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Idle Cycles
Personal blog · idle.nprescott.comprogrammingmath
Idle Cycles is a personal blog at idle.nprescott.com about programming and math. Since 2016, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “Why Bother with Markdown? (2020)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Why Bother with Markdown? (2020)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-24
- K-Means Clustering in Klong (2019)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-12-22
- Ray Tracing in J2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-04
What Hacker News says?
I wrote up a few of my own thoughts[0] on moving away from writing markdown to writing HTML directly. At this point I have a small bit of code to wrap things into an <article> tag include a <header>, <footer> with links to a home page and include some boilerplate like <meta> tags. I don't think I've sacrificed anything in terms of best practices and actually gained a few things in writing more semantic HTML which I…
Comment linking /2020/why-bother-with-markdown.html
on “Text-Only Websites”Submitted Ray Tracing in J as a story · 87 points
HN discussionI had a similar idea recently, originally I intended to try and identify "fashionable" color palettes, which worked pretty well: https://idle.nprescott.com/2016/scraping-color-palettes.html and only later tried branching out to the 100 most popular sites: https://idle.nprescott.com/2016/image-capture-crawler.html I tried ImageMagick's histogram functionality and a K-Means but wasn't happy with the results. I didn't…
Comment linking /2016/image-capture-crawler.html
on “Show HN: Colors Used by Popular Sites”Submitted Why Bother with Markdown? (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI've been teaching myself J and dabbled in a few other APL-family languages before that (Klong and Dyalog's APL mostly). I don't have any specific goal in mind and have been doing it for fun more than anything -- I recently tried writing a minimal ray tracer[0] for example. I've been surprised at how much I liked writing it. J can be derided for being a "puzzle language"[1], which isn't entirely unfair, but I've fou…
Comment linking /2020/ray-tracing-in-j.html
on “J for C Programmers”Submitted K-Means Clustering in Klong (2019) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI read the Klong book [0] and for me it "clicked" in a way that J/K never had. The author did a really nice job paring down the language and cleaning up some of the ambiguities in a way that made it approachable. Also, after reading it I've found APL and J more approachable, which is encouraging. If you'll forgive the style, I took a swing at implementing k-means clustering in Klong a few months ago [1]. While I did…
Comment linking /2019/k-means-clustering-in-klong.html
on “Klong: a Simple Array Language”Submitted Understanding Asteroids (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionUsing the RSS feed for the content seems clever, and useful as a means to build the static search widget outside the content generation phase of site building (or for adding after the fact). I recently had a similar (less well fleshed-out) idea[0], but built the search corpus during the generation of my static site (this was made easy by the fact that I wrote the generator too). The results aren't nearly so impressi…
Comment linking /2017/text-search-on-a-static-blog.html
on “Show HN: A search widget for static web sites”ZFS has been on my list of things I should learn "some day" for a long time. I installed Fedora a while ago and ended up opted into Btrfs without really trying. I have been pleasantly surprised with it and have used it on 2 low-impact servers and 3 personal computers for about a year. I don't tend to do anything very interesting to tax the filesystem so it is most important that things just work day to day and the l…
Comment linking /2022/systemd-nspawn-and-btrfs.html
on “Ask HN: Btrfs VS ZFS for Linux personal computer in 2022?”This reminded me of a prior discussion[0] on bulk data generation in SQLite with Rust (vs Python vs PyPy) which previously led me to trying out two different techniques using just SQLite[1]. The approach here is so similar I tried my prior solution on the slowest VPS I have access to (1 vCPU core 2.4GHz, 512Mi, $2.50/month from vultr): sqlite> create table users (id blob primary key not null, created_at text not nul…
Comment linking /2021/bulk-data-generation-in-sqlite.html
on “15k inserts/s with Rust and SQLite (2021)”