Hacker News Reader

ptrott2017on Fml: An optimizing array programming language

This looks rather nice and in some ways resembles Nial (https://github.com/danlm/QNial7) in that its a array language that is more accessible to programmers not familiar with APL/K/Q etc

However the gist is over 8 years old and there doesnt seem to be a public repository for the language available.

Edit: add NIal repo link

ptrott2017on Open-source light-sheet microscopes for imaging cleared tissue

Yup it is not a cheap area of microscopy - commercial SPIM systems typically range from $250K to around $1 million (though there are some significantly cheaper than this) and you can build them for significantly less.

I think the hope with both OpenSPIM and mesoSPIM initiatives is by getting design information out and plans out as open source, the community has a reference system they can experiment with and find mechanisms that work to help bring the price of the systems down. Typically, most expensive parts are things like cameras and detection objectives. If you can scrounge parts, find alternative units (cheaper cameras etc.) you can find means to significantly reduce cost. Similarly, if you are trying to push the boundaries - you can see where you can gain potential advantage by substituting sub-systems for greater resolution units etc.

My hope is that through community initiatives like OpenSPIM and MesoSPIM, the community can reduce costs of these systems by an order of magnitude over the coming years, while at the same time, using similar reference systems other leading teams can push the boundaries and highlight what is possible.

ptrott2017on Open-source light-sheet microscopes for imaging cleared tissue

Having built a prototype SPIM microsocope, based on the original OpenSPIM (https://openspim.org/) project, this looks a fantastic project and nicely designed piece of kit.

Its especially great that the team are actively building a community around the project for exchange of ideas between lightsheet developers and end users.

For anyone interested and wanting to deep dive for example on parts list or laser selection recommend reading the wiki here: https://github.com/mesoSPIM/mesoSPIM-hardware-documentation/...

Very cool project - thanks X for posting this.

ptrott2017on Digital Twins Are Reinventing Innovation

Companies like GE, SAP, Mathworks, Dassault, PTC and Siemens all have digital twin platforms used by major manufacturers. Initially there was a period (2003 -2013) where twin systems were built my specialist media developers using 3rd party authoring tools and integrating with different system simulation tools. While this still happens for specialist or niche projects (or sometimes on very large projects with specific deadlines that require outsourced help). Increasingly most manufacturers build digital twins directy from design assets (CAD, CAM, Systems simulations etc) as part of the in-house product development process using extensions to their existing design and simulation tooling.

ptrott2017on Show HN: Lucidity – an interactive program-state visualizer

re: min set of tasks - Obvious list:

0. Decide how you want to license codebase and how much you care about post-release adoption.

1. Write enough documentation to understand what the project is and can be used for (i.e. an edited version of what you have already posted)

2. Minimal demo project / app that the can be build so a prospective user can understand the application / library (probably updated example you already have)

3. Clear repeatable build instructions for demo app/ lib etc

4. License and Copyrights clearly stated and in codebase.

5. One or two paragraph guidance on contributing to the project or using the project.

6. Plan on where to announce, announcement msg and follow up so you can monitor interest.

7. If you decide you do care about adoption, plan on some regular but minimal effort after release to write updates/project blogs so folks can see what is happening and encourage interest. *i.e. dont just throw it public, do no marketing or launch effort and expect people to magically find it and adopt it - some sustenance effort will be necessary. If you don’t care, but just want to release it so its out there – then this step is obviously not necessary.

Finally, perhaps, an alternate way to get people interested in Lucidity and demonstrate Lucidity's benefits would be to package up Lucidity and look to contribute new features / functionality that leverage a subset of Lucidity to an existing project that would benefit from those Lucidity's features.

Whatever you decide, Good luck.

ptrott2017on Show HN: Lucidity – an interactive program-state visualizer

Firstly, congrats on an interesting project with clearly a lot of thought and time investment. At end of article you request feedback on should you open source - in that respect:

There is clearly some interest in this area e.g. DS-PITON project (See https://bit.ly/35Eq35R) or the Jive project for java (https://cse.buffalo.edu/jive/). Another would be Glamours Toolkit for Pharo Smalltalk (https://gtoolkit.com/) - though it has a larger scope.

If you do not have time or funds to continue it in its current form and you do not have any 3rd party at this point interested in sponsoring development in some form, and you cannot see how to leverage it in the future - what do you have to lose by open sourcing it?

