way to programmatically choose the rounding mode. As far as I know only C a
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by fouronnes3 5mo ago
It's possible to support that but it makes the code very very much more complicated. I've decided early on to not support it. Would be a cool addition though!
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by fouronnes3 5mo ago
I wonder if we could design a programming language specifically for teaching CS, and have a way to hard-exclude it from all LLM output. Kinda like anti virus software has special strings that are not viruses but trigger detections for testi
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by fouronnes3 5mo ago
I've had a lot of enjoyment flipping the agentic workflow around: code manually and ask the agent for code review. Keeps my coding skills and knowledge of the codebase sharp, and catches bugs before I commit them!
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by fouronnes3 5mo ago
Author here. Outward rounding to combat precision issues is what interval arithmetic is most known for (try 0.1+0.2 with "full precision mode" enabled), but that's really a shame in my opinion. Outward rounding is cool, but t
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Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals(victorpoughon.github.io)
314 points by fouronnes3 5mo ago|54 comments
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by fouronnes3 5mo ago
This is awesome! I myself did a 12 weeks batch at RC (W1'24) and had an absolute blast. Happy coding! Stay curious.
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by fouronnes3 6mo ago
Working with tensor datatypes in numerical computing, I've been wondering if it would be possible to somehow add an extra dimension to tensors that would serve as the "floating point precision" dimension, instead of a data ty
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by fouronnes3 6mo ago
This is very interesting! I made an interval arithmetic calculator a few months ago [0]. I wonder if you could combine the two techs to make something even more powerful. [0] https://victorpoughon.github.io/interval-calculat
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by fouronnes3 6mo ago
> not generally feasible or computable You'd be surprised. It really depends on how you define the problem and what your goal is. My goal with bidicalc what to find ONE solution. This makes the problem somewhat possible since when t
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by fouronnes3 6mo ago
Very cool article! I also implemented a spreadsheet last year [0] in pure TypeScript, with the fun twist that formulas also update backwards. While the backwards root finding algorithm was challenging, I also found it incredibly humbling to
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by fouronnes3 6mo ago
I feel you. I don't think I've ever finished reading a sentence that started with "I asked <LLM> and he said..."
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by fouronnes3 6mo ago
Mindshare death is a very large overstatement given the massive amount of legacy C++ out there that will be maintained by poor souls for year to come. But you are right, there used to be a great language hiding within C++ if the committee e
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by fouronnes3 8mo ago
Only on HN do we explain social interactions using network protocol analogies, and not the other way around!
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by fouronnes3 8mo ago
I'm not even sure if this is a sarcastic dropbox-style comment at this point.
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by fouronnes3 8mo ago
I do all my programming by only making self sustaining full scale universe simulations that contain a copy of myself, so that by the strong anthropic principle the code has already been written.
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by fouronnes3 8mo ago
It is quite powerful that when you see a common keyword in the wrong color you can immediately deduce a syntax error.
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by fouronnes3 8mo ago
Congrats on the launch! This is a very exciting project because the only decent autodiff implementation in typescript was tensorflowjs, which has been completely abandonned by Google. Everyone uses onnx runtime web for inference but actuall
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by fouronnes3 9mo ago
A life hack I'm trying for 2026 is to stop setting an alarm clock in the morning, and set a bed time alarm instead. Yes, even when I have an important meeting in the morning. This does two things: - provide a strong incentive to go to
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by fouronnes3 9mo ago
The most fascinating thing about AI is how in a thread like this one, answers range between 0% and infinity.
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by fouronnes3 9mo ago
Thanks! Yes I loved the ratio of apparent simplicity to underlying complexity of this project. I have filled around 120 pages of draft and notes just for the math of the solver :)

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