Top all-time · #2291
Bill Wadge
Personal blog · billwadge.wordpress.commathsciencewriting
Bill Wadge's personal blog at billwadge.wordpress.com covers math, science and writing. Since 2011, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 98 times, most often “Laws of the Universe and Teaching”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (16) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Bill Wadge's blog for informal accounts of the Lucid dataflow language he helped create, plus posts on academia, foundations of mathematics and his inventions. One commenter calls the Lucid origins series a nice place to start.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- One commenter calls an excerpt "pretty neat"; another calls the Lucid origins posts a "nice series" and the recounting of Lucid's creation "truly awesome", advi
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 16 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Just another WordPress.com site
Most-linked posts?
- Laws of the Universe and Teaching4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-03-24
- Honest We’s Just Funnin’ – serious work viciously parodied3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-02-06
- Extensional Higher Order Prolog3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-01-20
- PYFL: Putting the fun back in functional programming2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-08
- B Before A2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-04-08
- Multidimensional Dataflow in Lucid2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-11-28
- Department of Redundancy Department2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-12-16
- Double Slit Experiment No Mystery2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-10-25
- Ridiculously easy T/F questions that students still got wrong2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-05
- I deduce you are studying logic2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-09-30
What Hacker News says?
https://billwadge.wordpress.com Informal descriptions of my inventions, including Lucid lang Foundations of Math explained. My adventures in Academia Lame jokes
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted The secret of academic success, or fun filled failure if you prefer as a story · 239 points
HN discussionThis reminds me of an article on HN from earlier this year by a reviewer of grant proposals, about how often they receive applications that clearly describe the problem the applicant wants to solve, but don't describe an idea with which to solve it: https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/10/im-good-enough-im...
Comment linking /2020/02/10/im-good-enough-im-smart-enough-and-dog-gone-it-people-like-me-writing-grant-applications/
on “The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business”Submitted Writing Grant Applications as a story · 160 points
HN discussionIt seems the writing that he was referring to is this: https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/honest-wes-just-f... I'm not really seeing where that could have been offensive. Its easy to disagree with, of course, but was it attacking anyone?
Comment linking /2020/02/06/honest-wes-just-funnin-serious-work-viciously-parodied/
on “The secret of academic success, or fun filled failure if you prefer”Submitted Software Development: Mistakes I Made as a story · 127 points
HN discussionThe primary fun filled failure, https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/honest-wes-just-f... , is a pretty neat excerpt I had never read before, especially as one who toes that Wizard approach towards formal verification.
Comment linking /2020/02/06/honest-wes-just-funnin-serious-work-viciously-parodied/
on “The secret of academic success, or fun filled failure if you prefer”Submitted Double Slit Experiment No Mystery as a story · 107 points
HN discussionAnd goes well with the article[1] we discussed yesterday[2] ! [1] https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2016/01/08/b-before-a/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19608883
Comment linking /2016/01/08/b-before-a/
on “Ask HN: Best place to start learning about Markov Chains?”Submitted I deduce you are studying logic as a story · 104 points
HN discussionAnd the scary thing is that one can do even better: https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/extensional-highe... https://github.com/acharal/hopes
Comment linking /2016/01/18/extensional-higher-order-prolog/
on “A gentle introduction to Prolog (2013)”Submitted Choose Your Paradox – the downside of the Axiom of Choice as a story · 97 points
HN discussionhttps://billwadge.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/laws-of-the-unive... Wadge’s Law (of Meetings). Before every formal meeting there’s a smaller, more exclusive, less formal meeting where all the important decisions are made. This is based on decades of experience in academia and friends’ experience in industry and government. Sometimes there’s an even smaller, more exclusive, less formal pre pre meeting where all the decis…
Comment linking /2019/03/24/laws-of-the-universe-and-teaching/
on “Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)”Submitted Extensional Higher Order Prolog as a story · 81 points
HN discussionThe pinnacle of confusion can be seen in the following abomination: x = x + 1 Bill Wadge invented the dataflow language Lucid in the early 1970s by pondering this very paradox. He wrote a nice series of blog posts about it that begins at http://billwadge.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/lucid-the-origins . His insight was that x = x + 1 isn't contradictory once you recognize that the two x's have implicit temporal subscript…
Comment linking /2011/03/23/lucid-the-origins
on “Coding Horror: Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats”Submitted The Intensional Spreadsheet as a story · 79 points
HN discussionInnovative ways to improve learning are always exciting, but leading with a hypothesis contrary to my personal experience[1] is unlikely to convince me the conclusion be valid. https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/the-secret-of-aca... > "The temptation is to write papers proclaiming the superiority of your work and the pathetic inadequacy of the contributions of A, B, C, …" [1] in particular, working memory is…
Comment linking /2020/02/06/the-secret-of-academic-success-or-fun-filled-failure-if-you-prefer/
on “Why books don't work (2019)”Submitted Map/Reduce for Mortals as a story · 76 points
HN discussionLucid was called a dataflow language at one point, but is more accurately an 'eduction' language. The key difference is that Lucid relies on demand-driven evaluation, wheras dataflow semantics entirely relies on the more push-based semantics of data becoming available to fire an operation. I suppose you could call it 'tagged-token demand-driven dataflow', but its semantics are much different from other dataflow lang…
Comment linking /2012/03/31/lucid-eduction/
on “I deduce you are studying logic”Submitted In This Talk as a story · 68 points
HN discussionI'm not sure which way the comments went, but there are some that appear both here and there. One doesn't seem to have popped up here, but is so good that I must repeat it (it's not mine!): > That thing that you are studying… we call it denotational logic. > - JoshH ( https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/i-deduce-you-are-... )
Comment linking /2015/09/30/i-deduce-you-are-studying-logic/
on “I deduce you are studying logic”Submitted Lucid – the origin story as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI'm certainly interested in this, but for different reasons. Over the years, several people have bent my ears about Duane's theorem that suggests the double-slit experiment is not demonstrating quantum effects at all. It strikes me that this could help establish or overturn such claims. https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2019/10/25/double-slit-exper... Any thoughts? Could it help to test it on a planet-sized scale?
Comment linking /2019/10/25/double-slit-experiment-no-mystery/
on “Quantum Double-Slit Experiment Offers Hope for Earth-Size Telescope”Submitted Parametric Programming – an equational approach to OO and beyond as a story · 57 points
HN discussionIt is possible that you are studying modal logic. https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/i-deduce-you-are-...
Comment linking /2015/09/30/i-deduce-you-are-studying-logic/
on “Modal Logic Playground”Submitted Free Sex Pot Bust Rap – Introduction to Noun Talk as a story · 53 points
HN discussionSo happy to have stumbled upon this, this is truly awesome, a recounting of Lucid's creation and various details by one of its creators. Probably best to start at the beginning: https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/lucid-the-origins... And then work your way forward. The book is also great: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~plaice/archive/WWW/1985/B-AP85-L... This stuff has a very direct line to the modern "FRP" ide…
Comment linking /2011/03/23/lucid-the-origins/
on “Multidimensional Dataflow in Lucid”Submitted Multidimensional Dataflow in Lucid as a story · 53 points
HN discussionfollowup to https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/laws-of-the-unive... -- previously on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19478384
Comment linking /2019/03/24/laws-of-the-universe-and-teaching/
on “Nuclear Pedagogy”Submitted Gödel, Grammar, Go – The Limits of Rules and Facts as a story · 52 points
HN discussion
