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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.
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.
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.

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.
Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund

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