jz391

4 ms·

1.
by jz391 14d ago
And, of course, with the Speccy you had the Microdrive - an affordable middle ground between tape recorder and a disk drive. I still remember the excitement of not having to record/rewind/play (to verify). Good old times...
2.
by jz391 29d ago
That is sad to hear. I had the pleasure of meeting him once, working with Perihelion as a student. Perihelion were a smart bunch and Helios (quasi UNIX distributed OS for Transputers) was incredibly usable and powerful for its time and har
3.
by jz391 2mo ago
Would an extension to `madvise` to say: "page this region in/out as a whole" help here? Engine could define memory ranges representing each expert and leave paging to the OS (tho' "paging" at this point become
4.
by jz391 2mo ago
One point mentioned in the first link you included is support of $ORIGIN in #! scripts - that would need kernel support.
5.
by jz391 4mo ago
I think many of us miss that feeling... For me, the level of complexity of the computers in my childhood (TRS-80, Spectrum) made them interesting but still possible to fully understand. I think we have lost that - modern hardware and softwa
6.
by jz391 4mo ago
I do understand it takes effort to stop and re-accelerate, but isn't making effort (exercise) part of the purpose of cycling in the first place? My main objection is to cyclist failing to stop at pedestrian crossing lights: as a pedes
7.
by jz391 4mo ago
Definitely agree with the sentiment (also a Speccy 48K guy), but at the risk of being pedantic, I think you're double-counting: "million times faster" is for one Spectrum, the "0.000625% price" is for a million...
8.
by jz391 4mo ago
Braces are substitution, so b{a/x} means: expression b with variable x inside it replaced by expression a. So their beta-reduction line just says that if k = ... (λx.b) a ... it can be reduced to k = ... c ... wher
9.
by jz391 4mo ago
> I wouldn't call it "exceptionally nice" I guess depends on your reference point :-) I recall in the beginning, python offering an easier/more readable alternative to Perl, which itself was a step up from awk/s
10.
by jz391 5mo ago
Reminds me of a commercial project I did for my old University department around 1994. The GUI was ambitious and written in Motif, which was a little buggy and leaked memory. So... I ended up catching any SEGVs, saving state, and restarting
11.
by jz391 6mo ago
The key issue is that Lisp's minimal uniform syntax has less variation to help with visual pattern matching, which we humans are good at (compared to richer syntax). The meta-programming power of Lisp may be largely due to being homoic
12.
JP Jonathan Blow on LSP [video](youtube.com)
2 points by jz391 7mo ago|0 comments
13.
by jz391 7mo ago
To extend your analogy: if the house is a listed building (UK concept; apparently US equivalent is listed in National Register of Historic Places), by law you cannot just tear it down. You need to do much more work to renovate what can be d
14.
by jz391 7mo ago
And, of course, the next level of procrastination is to develop your own programming language, which you will use to write the engine to use in creating the game :-) Definitely hats off to Jon for pulling it off - he had a lot of focus and
15.
Our Kona EBM a 96% vs. 2% Sudoku Benchmark(logicalintelligence.com)
2 points by jz391 7mo ago|0 comments
16.
by jz391 8mo ago
True for many, but I actually have been acquiring some computing books I had enjoyed reading in my youth (e.g. Organick's Multics). Perhaps living permanently abroad strengthens nostalgia...
17.
by jz391 9mo ago
Interesting. The voice used for the pronunciation sound seems to be using the wrong language though (FYI using Firefox).
18.
by jz391 10mo ago
Absolutely. As an Electrical Engineer turned software guy, Ohm's/Kirchhoff's laws remain as valid and significant as when I was taught them 35 years ago. For software however, growth of hardware architectures/constraints
19.
by jz391 10mo ago
Indeed. Coming from UNIX tools (sed/awk/sh/grep/tr etc), perl had a lot of appeal and almost intuitive syntax - alternatives in the '80s being C, awk, or if you were unlucky, FORTRAN IV without string type :-). Th
20.
SiPearl unveils Europe's first dual-use sovereign processor with 80 cores(tomshardware.com)
7 points by jz391 1y ago|0 comments
21.
by jz391 2y ago
Does anyone have experience using any of these for scientific paper PDFs, in particular containing equations (I'm guessing graphs are still well beyond their reach)? The workflow for these seems to involve converting PDF->text...
22.
by jz391 2y ago
Could be worse of course: Multics (the first system with hierarchical names) used greater-than (>) as separator. Unix/DOS use of slashes gives us the sane pipeline/redirection syntax we all love (see [1] for the Multics redirec
23.
by jz391 2y ago
I understand what you mean (although I "grew up" on UNIX, don't find this a problem); however, it would be better if the long (i.e. readable) options were prefixed by double dash to follow usual UNIX convention. Using single
24.
by jz391 3y ago
Excellent Sci-Fi yarn, with nostalgic references. I particularly liked the VAX-11 and LISP reference ("ideograms in a formal language full of parentheses")
25.
by jz391 3y ago
Not my area, but isn't a lot of NVIDIA's edge over AMD precisely software? NVIDIA seem to employ a lot of software dev (for a hardware company) & made CUDA into the de facto standard for much ML work. Do you know if AMD are
26.
by jz391 3y ago
I've used Slickgrid (open source, https://slickgrid.net/ ) with some success.
27.
by jz391 3y ago
Does anyone know if Cahit's Spiral Chains proof (< https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0408247 >) was found to have issues? It is much more elegant, as it avoids the exhaustive computer case verification...
28.
by jz391 3y ago
I believe the parent was referring to line from the article which said "...square that gets partitioned into rectangles of equal area" - i.e. area of yellow, green, pink and orange is the same, so the area of the big rectangle con
29.
by jz391 4y ago
So another Banks' novel - "Look to Windward" - title came from this poem
30.
by jz391 4y ago
Slightly odd that they explicitly say: these should include the lang attribute to identify the language but then don't do that in the Example (with *vini, vidi, vici*)...

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