Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | Smaug123's commentslogin

The stack has grown and almost shrunk again.

* The immediate-mode "every tick I ask you for a VDOM based on the user-defined state" TUI framework has all the fundamental features, I think; writing docs and expanding the library of components it ships with. https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Zoomies

* Decided I needed a nice text display widget, so got side-tracked into implementing the Knuth-Plass paragraph layout algorithm; it currently functions but is buggy. https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.KnuthPlass

* Finally starting to put proper effort into the LLM integrations into my workflows, writing skills, defining the Gospel According To Me to try and poke the LLMs into the right basin - with limited success so far. https://github.com/Smaug123/gospel

No progress on the deterministic .NET runtime.

(Same comment from last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45869787)


This is the paper in which Knuth and Plass define the bones of the layout algorithm behind TeX. The Knuth-Plass algorithm decides how wide spaces should be on each line and which choices of hyphenation out of some predefined set should be used to lay out a paragraph. It's super readable and generally quite joyful. Knuth describes TeX as a "labor of love", and it shines through that paper.

It's not the same. Recently Opus 4.5 diagnosed and fixed a bug in the F# compiler for me, for example (https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp/pull/19123). The root cause is pretty subtle and very non-obvious, and of course the critical snippet of the stack trace `at FSharp.Compiler.Symbols.FSharpExprConvert.GetWitnessArgs` has no hits on Google other than my own bug report. I would have been completely lost fixing it.

On the layout side rather than the "what spaces are available" side, I really recommend https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/tex/1981-knuth.pdf , the paper in which the Knuth-Plass algorithm for paragraph layout is defined. (The Knuth-Plass algorithm decides how wide spaces should be on each line and which choices of hyphenation out of some predefined set should be used to lay out a paragraph.) It's super readable and generally quite joyful. Knuth describes TeX as a "labor of love", and it shines through that paper.

For those interested in typst, Laurenz wrote[0] about the differences between the typst and TeX layout algorithms a while ago. The paragraph layout algorithm is the same but the way it interacts with page placement is quite different.

[0]: https://laurmaedje.github.io/posts/layout-models/


Yeah, one of the things which I always wished for when doing page composition was a way to visualize which paragraphs could be set a line or two longer or shorter while still being set reasonably nicely.

In decades of typesetting, I've had a chapter fall out almost perfectly with nicely pages and appropriately placed figures exactly once (fastest 40 minutes of my life) --- for the rest, it was:

- style the text and place the figures

- check the last page and see if it would be helped by paging tight or loose

- review all the pages and their figure placement to see which was the most problematic/egregious --- fix it

- starting at the beginning, adjust paragraph tightness as necessary, trying to get pages to balance and if need be, figures and references to be placed where the specs call for them --- if need be, adjust figure size/height/placement/style

- if one reaches the end and the selected strategy did not have the desired result, revert back to the initially styled and placed version and try the other strategy

- repeat until everything worked and everything panned out and all pages are balanced and all references/figure placements


> Yeah, one of the things which I always wished for when doing page composition was a way to visualize which paragraphs could be set a line or two longer or shorter while still being set reasonably nicely.

I wrote a LaTeX package [0] that does exactly this. The default settings automatically lengthen paragraphs as necessary, but you can configure it to only tell you which paragraphs can be easily lengthened [1] without actually lengthening any of them.

[0]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/lua-widow-control

[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-3/tb135chernoff-lwc.pdf


Looking forward to trying this out! (not sure how I missed it...) Thanks!

That's awesome! Thank you very much!

In fairness the problem is not easy! JupyterLab only got document-wide undo/redo in 2021 per https://jupyterlab.readthedocs.io/en/3.1.x/getting_started/c... .

Mathmatica has been around since the 80s, Jupyter how long? Far leas.

"Fun" fact: This is partially because Wolfram owned a patent on the "code notebook" invention. Once it expired, Jupyter was created.

We have at least recently accepted the Fingleton report's findings (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-regulator...) which is an attempt to get rid of a bunch of administrative blockers. I'm not aware of any new reactors being announced?


