slightknack

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Submissions

I bought a short domain name. What should I do with it?

11 pointsby slightknack4 anni fa15 comments

Tell HN: GitHub is down (Update: Back online now)

188 pointsby slightknack4 anni fa64 comments

Effective Concurrency with Algebraic Effects in Multicore OCaml

148 pointsby slightknack5 anni fa59 comments

Show HN: Shadergarden: Create reloadable graphical pipelines with Lisp and GLSL

47 pointsby slightknack5 anni fa2 comments

Writing a Nanopass Compiler – Andy Keep [video]

1 pointsby slightknack5 anni fa0 comments

How DAT Works: A Distributed Protocol for Sharing Data (2019)

datprotocol.github.io

2 pointsby slightknack5 anni fa0 comments

Can You Find This Man? (video)

1 pointsby slightknack6 anni fa0 comments

Show HN: Passerine – an extensible programming language – v0.8.0 released

22 pointsby slightknack6 anni fa8 comments

comments

8 mesi fadiscuss

The minimaxir/gemimg repo is pretty cool, fwiw.

Going further, one thing you can do is give Gemini 2.5 a system prompt like the following:

https://goto.isaac.sh/image-prompt

And then pass Gemini 2.5's output directly to Nano-Banana. Doing this yields very high-quality images. This is also good for style transfer and image combination. For example, if you then give Gemini 2.5 a user prompt that looks something like this:

    I would like to perform style transfer. I will provide the image generation model a photograph alongside your generated prompt. Please write a prompt to transfer the following style: {{ brief style description here }}.

You can get aesthetic consistently-styled images, like these:

https://goto.isaac.sh/image-style-transfer

4 anni fadiscuss

In my opinion, writing derivations in Guile Scheme, using Guix[0], is a breath of fresh air[1]. If only the ecosystem were as large as Nix's...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guix

[1]: https://goto.isaac.sh/guix

4 anni fadiscuss

> He identified the four forces which act on a heavier-than-air flying vehicle: weight, lift, drag and thrust. [...] He also designed the first glider reliably reported to carry a human aloft. He correctly predicted that sustained flight would not occur until a lightweight engine was developed to provide adequate thrust and lift. The Wright brothers acknowledged his importance to the development of aviation.

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley

I think by the time the Wright brothers came around, the general theory for powered flight was in place. The Wright Flyer was precision engineered, compared to most 'kites' that came before it. It's not every day you see an internal combustion engine on a kite.

4 anni fadiscuss

A language with a function-color-agnostic effect system, generic over asynchronicity?

4 anni fadiscuss

I mocked up a prototype for something similar to this using TreeSitter and its query language the other day for some heavy refactoring I had to do. This looks like a really cool project, will have to try it out!

4 anni fadiscuss

I had a little too much fun...

    x>0.2-abs(sin(t*2))*0.05&&x<0.8+abs(sin(t*2))*0.05?(i%2?(min((x-sin(t%1.57)*0.3-0.5)*tan(-t%1.57)+cos(t%1.57)*0.3+0.5,(x-sin(t%1.57-1.57)*0.3-0.5)*tan(-t%1.57-1.57)+cos(t%1.57-1.57)*0.3+0.5)*0.4+0.5):(1-(min((-x-sin(t%1.57)*0.3+0.5)*tan(-t%1.57)+cos(t%1.57)*0.3+0.5,(-x-sin(t%1.57-1.57)*0.3+0.5)*tan(-t%1.57-1.57)+cos(t%1.57-1.57)*0.3+0.5)*0.4+0.5))):0.5

https://sliderland.blinry.org/#x%3E0.2-abs%28sin%28t*2%29%29...

4 anni fadiscuss

I love Actual, one of the best local-first apps I've used. I'm excited that it's been open sourced, but I also understand that this release is a bit bittersweet. Awesome work James, best of luck in your future endeavors :)

4 anni fadiscuss

Thanks for the link to the guidelines: I removed the 'Show HN' prefix as this project isn't anything quantifiable yet. I'll be sure to post a proper Show HN when I've got something to show.

4 anni fadiscuss

Don't forget the built-in chat in google docs that nobody uses! (Yes, the one other than the commenting system).

4 anni fadiscuss

We shouldn't have to live in a culture when being called out for making a 'choice with tenuous political relevancy' is socially expected, and something someone is 'guilty of'.

4 anni fadiscuss

Like you, I am not a huge fan of JS, but I'd like to say that the ideas behind TermKit — namely having a shell with richer graphical interaction (e.g. cat works for images too), semantic awareness and tokenization of commands, rich autocomplete, etc. — were ahead of their time.

