vandyswa (u/vandyswa)

vandyswa commented on Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards victorpoughon.github.io/b... · Posted by u/fouronnes3

Towaway69 · 5 days ago

Won’t another breadcrumb be Prolog and “declarative programming”[1].

Wasn’t Prolog invented to formalise these kinds of problems of making the inputs match what the desired output should be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming

vandyswa · 5 days ago

Yes, I'm glad to see a comment on Prolog. I think of it as _the_ foundational programming language for solving such problems. It isn't so much that it's a back propagation language; it's just that, based on which variables are bound at a given point, it will go forward deductively, or backwards inductively.

vandyswa commented on Making RSS More Fun matduggan.com/making-rss-... · Posted by u/salmon

vandyswa · 13 days ago

To me, it feels like most feed readers are made by people who don't use RSS, and just exercise their feed reader on a few feeds. I seem to be at 211 feeds with (currently) 13,000 cached entries, organized across a couple dozen categories.

A reader where you'll click into the body under a headline only 1-5% of the time is a totally different beast.

vandyswa commented on Inside Amazon's engineering culture: Lessons from their senior principals olshansky.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/Olshansky

vandyswa · 2 months ago

With Amazon layoff blood running in the gutters today, I'm sure their PR people shook the tree to get something nice to drop onto the interwebitudes.

vandyswa commented on Public trust demands open-source voting systems voting.works/news/public-... · Posted by u/philips

teddyh · 2 months ago

No. Public trust demands no software or programmable hardware in the election process.

• Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI>

• Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs>

vandyswa · 2 months ago

A solid starting point, but it's easy to lose sight of the other critical part of the puzzle--integrity of the voting rolls. High quality vote tabulation needs to start from voters, where _only_ legitimate voters vote, and each only votes (at most) once, after which yes, their vote is accurately tabulated.

vandyswa commented on Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour bitshifters.cc/2025/05/04... · Posted by u/hmac1282

bsrkf · 7 months ago

I always thought it was more akin to a C++ than a C alternative, and reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language) seems to rather confirm this notion:

  "originated as a re-engineering of C++"
  "influenced by Java, Python, Ruby, C#, and Eiffel"
  "design by contract, ranges, built-in container iteration concepts, and type inference"
  "array slicing, nested functions and lazy evaluation."
  "Java-style single inheritance with interfaces and mixins"
  "function overloading and operator overloading"
  "supports five main programming paradigms" (including OOP)
  ... et cetera

Though it does support things like in-line assembly and the like, I'm sure most C programmers would pass on it, as a C-alternative, based on those factoids.

vandyswa · 7 months ago

Yes, I understand the C++ aspect, but I was never a C++ coder, and D "fit in my hand" in a way which made me certain that its creator had coded extensively in C and understood the aspects which made it so perfect for its time. It really felt like D, not D++ to me.

(Oh, disclosure, I'm just a D user, no organizational or financial interests here.)

vandyswa commented on Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour bitshifters.cc/2025/05/04... · Posted by u/hmac1282

vandyswa · 7 months ago

FWIW, another take on "C Alternative" is the D programming language:

https://wiki.dlang.org/Tutorials

Comparatively mature, there's even a freeware book which is quite good:

http://www.ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html

vandyswa commented on Doge Put a College Student in Charge of Using AI to Rewrite Regulations wired.com/story/doge-coll... · Posted by u/tysone

vandyswa · 8 months ago

Is there any sign of its effectiveness (or lack thereof)? It seems like the world of dense regulatory language may actually be amenable to such techniques. If a (presumably bright) college person driving the tool gives good results--who cares?

vandyswa commented on Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots omnom.zone/?src=hn... · Posted by u/mstef

vandyswa · 8 months ago

I have a static web page with a table of A href's. Source controlled under git. Problem solved.

vandyswa commented on Recommendation for non-DOS/Unix open source OS outside x86/X64 · Posted by u/anta40

vandyswa · 9 months ago

RSX-280 for the Z280 CPU:

https://github.com/hperaza/RSX280

Nothing like DOS. Nothing like UNIX.

vandyswa commented on Married Women Could Be Stopped from Voting Under Save Act newsweek.com/married-wome... · Posted by u/hn_acker

duxup · 10 months ago

>The SAVE Act lists several types of documentation that would be accepted, including a form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005, a valid United States passport, valid military ID, forms of Tribal identification and proof of naturalization. Many of these forms of ID, other than a passport, either include a birth certificate or must be presented alongside a birth certificate.

I do not understand why it is "alongside" most of these forms of ID require a birth certificate in the first place.

vandyswa · 10 months ago

Assuming this act even moved forward (big IF), "bugs" like this show up in first drafts of bills all the time. They'd do a little research, then apply a fix. Amusing that the "coverage" didn't seem interested in "how could this easily be addressed?".