At worst - it languishes, and no one uses it but it will give you a referenceable open source project for your CV that may help attract work in this or a related area.

At best, the project sees adoption and opens new opportunities for you.

Given the quality on display in the articles and videos I would expect the project to get some interest especially amongst IDE and program visualization communities.

If you do decide to open source the project be careful on licensing choice (to encourage adoption in a manner you want) and copyright notices to ensure you are associated with it. Do expect to have to invest a little time in documentation and code clean up before making it available - but think of that as future advertising for your own capabilities.

Good luck

ptrott2017on Active Oberon Language Report Update 2019

Active Oberon is a small but powerful language with a lot of good ideas within the language.

One of the interesting additions over plain Oberon is the concept and support for active cells. Active Cells provide an abstract mechanism to define systems composed of computing elements that exchange information over message channels. Not new to anyone familiar with Go Channels etc buts its one of the nice things in Active oberon and provides support for both Actor models, concurrency and parallel programming.

How this applies to scalable systems and custom FPGA hardware is described in an older paper - see https://inf.ethz.ch/personal/felixf/pdfs/2012_ActiveCells.pd...

In addition to cells there is math support for tensors (via Math Array) and matlab like array processing as well.

From a language implementation perspective it provides quite a lot in a relatively small, clean and easy to follow code base.

ptrott2017on The Lx Programming Language

Having played around with XL, Tao3D and Elfe, I have to say there was/is a lot of fun to be had and some very compelling concepts and unique ideas in these projects. Its great to see them mentioned on HN. I found the parse tree approach very educational and its a very nice and powerful alternative to S-expressions. Tao3D was an very quick way to build simple interactive graphics apps and a lot of fun. ELFE has some interesting concepts for distributed computing. While I ended up using Erlang and LISP rather than ELFE it was defintely eye opening in a good way and reminded me of the fun and creativity to be had - - so a huge thank you for the past projects and good luck with the next evolution.

ptrott2017on The Little Handbook of Statistical Practice (2012)

updates after 2012 - are in the ebook version for Kindle (read the important announcement section to see how to obtain it)

ptrott2017on Microsoft open sources SandDance, a visual data exploration tool

strongly recommend folks interested in data viz investigate Vegas further and especially VEGAS, VEGAS-LITE and the related projects such as Voyager, LYRA and CompassQL. As noted below/above great to see it used in SandDance

ptrott2017on A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality (2017)

That used to be the dominant theory - there is now evidence that new cells continue to grow - just the replacement rate slows down as we age. However we still do not really understand the mechanisms of neurogenesis (growth of new brain cells), the interplay with neural stem cells, cellular development dependencies or the pathological mechanisms associated with various diseases such as Alzheimer's. There continue to be new theories, emergent lab work etc but we still have a long long way to go before we have a clear insightful model of the mechanisms involved, never mind a predictive understanding for systemic outcomes.

ptrott2017on The C4 model for visualising software architecture

And domain story telling is like a constrained form of Chekland's rich pictures (which had some good ideas along with a chunk of cruft).

ptrott2017on Ask HN: What is the ops architecture like for AAA multiplayer game servers?

Riot games tech blog is an awesome read. The fps (as in frames per second) performance monitoring on league of legends post recently was a great example of why its worth a read.

ptrott2017on Waypipe: GSoC Project Complete

Totally agree - its an impressive piece of work and strongly recommend any one interested in this area to read the blog posts that were made during the project:

https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html

They are definitely worth going through and Manuel Stoeckl deserves a lot of good karma for taking this on.

ptrott2017on Stephen Wolfram's 60th Birthday AMA IRL

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/474114788

Birthday AMA - is very interesting - both the discussion of computational intelligence as part of language design at the start but especially the wide range of questions asked and answered.

The live CEOing vids are also an interesting insight for those interested in how wolfram and mathematica are developed.

ptrott2017on Rodney Brooks

My first job out of school nearly 30 years ago was building commercial research autonomous robots. We used a subsumption arch for real time avoidance and path following linked to a reactive planner implemented in C and xlisp for goal directed actions and task execution. While most modern books on robotics skim the history of this area - there are a lot of good ideas from that period of research that can be cheaply revistited. If you know anyone interested in robotics - get them to read Ron's (lisper) three layer architecture paper - its a classic in terms of summarizing previous approaches and it also that provided a foundation for a lot what now drives today's research.

re: NeilV - Braitenberg "Vehicles" book - enough goodness cannot be said about that book. It seems deceptively simple but its a wonderful place to start thinking about and being inspired to building simple beasties.

