The public transport service in Hannover/Germany once had a screensaver that you could configure to show the next departure from your nearest station. I thought that was clever marketing. Today you probably could implement this as a web service.
Readit Newslindig commented on Show HN: When is the next Caltrain? (minimal webapp) erikschluntz.com/caltrain... · Posted by u/eschluntz
lindig commented on The Yin and Yang of Programming billwadge.com/2025/02/22/... · Posted by u/herodotus
I like the idea mentioned in the article of exploring limited higher-order functions: functions that can only take functions as argument that themselves are not taking functions as arguments. But what simplification does this buy (in the implementation of such a language) over a language that is fully functional? It is not explained in the article.
This makes you appreciate curation in a museum. Why are these objects shown together? Historical period, size, design feature, material, production method? It looks completely arbitrary.
lindig commented on Interval Parsing Grammars for File Format Parsing (2023) [pdf] dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.114... · Posted by u/vitplister
I built a grammar to tackle these sorts of problems when I had trouble writing formal grammar notations for my binary data format. It's even got a syntax highlighter.
So far it's been able to describe 90% of what's out there. Some examples:
- 802.3 layer 2 Ethernet: https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma/blob/master/v1/examples/8...
- Microsoft ICO format: https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma/blob/master/v1/examples/i...
- Android Dex v39: https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma/blob/master/v1/examples/d...
- IPv4: https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma/blob/master/v1/examples/i...
- DNS query: https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma/blob/master/v1/examples/d...
- Microsoft Minidump: https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma/blob/master/v1/examples/m...
- Concise Binary Encoding: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...
- Concise Text Encoding: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...
The main feature of interval parsing appears to be that it can jump over content such that a later part in a file does not depend on knowing everything that comes before it. Has Dogma similar expressiveness?
lindig commented on I moved my blog from IPFS to a server neimanslab.org/2024-01-31... · Posted by u/neiman
Filecoin, which is based on IPFS, creates a market for unused storage. I think that idea is great but for adoption it needs to be as simple as Dropbox to store files. But visit https://filecoin.io/ and the dropbox-like app that you could be willing to try is nowhere to be found. So maybe it is an enterprise solution? That isn't spelled out either. So I am not surprised that this has little traction and the article further confirms the impression.
lindig commented on Why is everything so ugly? nplusonemag.com/issue-44/... · Posted by u/lucabenazzi
"Show, don't tell" is lost on the authors. They only talk about visual ugliness.
lindig commented on A Simulated Annealing FPGA Placer stefanabikaram.com/writin... · Posted by u/stefanpie
In the "Simulated Annealing" section:
"At first, you might want to make moves or swaps over large distances or you might want to accept some percent of moves that don't improve the objective, but as time goes on ...
However, as it turns out, you technically don't need this annealing part to make FPGA placement work. You can just randomly try different moves and accept or reject them based on whether they improve the objective function. This is what I did in my toy implementation of an FPGA placer just to keep it simple."
The argument for annealing in the original paper is that accepting regressions is essential to escape from local minima.
https://www2.stat.duke.edu/~scs/Courses/Stat376/Papers/Tempe...
"Annealing, as implemented by the Metropolis procedure, differs from iterative improvement in that the procedure need not get stuck since transitions out of a local optimum are always possible at nonzero temperature. A second and more important feature is that a sort of adaptive divide-and-conquer occurs. Gross features of the eventual state of the system appear at higher tempera-tures; fine details develop at lower tem-peratures. This will be discussed with specific examples."
lindig commented on A Simulated Annealing FPGA Placer stefanabikaram.com/writin... · Posted by u/stefanpie
My understanding of simulated annealing is that solutions that are not improvements are still accepted with some probability in early steps but that this probability decreases as "temperature" drops. Looking at your description (but not code) I did not see that aspect but it looked like you would only accept improvements of the cost function. Is this correct or where does your solution accept slight regressions with some probability, too?
I wrote a blogpost how I use Vale and how you can do it too
- https://vinckr.com/blog/open-source-stylecheck/
Links are unreadable in that blog post on iOS/Safari.
For covering the subject of writing, the typesetting of the PDF is remarkably poor. The mix of serif and sans serif, the font sizes don't match the structure of the document, and enumerations have inconsistent indentation - to point out just a few blemishes.