Maybe it's expected that TermKit-the-project died, but I don't think that TermKit-the-idea should: whether it be bringing features from the project as extensions to existing terminals (cat for images would be nice), or building a new TermKit built on modern graphics libraries powered by WASM/Lua/bring-your-own scripting language.

5 anni fadiscuss

Just letting you know, it's also the name of a pretty well-known suit of cards present in decks of playing cards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spades_(suit)

5 anni fadiscuss

This is a neat idea. Would love to run some queries against this with a larger index. Here's one instance of the question just going over the transformer's head, I guess:

My question:

> how does google work

The response:

> A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a software running on a distributed ledger that offers users a built-in model for the collective management of its code. To become a member of a DAO, users need to first join the DAO by buying its currency. Unlike traditional organizations, there is no hierarchy in DAOs. One of the key features of DAOS is the internal capital that is used to incentivize these actors and ensure that the organization runs smoothly.

5 anni fadiscuss

Yes, but this almost seems intentionally genius at the same time.

5 anni fadiscuss

A snapshot is a the entire state of a program at a single moment in time. Continuations are basically exposed snapshots, i.e. taking a snapshot, storing it in a variable, doing some work, and then 'calling' the snapshot to return to an earlier point. Continuations allow you to implement a naive version of single-shot delimited continuations - coroutines! This can be very useful for modeling concurrency.

Aside from coroutines and continuations, snapshots are neat for distributed computing: spin up a vm, take a snapshot, and replicate it over the network. You could also send snapshots of different tasks to other computers to execute. In the context of edge computing, you could snapshot the program once it's 'warm' to cut back on VM startup time.

Snapshots allow you to peek into your program. Imagine a debugger that takes snapshots on breakpoints, lets you to inspect the stack and heap, and replay the program forward from a given point in a deterministic manner. You could also send a snapshot to a friend so they can run an application from a given point on their machine. If you do snapshots + live reloading there are tons of other things you can do (e.g. live patching and replaying of functions while debugging).

5 anni fadiscuss

I've written some documentation for it in the past, but had to scrap it because things tend to move so quickly that it's better to read the code and ask Shaw than use incorrect documentation. As things stabilize, these issues will be resolved, but it's very bleeding-edge right now.

5 anni fadiscuss

Oh, I did something like this a while back as well! Aside from ray tracing, my renderer also supports ray marching, so it can render some cool fractals[1]. Writing path tracers is so much fun, love the write-up!

[1]: https://github.com/slightknack/keikan#readme

5 anni fadiscuss

> Tossing my hat in for Passerine [1]. Gorgeous ML inspired syntax.

I work on Passerine, cool to see the language mentioned in the wild, glad you like it!

> Written in Rust, and I suspect scripting Rust libraries is in the cards.

We have a rudimentary FFI to Rust already in place. We're also working on a proc macro lib for creating high-level bindings to Rust types/functions/crates (currently unreleased). Also working on an algebraic-effect-based system-injection engine, which will replace the FFI in the 0.10.0 or 0.11.0 release :)

5 anni fadiscuss

Hey HN,

Isaac Clayton again[0]! This summer I worked as an intern at tonari[1] where I developed algorithms for real-time 3D scene construction on the GPU. As a part of my research, I developed a library / tool for prototyping shader-based graphical pipelines on the GPU. This tool, Shadergarden[2], uses GLSL[3] for shaders, but introduces a lisp-like configuration language[4] for chaining shaders (and other transformations) into directed acyclic graphical pipelines. We've been using it for both art and research, kinda like a local Shadertoy.

Hope you enjoy the write up, have a nice day!

PS — If your browser automatically pauses videos, you might need to 'show video controls' to play some of the visualizations.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25347140 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212491

[1]: https://tonari.no

[2]: https://github.com/tonarino/shadergarden

[3]: https://thebookofshaders.com/

[4]: https://github.com/tonarino/shadergarden/blob/master/LISP.md (When all you have is a compiler, everything's a DSL)

5 anni fadiscuss

I vote that we add our blogs / other good blogs we have come across as children on this comment. I'll start, here's mine:

- https://slightknack.dev/blog

Here are some others:

- https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com

- https://www.gwern.net/index

- https://danluu.com

- https://tonsky.me/

- https://lemire.me/blog/

- https://waitbutwhy.com/

- https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/

- https://blog.codinghorror.com/