symstym (u/symstym) - Readit News

symstym commented on Pockit: A tiny, powerful, modular computer [video] youtube.com/watch?v=b3F9O... · Posted by u/rayrag

lanewinfield · 4 years ago

As far as I can tell, this is a single individual that has done all of this work. I am floored at the design and intricacy of this project.

Really, truly blown away. I'm sure there are plenty of edge cases to correct for but I haven't gotten so excited by a demo in a long time. I've obviously signed up to learn more.

symstym · 4 years ago

But remember, there's no such thing as a 10x engineer! /s

symstym commented on Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero quantamagazine.org/animal... · Posted by u/digital55

gonehome · 5 years ago

There was a funny related example of the African Gray parrot Alex surprising the trainers by silently counting in his head.

They were training a younger parrot and trying to get the younger parrot to count to two by tapping twice.

Alex overheard the training and got impatient with the other bird. He yelled out “two” and then after two more taps “four” and then “six”.

The trainers were just expecting “two” each time.

It was this book: https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-Animals/dp/0393...

The book is interesting and goes into how humans need to set up experiments properly to actually test non-human animals in ways that make sense (rather than just in some biased human way).

One quick example was testing tool use, the original experimenters left branches on the ground for the monkeys to use, but the monkeys can’t pick stuff up that’s flat on the ground since they’re normally in trees (their hands don’t have thumbs that move that way). When he redid the experiment with the tool raised they were able to grab and use it.

Same author also wrote Chimpanzee Politics and did this great video experiment: https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg

symstym · 5 years ago

You may appreciate this poignant sci-fi short story/video that references and expands on the story of Alex: https://vimeo.com/195588827

symstym commented on Circle – A C++ compiler with compile-time imperative metaprogramming github.com/seanbaxter/cir... · Posted by u/orbifold

symstym · 6 years ago

This seems similar to Zig (https://ziglang.org/#Compile-time-reflection-and-compile-tim...)

symstym commented on Ask HN: What projects are you working on now? · Posted by u/sakopov

dietrichepp · 6 years ago

A sound effects generator in the style of SFXR (or its many clones), but with a larger library of sound effects.

https://www.ultrafxr.us/

Under the hood, it’s a software modular synthesizer with certain limitations—for example, the modules can’t be connected in a cycle. The modules are connected with code in a simple language that checks units, so you write “500ms” instead of “0.5” if you need a 500ms delay. If you write 500Hz instead, that’s an error. This part already works.

On the surface, I’m figuring out how to expose the parameters with simple sliders and knobs in a web page. The idea is that you click a button like “explosion” and then tweak the knobs to get the explosion sound that you want. This is how SFXR (and as3fxr, BFXR, JFXR, etc) work, but they have a fairly limited set of sounds.

symstym · 6 years ago

Sounds cool. If you haven't already, you might want to check out the Fractal Bits iOS app. It doesn't let you manually adjust parameters, only randomly generate sounds, but it makes some nice ones. It sounds probably FM-based to me.

symstym commented on Defunctionalisation: An underappreciated tool for writing good software gresearch.co.uk/article/d... · Posted by u/Smaug123

jonahx · 6 years ago

Prior Art: "The Best Refactoring You've Never Heard Of"

http://www.pathsensitive.com/2019/07/the-best-refactoring-yo...

symstym · 6 years ago

I think this is a much better introduction than TLA, thanks.

symstym commented on D6tflow: Python library for building data science workflows github.com/d6t/d6tflow... · Posted by u/DBCerigo

SebiH · 7 years ago

> We have put a lot of effort into making this library useful to you. To help us make this library even better, it collects ANONYMOUS error messages and usage statistics. See d6tcollect for details including how to disable collection. Collection is asynchronous and doesn't impact your code in any way.