Out of interest, was your intended answer "where you started, facing east"?

FWIW, Claude Opus 4.5 gets this right for me, assuming that is the intended answer. On request, it also gave me a Mathematica program which (after I fixed some trivial exceptions due to errors in units) informs me that using the ITRF00 datum the actual answer is 0.0177593 degrees north and 0.168379 west of where you started (about 11.7 miles away from the starting point) and your rotation is 89.98 degrees rather than 90.

(ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking, for me, get the wrong answer because it correctly gets near the South Pole and then follows a line of latitude 200 times round the South Pole for the second leg, which strikes me as a flatly incorrect interpretation of the words "move forward along the surface of the earth". Was that the "usual error they all used to make"?)


> Out of interest, was your intended answer "where you started, facing east"?

Or anything close to it so long as the logic is right, yes. I care about the reasoning failure, not the small difference between the exact quarter-circumferences of these great circles and 10,000km; (Not that it really matters, but now you've said the answer, this test becomes even less reliable than it already was).

> FWIW, Claude Opus 4.5 gets this right for me, assuming that is the intended answer.

Like I said, now the best ones sometimes don't [always get it wrong].

For me yesterday, Claude (albeit Sonnet 4.5, because my testing is cheap) avoided the south pole issue, but then got the third leg wrong and ended up at the north pole. A while back ChatGPT 5 (I looked the result up) got the answer right, yesterday GPT-5-thinking-mini (auto-selected by the system) got it wrong same way as you report on the south pole but then also got the equator wrong and ended up near the north pole.

"Never" to "unreliable success" is still an improvement.


Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's correct. Just whipped this up, using the WGS-84 datum.

  (use-modules (geo vincenty))
  
  (let walk ((p '(0 0 180))
             (i 0))
    (cond ((= i 3)
           (display p)
           (newline))
          (else
            (walk (apply vincenty
                         (list (car p) (cadr p) (+ 90 (caddr p)) 10000000))
                  (+ i 1)))))
Running this yields:

  (0.01777744062090717 0.16837322410251268 179.98234155229127)
Surely the discrepancy is down to spheroid vs sphere, yeah?

Almost the entirety of Asimov's Robots canon is a meditation on how the Three Laws of Robotics as stated are grossly inadequate!


It's been a long time since I read through my father's Asimov book collection, so pardon my question: but how are these rules considered "laws", exactly? IIRC, USRobotics marketed them as though they were unbreakable like the laws of physics, but the positronic brains were engineered to comply with them - which while better than inlining them with training or inference input - but this was far from foolproof.


They're "laws" in the same sense as aircraft have flight control laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes

There are instances of robots entirely lacking the Three Laws in Asimov's works, as well as lots of stories dealing with the loopholes that inevitably crop up.



Silly concept because as written it's a reference to the Total Perspective Vortex from HHGTTG.

But in the story, when that was used on Zaphod, it turned out to be harmless!


OG Torment Nexus


Hey, I've been on an odyssey to port this (for a very liberal definition of "port") to .NET for many months!

The underlying library [Incremental][0] [is ported][1] though currently unused; the "ported" framework itself doesn't yet include any Bonsai magic, but the terminal-side stuff is [Zoomies][2], in which [this is broadly what it looks like][3] to write a VDOM (scroll down to line 100 to see how to process user interaction, and line 150 to see how that VDOM renders). All very incomplete and with a big long list of features to add, and the current design is not flexible enough yet to accommodate the "table" primitive, but we're slowly getting there.

[0]: https://github.com/janestreet/incremental/

[1]: https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Incremental/

[2]: https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Zoomies

[3]: https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Zoomies/blob/15bf1875ed...


The .NET source build team looked at subtrees (https://github.com/dotnet/arcade/issues/10257#issuecomment-1...).

> Introduces a very messy and complex history which would not work for the repo of our size > Apparently the support in git is buggy and can lead to problems in the repo (the SO is full of examples) > Doesn't support cloaking

(I think by "cloaking" they are referring to https://github.com/premun/dotnet/blob/766c564dd379e634c38739... )


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: