Top all-time · #1098
randomhacks.net
Personal blog · randomhacks.net · on HN as ekiddprogrammingsystems
randomhacks.net is a personal blog at randomhacks.net about programming and systems. Since 2007, 65 different Hacker News readers have linked it 84 times, most often “Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)13 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2014-06-27
- Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2008-01-15
- McCarthy's Ambiguous Operator (2005)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-02-12
- Bayes' rule in Haskell (2007)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2007-04-10
- Generalised error handling in Haskell3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-12-09
- Bare Metal Rust: Building Kernels in Rust3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-12-29
- /substudy/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-12-22
- 13 Ways of Looking at a Ruby Symbol2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-01-19
- Monads in 15 minutes: Backtracking and Maybe (2007)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-05
- Proving sorted lists correct using the Coq proof assistant (2015)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-06
What Hacker News says?
Not to take away from the sheer amaze-balls power that lisp offers, you can get Ruby superpowers just from one book, Metaprogramming Ruby 2, which is sadly out of print. Here's a 2005 article comparing Ruby favorably to Lisp: http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-accepta... I learned Lisp, went through the whole of HtDP, tried to get into it, but Ruby's friendliness is really special and unique.
Comment linking /2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp/
on “Elixir Is Erlang, not Ruby”Submitted Rust lifetimes: Getting away with things that would be reckless in C++ as a story · 231 points
HN discussion> Did you ever feel like you were answering correctly, on close cards specifically, not because of an improved understanding but because you were associating the correct answer with the prompt/excerpt? I actually suspect that associating the word with the context helps , as surprising as that might be. Let's say I grab a few sentences from an interesting article, and I boldface a word. I'll mark the card as "pass" i…
Comment linking /substudy/
on “FSRS: A modern, efficient spaced repetition algorithm”Submitted Bayes' rule in Haskell (2007) as a story · 176 points
HN discussionEric Kidd? http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-a...
Comment linking /articles/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp
on “Programming With Nothing: FizzBuzz in the lambda calculus in Ruby”Submitted McCarthy's Ambiguous Operator (2005) as a story · 157 points
HN discussionIn response to your last sentence. Just wanted to mention that Ruby was highly inspired by Perl, particularly its regular expressions and it has a variety of perlisms. Kind of surprised you went to python and not ruby. Your lisp mention reminds me of this: http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-accepta...
Comment linking /2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp/
on “Perl 11”Submitted Bare Metal Rust 2: Retarget your compiler so interrupts are not evil as a story · 140 points
HN discussion> In Haskell, functions do not fail in traditional sense - they just return indication of failure. That's too general a statement. Haskell functions certainly can fail in the traditional sense. As a trivial example, "head []" is a well-typed Haskell expression that will raise an exception when evaluated; if the exception is not caught (using a traditional exception handler), then it propagates to an error, and the p…
Comment linking /2007/03/10/haskell-8-ways-to-report-errors/
on “Escaping Hell with Monads (2017)”Submitted Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005) as a story · 139 points
HN discussion'Swift is the better rust' inspired by the why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp debate: http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-accepta...
Comment linking /2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp/
on “Swift is a more convenient Rust”Submitted Jim Hefferon's Linear Algebra: A free textbook with fascinating applications as a story · 97 points
HN discussionI love Ruby so much as a scripting language, I ask myself why I don't just use it as an "acceptable lisp" [1] for my research, rather than Haskell. Haskell is more easily parallelized than any other language I've experienced. Alas, my experiments with Ruby 3.1 parallel extensions flunked. Who cares about single core speed? I was always put off by Rust syntax (it's a fly-pollinated flower, to attract C programmers),…
Comment linking /2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp/
on “Faster Ruby: Thoughts from the outside”Submitted Build Your Own Probability Monads as a story · 66 points
HN discussionSounds interesting. I've been trying to use movies (something called "substudy"* which converts subtitled movies to a csv file which I then import them as cards into anki), but I find it very difficult. Could you point me in the direction of some of these simple audio books? * substudy is here: http://www.randomhacks.net/substudy/
Comment linking /substudy/
on “Show HN: Mandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation”Submitted McCarthy's Ambiguous Operator (2005) as a story · 30 points
HN discussionSuppose you have a probability monad, implementing enumeration or random sampling. Like Amb but with probabilities attached. bayesRule :: (Prob a) -> (a -> Prob b) -> b -> Prob a bayesRule prior likelihood data = do h <- prior d <- likelihood h guard $ d == data return h I don’t actually do Haskell...just thinking out loud. Looks like it was written similarly here http://www.randomhacks.net/files/build-your-own-prob…
Comment linking /files/build-your-own-probability-monads.pdf
on “Bayes’ Theorem in the 21st Century (2013) [pdf]”Submitted Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005) as a story · 27 points
HN discussionWhen I was a child, I always found math easy. Fractions, calculus, formulas—they were always visual. Fractions were pizzas; equations were deformations of the plane; integration was tracing out a shape using a slope. So I'm sympathetic to the author's desire for better visualization and teaching tools. But when I reached college, I became frustrated with math. It just wasn't easy anymore, the way programming was: I…
Comment linking /darcs/probability-monads/probability-monads.pdf
on “Kill Math”Submitted Why Hygienic Macros Rock as a story · 26 points
HN discussionThis post has a good overview of what can be gained by the use of these techniques: http://www.randomhacks.net/2007/02/10/map-fusion-and-haskell... > Using just these two rules, I saw a 225% increase in the number of nodes processed per second. Under the right circumstances, GHC can even outperform C code by applying these kinds of inter-procedural optimizations. Also, we have QuickCheck, which allows us to check pr…
Comment linking /2007/02/10/map-fusion-and-haskell-performance/
on “Compiler Optimizations are Awesome”Submitted Eric Kidd: Why Ruby is an Acceptable Lisp as a story · 22 points
HN discussionYou can write a kernel in pretty much every language. There are some experiments with Rust: http://www.randomhacks.net/bare-metal-rust/ There are several reasons to choose a language rather than another. I personally don't like Rust at all, so I don't see any reason to use it, neither do I see any advantage in using it. But that's only my opinion. A lot of osdev currently is made by hobbyist (not counting the handfu…
Comment linking /bare-metal-rust/
on “Thor – A minimalistic operating system in assembly and C++”Submitted Bare Metal Rust: Low-Level CPU I/O Ports as a story · 16 points
HN discussion>Neither python nor ruby are lisp. You may or may not agree, but you'll probably be interested in Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp: http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-a... Covered on HN previously here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416589
Comment linking /articles/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp
on “What Pythonistas Think of Ruby”Submitted Smart classification using Bayesian monads in Haskell as a story · 15 points
HN discussionWell, I think it's because Ruby has borrowed a lot of features from Lisp (and Clojure is also a Lisp). Here's an article that argues that it is actually an acceptable Lisp: http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-a...
Comment linking /articles/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp
on “Why I am excited about Clojure”- vq · 2015-11-16
Submitted Bare Metal Rust 3: Configure your PIC to handle interrupts correctly as a story · 8 points
HN discussion This is a pretty old post of mine (2007), and I was a bit surprised to see it on Hacker News this morning! For those of you who find all the Haskell impenetrable, let me summarize: 1. As raverbashing points out, the key takeaway here is "removing the impossible and normalizing is equivalent to Bayes rule." This can be represented in a programming language using a "die unless X is true" instruction and some magic beh…
Comment linking /darcs/probability-monads/probability-monads.pdf
on “Bayes' rule in Haskell (2007)”Submitted AWS outage timeline & downtimes by recovery strategy as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
