fusiongyro (u/fusiongyro)

fusiongyro commented on SAT/SMT by Example [pdf] yurichev.com/writings/SAT... · Posted by u/dennis714

currymj · 7 years ago

This is a kick ass book.

It’s worth learning the basic use of some constraint solver, since they are now so fast and powerful. Z3 is free software and is very, very good, and you’d be surprised how many problems it can tackle (see: hundreds of examples in this book) that might actually come up in your work or life. In particular, you can attack scheduling problems with Z3 and people will think you are a wizard.

fusiongyro · 7 years ago

Can you elaborate on that? I only saw a couple small scheduling examples in the book.

fusiongyro commented on APL\iv: an APL interpreter and stream processor written in Go github.com/ktye/iv... · Posted by u/chrispsn

threwawasy1228 · 7 years ago

I've personally found GNU APL to be a bit flimsy, and not some of the design choices they made in it to be a bit odd. It also deviates from the ISO standard, if that matters to you.

Dyalog is the only implementation that is robust and production ready that is still actively maintained. I would suggest learning with something other than the GNU implementation.

fusiongyro · 7 years ago

Dyalog also deviates from the ISO standard, adding things from J like hooks and forks. IIRC, GNU APL's deviations are to bring it closer to IBM APL2, but it's been a while since I cared about any of this.

fusiongyro commented on Using the Singular ‘They’: Why It Is Important textly.ai/blog/using-the-... · Posted by u/alexlash

fusiongyro · 7 years ago

For some reason, in my Firefox, the page renders with a massive symbol obscuring the bottom half of the page.

fusiongyro commented on Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like? · Posted by u/alangibson

PaulHoule · 7 years ago

Funny, I thought Stack Overflow was a spam site.

Frequently I have to barge through ten screenfuls of code that don't work before I finally get to a correct answer.

To add insult to injury SO doesn't allow questions about many important topics such as "how do I eliminate the wheat from the chaff for all the libraries I could possibly use to do this?"

It might be 2035 when they finally add parenthesis to all the Python code examples so they work in Python 3.

fusiongyro · 7 years ago

It's fine if you don't agree with my analogy or don't like S.O. but I don't think this contributes much to the discussion of how to make issue trackers.

fusiongyro commented on Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like? · Posted by u/alangibson

alangibson · 7 years ago

That's an interesting take. How would it work in practice? I would think that most teams want direct control what gets surfaced via severity, due date, etc. Or at least that's what they're used to...

fusiongyro · 7 years ago

I don't know exactly how it would work. But if I wanted to figure it out, I would start by taking a fairly large project's ticket tracker and sort through every reply on every ticket and try to categorize them into buckets.

For instance, I'd expect you to find "me too" comments, and those should be eliminated, just as "me too" "answers" on S.O. are eliminated.

I'd expect you to find status-update queries and replies. So that suggests you need a mechanism for pinging for an update that doesn't require a bunch of text from user and developer, or else some mechanism by which the freshness of a ticket becomes irrelevant.add new answers to old questions.)

I'd expect you to find people posting workarounds, which would suggest that you want workarounds to be a different "type" than regular commentary, and you probably want them called out separately somehow. It sucks to have to read through three pages of identical me-too complaints to find a workaround and then read through another two pages of people thanking the workaround author for the workaround, as frequently happens on the Ubuntu tracker.

I'm not sure if these are helpful examples or not, but I think when you see a pile of messages that you have to read through to extract content, you are looking at an opportunity to work out the hidden semantics of the thing, and turn those hidden semantics into first-class entities and actions, to make a more structured environment that will save people time.

I have seen too many JIRA deployments where the only plan was, make the state machine larger and require more separate fields from everybody. But those fields and states really just represent the hope that you might not have to read that pile of comments. In practice, most of those fields wind up empty, most of those states wind up skipped over, and you still have to read the whole ticket. Why? Because a JIRA ticket is still fundamentally a chronologically-sorted forum thread.

fusiongyro commented on Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like? · Posted by u/alangibson

fusiongyro · 7 years ago

The main problem with issue trackers is similar to the problem of programming forums before Stack Overflow. Issue trackers become a chronological pile-up of crap. Stack Overflow is an incredible leap from earlier programming forums because it isolated what was valuable (questions, answers) and moved the chaff out of the way (comments, revising the question).

JIRA is basically the most sophisticated programming forum, for issue tracking. What we need is the Stack Overflow of issue tracking, that figures out what the real entities and actions are and eliminates the chronological pile-up.

fusiongyro commented on The LaTeX fetish (2016) danielallington.net/2016/... · Posted by u/edu

dpwm · 7 years ago

> I would actually say it is easier than LaTeX, in the sense that it is more discoverable.

Agreed. I think what I was trying to say is that LaTeX will have more answers on Stack Overflow. However, once you've found the command (and you can get an awful long way with the ten listed at the beginning of the reference manual) then the options are well documented.

> What is different about ConTeXt is the prevailing attitude towards using plain TeX from it. LaTeX really seems to consider plain TeX quite unsafe.

This is very interesting. I've found the same difference but in the opposite way. I've had to resort to using plain TeX in LaTeX quite a bit, usually buried in an environment or a command, to achieve what I want. And yes, it can be fragile, but sometimes it is the only way without using KOMA-Script.

I've found that ConTeXt has usually already considered what I want to do as a use case, because its scope is quite a bit more broad than LaTeX.

fusiongyro · 7 years ago

Most of my questions on tex.SE are about ConTeXt, simply because all paths in ConTeXt are less explored than LaTeX. The frontier is nearer. But I have never failed to get a useful and informative solution from one of the handful of experts.

I wish I had sources for my other comments handy. If I have time I will try to dig some up.

fusiongyro commented on The LaTeX fetish (2016) danielallington.net/2016/... · Posted by u/edu

exergy · 7 years ago

Not to bellitle your achievements (honestly!), but I do not think your last paragraph can be a commonly encountered scenario.

Either way, I'll back out a bit and ask a more elementary question. Is a workflow possible wherein one writes in anything-but-latex (Word/Markdown etc) and then uses latex to typeset? Because I (and the author) agree with you that a) standardisation is a good thing and b) latex is excellent at typesetting.

What latex is weak at is me writing my paper in it, and then trying to read back whether what I wrote flows well.

fusiongyro · 7 years ago

There is not, to my knowledge, a really commonly-used workflow that starts at Word and ends at typesetting. This is something Pandoc purports to do, but I would expect to lose most of your manual formatting tweaks from Word in the process.

Pandoc is a good tool for automating workflows that start with some other format and end with LaTeX.

Another good option if you like Emacs is org-mode, which has a LaTeX export, among other things.

fusiongyro commented on The LaTeX fetish (2016) danielallington.net/2016/... · Posted by u/edu

dpwm · 7 years ago

> There were also some development effort to “easy” LaTeX typesettings (for instance ConTeXt) but they not became widespread as “WYSIWYM” editors such LyX or TeXMacs, IMVHO because they are in fact less flexible than plain LaTeX and plain LaTeX is easier enough, at least it’s give you a easy and simple “learning path”.

ConTeXt is a substantially different beast to LaTeX. It's not LaTeX, although there are some LaTeX-inspired packages and tools to help migrate. A lot of ConTeXt is now written in Lua, and the versions in TeXlive are now sufficiently up-to-date to work from the manuals.

ConTeXt takes the view that it will start with sensible defaults and allow nearly all to be customized. Modules tend to play nicely together in an orthogonal way, but a lot of documents can be written without importing any modules.

The one thing I wouldn't say about ConTeXt is it's easier – you probably won't find the answers on stackoverflow like for LaTeX. It's a much more complicated system and you need the reference manual. But if you know how you want the page laid out and don't want to have to hack away at a style file, then it's a very powerful tool for serious typesetting.

fusiongyro · 7 years ago

I have used ConTeXt a fair amount and I like it quite a bit. I would actually say it is easier than LaTeX, in the sense that it is more discoverable. After you use it for a bit, you see that the macros are all built on each other in predictable ways, so they all tend to take the same options and achieve similar effects. In LaTeX, the answer to your questions is usually "there's a package for that," whereas in ConTeXt, the answer is often "this macro takes the same options as this other macro, so just pass them in."

What is different about ConTeXt is the prevailing attitude towards using plain TeX from it. LaTeX really seems to consider plain TeX quite unsafe. I suspect this is because it is hard to build a resilient declarative system on highly weird and procedural TeX. ConTeXt, on the other hand, kind of encourages you to use TeX directly. So that led me to learning more about plain TeX, which now seems much less scary to me than when I was using LaTeX.

fusiongyro commented on The LaTeX fetish (2016) danielallington.net/2016/... · Posted by u/edu

nailer · 7 years ago

> after successfully completing the task ZERO times

There's a Knuth quote about how the aim of TeX was to allow anyone to create properly typeset documents. I can't find the exact source, but https://www.tug.org/whatis.html should give you some idea.

This individual wasn't able to. Last time I looked at TeX it (or metafont specifically) often seemed to default to bitmap fonts. That's a poor default - a bug by today's standards - but Knuth has a different definition of 'bug' than you and I do. Maybe you should spend less time judging users and more time working on improving the software you're advocating for?

fusiongyro · 7 years ago

This complaint is basically the reason XeTeX was written, which accesses your standard system fonts instead. LuaTeX also handles TTF and OpenFont without trouble. These both produce PDFs instead of DVI or Postscript output (per your comment below).