Hacker News Reader

josh11bon Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

> This newsletter does not contain ads, ...

It most definitely contains ads since it is about ads.

josh11bon 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

I think it has to be parallel by symmetry.

josh11bon Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

Array iteration got checked into the prelude so this is now shorter: https://godbolt.org/z/YYheo19ea

josh11bon Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

Carbon is performance-first, so ABI instability is the default. We plan to have opt-in ABI stability, but that story is not well developed yet. Replacing C as the lingua franca is not a goal, at least not yet.

josh11bon Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

That is correct. Strings and I/O both have a bunch of work to be done. Printing currently requires workarounds like https://godbolt.org/z/MP4164f7s

josh11bon Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

The nightly release of the Carbon compiler can be used via https://carbon.compiler-explorer.com/ . Note that it is definitely a work in progress, it hasn't even reached our v0.1 goals yet, but a good chunk of important functionality is working.

josh11bon C3 solved memory lifetimes with scopes

https://learning-rust.github.io/docs/lifetimes/

> Lifetime annotations are checked at compile-time. ... This is the major reason for slower compilation times in Rust.

This misconception is being perpetuated by Rust tutorials.

josh11bon Why are QR Codes with capital letters smaller than QR codes with lower case?

10^12 < 256^5 ≈ 1.1e+12, which isn't too bad. You could also use 10^118 < 256^49, which wastes less but is in bignum land.

But don't you want 10^x to be slightly bigger than 256^y, so you could represent all length-y byte sequences in x-digit number? In this direction, there's 10^53 > 256^22, but that is still in bignum land.

josh11bon WASM will replace containers

That is what I was thinking of too! From 2014: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death....

josh11bon The two factions of C++

(Carbon lang dev here.)

Carbon is intended to be memory safe! (Not sure whether you intended to write a double negative there.) There are a few reasons that might not be clear:

* Carbon has relatively few people working on it. We currently are prioritizing work on the compiler at the moment, and don't yet have the bandwidth to also work on the safety design.

* As part of our migration-from-C++ story, where we expect code to transition C++ -> unsafe Carbon -> safe Carbon, we plan on supporting unsafe Carbon code with reasonable ergonomics.

* Carbon's original focus was on evolvability, and didn't focus on safety specifically. Since then it has become clear that memory safety is a requirement for Carbon's success, and will be our first test of those evolvability goals. Talks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZTJ9omXOQ0 better reflect more recent plans around this topic.

josh11bon Solar power from space? it might happen in a couple of years

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/space-based-so...

josh11bon Advancing Memory Safety

[Carbon team member here.]

Carbon is still a small team, so it is going to take time to achieve all of our goals. Carbon will need to demonstrate both C++ interop and memory safety to be considered a successful experiment, worth pushing to a 1.0 version. Once those are achieved, we do expect it will be easier to get C++ code to memory safety through Carbon, since that is the purpose it is being created for. The impedance mismatch between C++ and Carbon will be much lower than with Rust.

Parsing code quickly is merely one of those goals we can demonstrate today.

josh11bon Lezer: A parsing system for CodeMirror, inspired by Tree-sitter

(2019)

josh11bon GOTOphobia considered harmful in C

[1] on structured concurrency gives good context for Dijkstra's GOTO paper and how it is applicable today.

[1] https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-g...

josh11bon Caltech to launch space solar power technology demo into orbit

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/space-based-so...

josh11bon Caltech to launch space solar power technology demo into orbit

There is no place on the moon that isn't in shadow 14 days at a time. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/03/powering-the-l...

josh11bon Sayonara, C++, and Hello to Rust

I don't think Rust polymorphism is decidable: https://sdleffler.github.io/RustTypeSystemTuringComplete/

josh11bon Chronofold: A data structure for versioned text (2020)

I suspect this is a follow-up to this recent article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28017204

josh11bon Barcode scanner app on Google Play infects 10M users with one update

Robinhood's app has a 1.2 star rating at the moment.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.robinhood....

josh11bon The Charisma Machine (2019)

I know the author, if you have any questions.

josh11bon Eager Execution: An imperative, define-by-run interface to TensorFlow

I'm on the team that worked on this -- happy to answer questions!

josh11bon Deep Learning at x.ai

In fact, the typical way to visualize word2vec embeddings is t-SNE.