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> The person who wrote this is themself a rich person. But of course they would never give up their own money.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/

tomstuarton Towards a Theory of Bugs: The Ruliology of the Unexpected

At the risk of straying into forbidden metacommentary: look, I understand (and also feel) the temptation to have a go at Stephen Wolfram every time he posts something wacky, but… he’s just a guy with a fun hobby, isn’t he? Sure it’s all a bit eccentric and self-indulgent, but so are most hobbies, and in contrast to basically every other rich tech man he isn’t actually hurting anyone. Live and let live I reckon.

tomstuarton I found a seashell in the middle of the desert

Among a strong field, this is the single most depressing comment I’ve ever read on Hacker News. Several grim components but it’s the “I don’t understand why” which seals the deal.

tomstuarton Show HN: Twixt – transform one word into another in four moves

The game’s difficult to understand so it’s too punitive to not offer even a single practice/example puzzle to use for learning. One puzzle a day is nice once you’ve got the hang of it, but it’s discouraging to “waste” today’s puzzle on learning the rules and not be able to try for real until tomorrow.

tomstuarton Graphing how the 10k* most common English words define each other

I had to look this up: https://doi.org/10.7155/jgaa.00370

tomstuarton I see a future in jj

Congratulations on the new adventure, Steve, and good luck!

tomstuarton How does Turbo listen for Turbo Streams

What do you mean by “Pagemorphs”? A quick Google search suggests you’re the only person using this term so it’s hard to know what you’re recommending. I think it must mean e.g. https://turbo.hotwired.dev/handbook/page_refreshes?

tomstuarton Jujutsu for everyone

Do you want another person (or yourself in the future) to be able to read your commits, in order, to get a clear account of what changed & why? If so, you should fix up those commits to address mistakes. If not, it doesn’t matter.

tomstuarton Postgres UUIDv7 and per-back end monotonicity

https://www.hyrumslaw.com/

tomstuarton Bottles of OOP now available in Python

Yes, it is.

tomstuarton Rubocop-obsession: RuboCop extension focused on higher-level concepts

This sounds intuitively true, but it’s a (very persistent) myth: https://www.viget.com/articles/just-use-double-quoted-ruby-s...

tomstuarton Hotwire Native

The branding is incredibly confusing, but: Hotwire (https://hotwired.dev/) is a set of ideas about how to build dynamic web UI (“HTML over the wire”), and the Turbo, Stimulus and Native frameworks are complementary implementations of those ideas in JavaScript and native mobile code. You can use all, some or none of them to build a Hotwire-style app.

The three frameworks originated in Rails apps, so they have good Rails integrations, but there’s nothing Rails-specific about them and you can use them in any environment where HTML is sent from server to client, even a static web site.

tomstuarton Switch Ruby's default parser from parse.y to Prism

Rails’ nightly CI already needed a fix: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/52937

tomstuarton Ruby's official documentation just got a new look

Here’s the PR. I don’t know whether it was discussed elsewhere. https://github.com/ruby/rdoc/pull/1157

tomstuarton We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

That’s the joke.

tomstuarton Ruby methods are colorless

I’m pretty sure you’re talking to an LLM.

tomstuarton Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

Definitive reference: https://www.urbanautomaton.com/blog/2015/08/10/the-pledge-to...

tomstuarton Show HN: I made a programmable computer from NAND gates

I did read your comment but I don’t really understand what you mean by “the memory system”. A linear bounded automaton is by definition a finite state machine for a given input (i.e. fixed tape size) because the number of possible configurations is finite. A Turing machine’s infinite tape is what stops it being a finite state machine.

tomstuarton Show HN: I made a programmable computer from NAND gates

Real-world computers are equivalent to linear bounded automata, not true Turing machines, because they have finite memory. This technicality is mostly ignored because a computer with a large finite memory is a decent enough approximation to a Turing machine for practical purposes. But, for example, the halting problem is decidable for linear bounded automata — because there are only finitely many states, every computation must either halt or eventually revisit an earlier state and get stuck in a loop — so in theory it’s an important distinction.

tomstuarton A Plea for More Mikado

Mike Dalessio, the maintainer of Nokogiri, gave an excellent talk about this at Rails World 2023: https://youtu.be/USPLEASZ0Dc?t=939

tomstuarton The end of "Useless Ruby sugar": On intuitions and evolutions

You’re taking the use of the word “state” too literally. The original comment was complaining about how Ruby `require` adds names (constants) to a global namespace; Python `import` only binds names in the local scope.

tomstuarton Ruby 3.3

You might be interested in Chris Salzberg’s Im [0], already usable on Ruby 3.2, or the discussion about the speculative “namespace on read” feature [1].

[0] https://github.com/shioyama/im

[1] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/19744

tomstuarton Why a spritz of water before grinding coffee yields better results

The target audience for this hack are people who carefully weigh their beans (and then put them into the empty hopper for grinding) each time they make coffee.

tomstuarton The 8000th Busy Beaver number eludes ZF set theory (2016)

I wouldn’t defend the idea that it’s “clear”, but the idea is to build a machine that combines the axioms of ZF set theory in all possible ways to generate all possible conclusions, checking each one for contradiction as it goes. If it never generates a contradictory conclusion from those axioms, it’ll run forever.

tomstuarton MyPowerbank hacks Santander bikes so London's homeless can charge their phones

It’s a student project, so the primary intent is to do the work necessary to graduate.

tomstuarton iOS 17 is available today

https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou

tomstuarton Catching up on the weird world of LLMs

Phew, thanks!

tomstuarton Catching up on the weird world of LLMs

What is going on with this comment? It was clearly made a couple of days ago, and Simon’s reply was also posted a couple of days ago, and yet they’re both appearing on an article posted in the last day, and (on that post) showing as being a few hours old. Am I on glue?