Why not use javascript, JSX and TypScript to produce PDF? You use the language you know already.
Why would you want to implement an entire typesetting engine yourself?
Readit Newsbarrucadu commented on I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst fransskarman.com/phd_thes... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
No. Dogs also taste good but they are way less convenient to raise per kilogram of meat then cows. That's one of the main reasons we rather eat cows, pigs and poultry than dogs, dolphins, squirrels or guinea pigs.
People do a lot of expensive and wasteful things just because they are convenient in many domains of life.
Meat isn't tasty. If it was you wouldn't always eat it fried almost to a char with salt and spices. Tasty things you can just eat straight up. Meat is easy. It's easier to keep some cows on grassy hill then kill them, than to create and maintain a field there.
Meat is also easy to cook and eat. It digests nicely. It can be used in mono diet with no immediate ill effects. It's a no-brainer food even an idiot can use to sustain themselves. It's hard to poison yourself with it because if it's not fresh it stinks like hell.
> Meat isn't tasty. If it was you wouldn't always eat it fried almost to a char with salt and spices.
Allow me to introduce you to the concept of "steak".
The two sides are never going to understand each other because I suspect we work on entirely different things and have radically different workflows. I suspect that hackernews gets more use out of LLMs in general than the average programmer because they are far more likely to be at a web startup and more likely to actually be bottlenecked on how fast you can physically put more code in the file and ship sooner.
If you work on stuff that is at all niche (as in, stack overflow was probably not going to have the answer you needed even before LLMs became popular), then it's not surprising when LLMs can't help because they've not been trained.
For people that were already going fast and needed or wanted to put out more code more quickly, I'm sure LLMs will speed them up even more.
For those of us working on niche stuff, we weren't going fast in the first place or being judged on how quickly we ship in all likelihood. So LLMs (even if they were trained on our stuff) aren't going to be able to speed us up because the bottleneck has never been about not being able to write enough code fast enough. There are architectural and environmental and testing related bottlenecks that LLMs don't get rid of.
That's a good point, I've personally not got much use out of LLMs (I use them to generate fantasy names for my D&D campaign, but find they fall down for anything complex) - but I've also never got much use out of StackOverflow either.
I don't think I'm working on anything particularly niche, but nor is it cookie-cutter generic either, and that could be enough to drastically reduce their utility.
barrucadu commented on The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor acoup.blog/2024/11/29/col... · Posted by u/Tomte
Fun read. Silly, of course, but still fun.
Surprised it didn't mention Iron Man. That is almost certainly the most popular of sci-fi body armor at the moment.
I, personally, think the biggest conceit with the armor narrative is that it can work as well as it does, period. This is touched in the article about how they manage to keep melee weapons as focus points. Realistically, no armor is protecting you from modern gun fire. And many hits that are survived by the likes of iron man would kill the person inside, regardless of if the armor survived.
In the first paragraph:
> I want to be clear that I am generally limiting my scope here to rigid non-powered armor. Power (or powered) armor – that is, armor that moves with built-in servos and motors, rather than purely under muscle power – is its own topic that we’ll leave for another day.
barrucadu commented on Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands? · Posted by u/MrsPeaches
Do people really think ICANN will make a large number of popular startups/websites/apps unusable overnight based on a technicality? That's not how the world works. .io has a globally recognized registrar and they will continue doing business as they do today.
Whether the registrar keeps doing business is irrelevant if the root nameservers stop serving NS for .io.
barrucadu commented on Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands? · Posted by u/MrsPeaches
By definition, any organization not composed entirely of elected representatives making completely transparent, documented decisions in perpetuity, 100 percent correctly is corrupt.
A sword of damacles hanging over every single discussion on HN is "The internet is still largely unregulated" because that discussion leads to "the internet is regulated by private bodies who got there first."
no one wants to admit that our employers and thus we benefit from this wild west of corruption.
ICANN, IANAL, CABF, Moz Security Council.... all made of of public corporations vying to make money.
Until
I agree that transparent and documented decisions are good evidence for not being corrupt, and I can see how you could argue that they're required (as a non-corrupt organisation that hides the reasoning behind its decisions is largely indistinguishable from a corrupt organisation that coincidentally makes the same decisions), but what do elections have to do with anything?
barrucadu commented on Is English a “creole Language”? languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu... · Posted by u/aebtebeten
> The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is!
The definition of a "word" is always straightforward: a word is an atomic unit of language.
However, which units are or aren't atomic varies according to what it is you're measuring.
Lexically, "catch fire" is an atomic entity, which cannot be understood as the sum of its parts. It's just one part, and it needs its own dictionary entry, separate from "catch" and from "fire".
Syntactically, "catch fire" is definitely not atomic, because the past tense is "caught fire". From this perspective, it's enough to know "catch" and "fire".
Syntactically again, we can see that "an elephant" is in variation with "two elephants" / "my elephant" / "every elephant" / etc., and it's clear that "an elephant" is not atomic, but is understood as the composition of "a(n)" with "elephant".
Phonologically, as the citation-form spelling above hinted, "an elephant" is atomic; the article cannot exist independently and must attach to another word. Without knowing what that word is, you won't know how the article is pronounced.
Specialized terms for both of these types of phenomena exist - lexical words that are too large to be syntactic words are called idioms; syntactic words that are too small to be phonological words are called clitics. But the general lesson is that, despite the definition of "word" being clear, membership in the category varies according to what aspect of the language you're looking at.
By god you've done it, you've solved linguistics!
barrucadu commented on Metformin decelerates aging clock in male monkeys cell.com/cell/abstract/S0... · Posted by u/tortilla
(Genuine Q): Why are people - or even just HN readers - really so interested in living longer?
Both my father and my father-in-law have dementia.
My father's dementia is fairly advanced (he doesn't know who I am and hasn't for a while, there are times where he doesn't know who my mother is) although he's still living at home.
My father-in-law's dementia is less advanced although he's much more frail as he was diagnosed with bladder cancer, had it removed, so has ended up with the whole tubes+bags "solution".
My OH and I were discussing this for the Nth time last week.
Apologies for being blunt, but our current perspective is this: try make your life count, and hope for it to end cleanly. Via Dignitas, if necessary.
There is no way I want to see out my final years in the way that my father or my father-in-law are doing now :(
Obviously the idea is to live longer with good mental and physical health.
There's no point in living longer if your faculties are too degraded to enjoy it, you may as well just be dead.
barrucadu commented on Double-entry bookkeeping as a directed graph matheusportela.com/double... · Posted by u/mportela
I tried using John Wiegley's Ledger, which uses negative numbers. Everything was great about Ledger except for that part - I just couldn't wrap my head around it.
Maybe this is one of those things that's harder to understand if you have an accounting background. As someone without an accounting background, I found it incredibly intuitive: if money moves out of an account, that's a posting with a negative number; if money moves into an account, that's a posting with a positive number; a transaction is a set of postings that together sum to zero, indicating that no money has been created or destroyed out of thin air.
There's no need to learn any confusing "credit" or "debit" jargon, you just need to think about the movement of money (which you had to do already).