As should Grey walter's wonderful tortoise: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945378.html

ptrott2017on Mobile NixOS: The Present and the Future

re: embedded - I thought as much - I think it likely just needs some use cases and marketing to drive adoptions.

Regarding Open source / sponsorship / support: - Andrew I will follow up directly via email over weekend.

ptrott2017on Mobile NixOS: The Present and the Future

Definitely of interest. Also of interest would be using Sciter for embedded (but not mobile) apps. Its a natural fit for certain markets.

Are you still considering open sourcing Sciter? I personally hope so - but also know how much is involved in going down that path.

ptrott2017on Ask HN: Sciter, Open Source or Other Options

Given advantages over electron etc - perhaps open sourcing it with a foundation model and commercial services for those wanting support. In many respects I can see Sciter being used by corporations in a similar wayt o sqlite - e.g. if it was open source there are a number of corporations who may be interested in commercially supported services and project sponsorship

ptrott2017on Lisp is not based on the Lambda Calculus

re:was he top notch? By 1955 he was an assistant professor of Mathematics and known in his field. In 1956 he organised the Dartmouth conference where the field of Artificial Intellgence - got its name. He was a peer of Claude Channon, Marvin Minsky and Nathanial Rochester - so yes he was top notch. YC audience knows him for Lisp - but he was known for a lot more in his fields of research.

ptrott2017on Space Engine

Celestia is old now but still brilliant

ptrott2017on Inferno Operating System

I never knew that about QNX - Is it possible to also monitor the connected processes across all machines?

ptrott2017on Cities Want 'Digital Twins' to Manage Traffic

Though the term digital twin was occasionally in use in the virtual reality and manufacturing community as a concept in the mid-1990s, Dr.Michael Grieves explicitly defined the term in 2001 for a digital version of a physical system as part of an overall product lifecycle process.

The term has been widely used in manufacturing since then and has been a key sales messaging for companies like IBM, Dassault Systems, Siemens amongst others. United Technologies for example have been demonstrating digital twin concepts for routing in flight engine telematics into 3D virtual engine simulations for trouble shooting and maintenance since 2005.

The term regularly crops up in manufacturing, maintenance, smart cities, IoT and more recently AI related proposals and projects and generally means a virtual simulation that uses real data to simulate a complex system.

As pointed out by many over the years - the concepts are also described by Prof.David Gelernter in his book 'MIrror Worlds: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean' first ipublished in 1991.

SO perhaps less bizarre and more just less familiar on HN.

ptrott2017on Nasa to Open International Space Station to Tourists

Both Valentin Lebedev and Anatoty Berzovoy have reported similar experiences to name two cosmonauts. Unlike most US astronauts, many cosmonauts continue working for government and do not publish books, or engage in public speaking in the same way (largely due to fewer marketing opportunities), so the overview efect tends to be reported largely from a US perspective. However UK astronaut Time Peak reported similar findings as has, Swiss astronaut Claude Nicollier and dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers (to name a few others). It will be interesting to see as the taikonauts begin to talk about their space experiences, if they report it or not.

ptrott2017on The Monkey Programming Language

A little bit = but personally happy to see a website for the language - there are a lot of implementations out there now ,so its good to have a source point.

If you have not read the books they are a really good practical introductions to building interpreters and compilers.

ptrott2017on New Mac Pro

I used to develop professional 3D tools and CUDA is used to accellerate features in 3D software including: scene manipulation, simulation, real time rendering, ray tracing, rendering shader effects and video encoding etc.

ptrott2017on Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

I was not a fan until I recently re-read all his work - but I dont think he ever would have claimed to be a shakespeare or a Henry James. I would say a more apt comparitive group would probably be Rabelais, Swift,Verne, Vonnegut, Voltaire, Wells, Wilde and Woodehouse - all of which he certainly is an equal writer to and his overall body of work sits well with.

ptrott2017on Founder Books

Lol yup. very good link on how to do the actual sales call once you have a list. very Worth reading.