That seems really out of place. I'm somewhat used to automatic data collection from applications, but automatic data collection from programming libraries / frameworks? Really?

symstym · 7 years ago

A while back I found out that the popular Serverless framework/library tracks and reports back usage (https://serverless.com/framework/docs/providers/aws/cli-refe...). This similarly struck me as really out of place, and (at the time at least) it didn't seem sufficiently disclosed or described in the docs. If I NPM install it and invoke it, have I implicitly agreed to this?

symstym commented on Show HN: Automatically synchronize subtitles with video github.com/smacke/subsync... · Posted by u/smacke

symstym · 7 years ago

Nice! Have you seen this similar project? If not sure if there are any ideas to be borrowed, but it sounds like it achieved excellent accuracy: https://github.com/AlbertoSabater/subtitle-synchronization

symstym commented on Permissionless innovation learnliberty.org/blog/per... · Posted by u/tomhoward

symstym · 8 years ago

This reminds me of some parts of Pieter Hintjens' book Social Architecture. He advocates that open source projects practice "optimistic merging" where essentially any patch that is well-formed should be accepted, without value judgement (though they may be reverted later). He argues that counterintuitively, this leads to better results than having gatekeepers. It seems pretty extreme, but similar in spirit to the idea of permissionless innovation.

symstym commented on The Future of Programming (2013) worrydream.com/dbx/... · Posted by u/illo

shalabhc · 8 years ago

> But for the most part, the reason these great past ideas are not in use is because nobody has made them into a compelling product.

I think you're overestimating the market's ability to select good ideas and specifically, promote long term scientific advances. A lot of variables affect what succeeds, e.g. marketing, coincidence, network effects etc.

You cannot leave everything to the market (i.e. what people adopt) and expect great science to come from it. Many times, great science (and maths) comes from the compelling drive of people to discover and create something new. These talks are encouraging that kind of research, and I don't see them saying they 'have it figured out', but rather pointing out ideas they think should be explored more extensively.

symstym · 8 years ago

I certainly don't think that the market selects good ideas or is sufficient to promote long-term advances. Per the bit of my comment that you quoted, I'm saying that the reason that the ideas are not in use (more) is that they haven't been incorporated into more compelling products. He feels that good ideas are not in wide use because we didn't "get" them or forgot them. I'm saying that sure, that may be part of the reason, but I think most of the reason is that certain ideas that seem good on paper are really hard to put into practice.

Quoting the talk:

> But I do think that it would be kind of a shame if in forty years we’re still coding in procedures and text files in a sequential programing model. I think that would suggest we didn’t learn anything from this really fertile period in computer science. So that would kind of be a tragedy.

Lots of people seem aware of the idea of coding without text files. There are some "visual" programming environments with traction (in the game dev world, Max/MSP). I'm even working on one myself! But there are significant downsides/challenges associated with this approach (more difficult to version control, often tied to one editor, etc.). So to his quote, the fact that we're still coding in text files may not be because we didn't learn anything, but because the idea of non-textual programming is hard to form into a product that more people want to use.

I agree with you that his talk is very valuable in terms of drawing attention to ideas that deserve more exploration, and I love the talk. It's just this one facet that I take issue with, the suggestion that the ideas haven't caught on because nobody appreciates them. His talks are frequently at the top of HN, they are widely appreciated. People have been super excited about related projects, like Light Table and Eve, and yet they haven't gotten much traction. So I think it's worth acknowledging that the problem is less idea-awareness and more compelling-implementation-difficulty.

symstym commented on The Future of Programming (2013) worrydream.com/dbx/... · Posted by u/illo

symstym · 8 years ago

I think this attitude of "we solved these problems decades ago!" is rather naive and sometimes arrogant.

I think it's a fantastic talk, and that Bret Victor and Alan Kay are geniuses. But I feel that they both promote the idea that we definitively solved all these important computing problems years ago, and that people are just too clueless/resistant to catch on. Yes, I agree that many good ideas have been culturally "forgotten". But for the most part, the reason these great past ideas are not in use is because nobody has made them into a compelling product.

Their attitude is comparable to someone saying "oh I invented the WWW in 1985 but nobody would listen to me", or "oh I invented Twitter before Twitter but users weren't enlightened enough to appreciate it". Almost all good ideas were already had before, but they are worth comparatively little, and unlikely to catch on, until they are reified into something that people want to use.

I agree with them that probably more people should be working in certain areas (e.g. new ways of programming). But if they really had it all figured out, then why haven't they themselves made the amazing new programming language that we all use? What if it's the case that some of their ideas are good in theory, but are hard to translate into a usable product? Most people accept that execution>>idea in the world of startups, but don't acknowledge that the same may apply here.