baruchel
Re:Yet another way to invoke functions without parentheses
on Friday October 16, 2026 @09:54AM (#50118421)
Forth (or Postscript by the way) works exactly like that, but writing the function first also makes sense in functional programming, specifically when you care about currying functions: writing "f(g(h(x)))" (or "f g h x" or whetever) makes more sense, since you are not supposed to put all expected arguments at once.
Re:SDF Public Access Unix System ... est. 1987
on Thursday October 01, 2026 @11:37AM (#49923121)
I use it for several purposes : a few PHP scripts serving custom RSS files, easy temporary space for exchanging epub books between my phone and my e-reader, etc.
Ordinal definability–how did Gödel do it?
Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
Re:Bomb Fishing Is Wreaking Havoc on Indonesia's Coral Reefs
on Thursday August 27, 2026 @08:42AM (#49463906)
I came to write THAT paper with Leslie Lamport
The Computer That Helped Win World War II
Create Your Own Variants • PyChess
Re:A stray "j" ruined my evening
on Sunday June 28, 2026 @05:41AM (#48705861)
The million-dollar math problem hardly anyone is trying to solve
What Do Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems Mean?
The mathematician who doesn't exist
From Probable to Provable: What Automated Reasoning Means for the Board
Mikan: a proof assistant for cubical type theory (forked from Agda)
Why Not Use Lean?
Rocq 9.2.0 Released
Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80
Re:Using Thunderbird for RSS
on Saturday March 14, 2026 @05:32AM (#47374894)
I can confirm the TT-RSS app (found on F-Droid) is very good. I have used it for years. On the other hand, the web app is not very good, and each time I wanted to read articles on my computer from the web interface, I encountered huge issues (for some reason, the "right click / mark as read" never correctly worked on my computers, or at least with huge lags of several seconds). When my free TT-RSS provider closed, I decided to switch to FreshRSS and could compare several apps for Android; I finally set up the following workflow: free FreshRSS account + "Read You" (found on F-Droid also), and managed to achieve a very similar workflow than previously (with a much better web app).
Re:Tony Hoare has died
on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @11:09AM (#47324317)
Yes, but don't forget his formal work also (Hoare logic).
Re:Self-Portrait by Ernst Mach (1886)
on Saturday March 07, 2026 @04:20PM (#47291586)
If I remember correctly, this picture is commented in the very good book "Exact thinking in demented times", together with Mach's ideas.
Can the Most Abstract Math Make the World a Better Place?
How many steps in a "chain of victories" separate you from your favorite player?
Assigning Open Problems in Class
Mathematicians find largest prime number to date
Any chess position with 8 pieces on board and one pair of pawns has been solved
Re:In Praise of APL (1977)
on Thursday January 22, 2026 @08:19AM (#46718883)
I’ve practiced array languages extensively myself, including for code golfing, and I fully understand the intellectual joy they can provide. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see a deep mismatch between what these languages present as “elegant” and what I find truly elegant from a computer science perspective.
Sure, realizing that the foobar of x is nothing more than the transpose of the 15th foo of x, combined via an inner product with the 7th bar of x raised to the power of baz, can be an ineffable intellectual delight. But actually computing that, rather than writing a “boring” loop, feels horrible to me. To my eyes, a “boring” piece of code written by Dijkstra in some Algol-like language contains more beauty than all these dazzling sleights of hand that hide zillions of loops under the rug while pretending that the actual computation doesn’t matter.
Re:Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency minin...
on Tuesday December 23, 2025 @05:18AM (#46364077)
When you compute some nice and elegant result, dissipated heat is an undesired side effect. But let's face it: we are speaking about proof of work. Proof of work means that a computed has run during some "required" time. In other words, you have to prove that enough heat has been dissipated. Waste of energy actually is "by design" here.
Re:Ask HN: What's a book that fundamentally altered your mental models
on Sunday December 21, 2025 @02:58PM (#46347855)
Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund