brassica VS hn-search

I’ve done something like this before to call Haskell from C++ (in [0]), so that I can build my GUI using Qt. It worked pretty well, except that I ran into various difficult-to-resolve linking problems on both Windows and Linux. After a year or two of trying to maintain it, I gave up and switched to a protocol where both sides pass JSON over stdin/stdout. This particular piece of software doesn’t require a huge amount of communication or shared data, so it works well enough.

The really nice thing about the original interop code, though, is that GHC’s new WASM backend uses essentially the same foreign function interface to export functions to JavaScript. So with only some minor modifications, I was able to get the same program working on a webpage [1], which I think is pretty cool.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

[1] At the risk of DDOS’ing my poor little home server: https://bradrn.com/brassica/

GHC’s WASM backend is already really useful! I also used it to port one of my own programs to the browser [0], albeit not using the DOM as this person did. Documentation is still sparse, but it’s a very similar process to creating a shared foreign library.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

No experience with Rust, but for a couple of personal projects I’ve written the logic in Haskell and the GUI in C++ (e.g. https://github.com/bradrn/brassica/blob/master/ARCHITECTURE....). It works pretty well, at least for smaller projects — the basic idea is that the Haskell code gets compiled into a library (static on Windows, dynamic on Linux) which the C++ side can link to. I’d imagine doing the same with Rust would be even easier, since it’s less of a pain to marshal stuff across the language barrier.

The biggest one for me is undoubtedly my custom keyboard layout Conkey [0], which I use constantly (including for typing this very comment). I hate the way the base US layout tends to get distorted in other keyboard layouts with good support for non-ASCII characters, so Conkey had the explicit goal of retaining that basic unshifted layout. I’ve also ended up porting Conkey to Mac and Linux — and given that I’m slowly switching from Windows to Linux, at least the Linux ports have ‘scratched my own itch’ too, which is nice.

Also, I made a utility to archive the full text of every website I view and store it in a SQLite database for searching. It’s proven pretty useful when I want to find something I saw a while ago and then forgot. (I haven’t attempted to open-source it, though — it consists of three entirely separate components, two of which were a pain to set up. I must try to get it into a more usable state one of these days.)

What else… my sound change applier [1], perhaps? Not that I use it very much, because I only need it on those occasions when I want to do some conlanging, which I haven’t had much time for recently. Actually, sound change appliers strike me as being very much a ‘scratch own itch’ type of project in general… sometimes it feels like every conlanger has written their own, and no two can agree on a nice design. Everyone just has their own unique preferred way of doing things.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

Recently I’ve been trying to do some GTK+ programming again, as a change from my more recent attempts to use Qt with Haskell. Alas, when I try to build the example application from the documentation, I get an error:

- Ads with Psychological tricks

Truly good websites have around 2 facts per 10 word sentence, and get instantly to the chase. Also: good websites give you the names of all their competitors/alternative websites before showing their own stuff, and give you further reading.

Right now the world of technology is supposedly more innovative than ever, but somehow Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org/) and Search Hackernews (https://hn.algolia.com/) beat billion dollar search engines.

Articles written decades ago are still unsurpassed in terms of quality and ease of understanding, but the best modern websites can do is textbook explanations. It is time society graduates from boilerplate buzzword textbook culture.

Now the gems of the internet are slowly being buried beneath mountains of trash.

If something sounds boilerplate it isn't good enough.

Don't bother saying something that has been said before, and better.

>for more detail: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Oh, I see. We actually discussed Pound about four years ago - just a little back and forth about the ABC of Reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196681

>What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist?

I'm not sure I particularly have one; I haven't read any of his longer political or cultural (i.e. non-literary) works. I just think it's silly to correlate an approach to translation that you dislike with fascism. Especially as I'm not sure it even makes sense on its own terms: I can only read your comment as 'lazy translator? Figures that he would be a fascist', but if I imagine the type of translation a fascist would approve of, the approach I picture is fastidious, fussy, concerned with fidelity to the point of stickler-ishness. (Isn't that from where we get 'grammar nazi'?)

And oh, well, since you ask I'll take a shy at it: my vague sense is that he became fascist because saw a society in decline due to it becoming more and more a sham society: opulence without virtue, power without vigour, money no longer tied to actually existing goods. (Of course, all of this shades easily into antisemitism.) He saw fascism as the answer; It's easier to see in retrospect that it wasn't.

"multiplayer notepad" goes back 15 years at least - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... notepad&sort=byDate&type=comment

it was used back with a popular website which opened a text document and anyone viewing could type, but I can't remember the name. That became a thing in Google Docs, Microsoft Office, Floobits, and lots of self-hosted and cloned sites.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [email protected].

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

I understand the reason for repeating these sentiments—it's the same reason why they get upvoted to the top of threads*—but repetition of this kind is what we're most trying to avoid here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* I've marked this one off topic now.

I was looking for it in the guidelines. There are a couple of conventions for postings. Consider a bit of prior examples: [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=show+hn]

yeah there are only three stories coming up from the site search

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=postgres+clustering

only one is semanthically correct, the other pick up the wrong version of clustering (i.e. k-means instead of multi master writes)

but yeah if one doesn't test the hard cases, how does one know it preserves semantics :D

Like dismissing the work of Feyerabend or Wittgenstein without seemingly having read either:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...