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Can you elaborate on that? I only saw a couple small scheduling examples in the book.


Those are small examples but you can scale them up and Z3 can still handle it.

I have no meaningful experience in OR, don’t know how SAT solvers work or how Z3 reduces things to SAT. Yet I was able to use it to attack a really gnarly scheduling problem with hundreds of variables, weird constraints, preferences, etc.

In addition to finding feasible solutions Z3 has an “Optimize” class that can handle soft constraints and objective functions. This is really useful. (I suspect CPLEX/Gurobi would be better at this but Z3 still works well.)


Dyalog also deviates from the ISO standard, adding things from J like hooks and forks. IIRC, GNU APL's deviations are to bring it closer to IBM APL2, but it's been a while since I cared about any of this.


For some reason, in my Firefox, the page renders with a massive symbol obscuring the bottom half of the page.


It happens when you have addthis.com blocked - that's a facebook logo. You can hide it with the developer tools.


The main problem with issue trackers is similar to the problem of programming forums before Stack Overflow. Issue trackers become a chronological pile-up of crap. Stack Overflow is an incredible leap from earlier programming forums because it isolated what was valuable (questions, answers) and moved the chaff out of the way (comments, revising the question).

JIRA is basically the most sophisticated programming forum, for issue tracking. What we need is the Stack Overflow of issue tracking, that figures out what the real entities and actions are and eliminates the chronological pile-up.


Funny, I thought Stack Overflow was a spam site.

Frequently I have to barge through ten screenfuls of code that don't work before I finally get to a correct answer.

To add insult to injury SO doesn't allow questions about many important topics such as "how do I eliminate the wheat from the chaff for all the libraries I could possibly use to do this?"

It might be 2035 when they finally add parenthesis to all the Python code examples so they work in Python 3.


Well, the idea that most people forgot or didn't realize (including me) is actually StackOverflow is a wiki so you can edit and fix other people's answers. You might need some reputations points before you can do that though.

The idea was to get the definitive answer as in Wikipedia. It was a good time when SO came out, afterwards it degraded in quality like anything else in universe.


> StackOverflow is a wiki so you can edit and fix other people's answers.

    Your edit was rejected because:

    [x] It deviates from the original intent of the post
    [x] It doesn't preserve the goals of the post's owner
That's what I got for updating an answer that was 3 years out-of-date. I had to post mine as a separate answer. That was 3 years ago, so my answer is now 3 years old (still accurate) and the original is now 6 years old. It has more than twice as many upvotes as mine, which languishes at the bottom of the page.

I have better things to do than labor for the wonks-run-wild at StackOverflow.


It's fine if you don't agree with my analogy or don't like S.O. but I don't think this contributes much to the discussion of how to make issue trackers.


It'd be cool if you could extract from bug reports (or test runs) when an "issue" occurs, and count that as an upvote. I've seen sth like that that up on dashboards at a company, they had an in-house test cluster that was continually running the think, counting exceptions, and showing the leaderboard of exceptions up on a big screen.


That's an interesting take. How would it work in practice? I would think that most teams want direct control what gets surfaced via severity, due date, etc. Or at least that's what they're used to...


I don't know exactly how it would work. But if I wanted to figure it out, I would start by taking a fairly large project's ticket tracker and sort through every reply on every ticket and try to categorize them into buckets.

For instance, I'd expect you to find "me too" comments, and those should be eliminated, just as "me too" "answers" on S.O. are eliminated.

I'd expect you to find status-update queries and replies. So that suggests you need a mechanism for pinging for an update that doesn't require a bunch of text from user and developer, or else some mechanism by which the freshness of a ticket becomes irrelevant.add new answers to old questions.)

I'd expect you to find people posting workarounds, which would suggest that you want workarounds to be a different "type" than regular commentary, and you probably want them called out separately somehow. It sucks to have to read through three pages of identical me-too complaints to find a workaround and then read through another two pages of people thanking the workaround author for the workaround, as frequently happens on the Ubuntu tracker.

I'm not sure if these are helpful examples or not, but I think when you see a pile of messages that you have to read through to extract content, you are looking at an opportunity to work out the hidden semantics of the thing, and turn those hidden semantics into first-class entities and actions, to make a more structured environment that will save people time.

I have seen too many JIRA deployments where the only plan was, make the state machine larger and require more separate fields from everybody. But those fields and states really just represent the hope that you might not have to read that pile of comments. In practice, most of those fields wind up empty, most of those states wind up skipped over, and you still have to read the whole ticket. Why? Because a JIRA ticket is still fundamentally a chronologically-sorted forum thread.


There is not, to my knowledge, a really commonly-used workflow that starts at Word and ends at typesetting. This is something Pandoc purports to do, but I would expect to lose most of your manual formatting tweaks from Word in the process.

Pandoc is a good tool for automating workflows that start with some other format and end with LaTeX.

Another good option if you like Emacs is org-mode, which has a LaTeX export, among other things.


I have used ConTeXt a fair amount and I like it quite a bit. I would actually say it is easier than LaTeX, in the sense that it is more discoverable. After you use it for a bit, you see that the macros are all built on each other in predictable ways, so they all tend to take the same options and achieve similar effects. In LaTeX, the answer to your questions is usually "there's a package for that," whereas in ConTeXt, the answer is often "this macro takes the same options as this other macro, so just pass them in."

What is different about ConTeXt is the prevailing attitude towards using plain TeX from it. LaTeX really seems to consider plain TeX quite unsafe. I suspect this is because it is hard to build a resilient declarative system on highly weird and procedural TeX. ConTeXt, on the other hand, kind of encourages you to use TeX directly. So that led me to learning more about plain TeX, which now seems much less scary to me than when I was using LaTeX.


> I would actually say it is easier than LaTeX, in the sense that it is more discoverable.

Agreed. I think what I was trying to say is that LaTeX will have more answers on Stack Overflow. However, once you've found the command (and you can get an awful long way with the ten listed at the beginning of the reference manual) then the options are well documented.

> What is different about ConTeXt is the prevailing attitude towards using plain TeX from it. LaTeX really seems to consider plain TeX quite unsafe.

This is very interesting. I've found the same difference but in the opposite way. I've had to resort to using plain TeX in LaTeX quite a bit, usually buried in an environment or a command, to achieve what I want. And yes, it can be fragile, but sometimes it is the only way without using KOMA-Script.

I've found that ConTeXt has usually already considered what I want to do as a use case, because its scope is quite a bit more broad than LaTeX.


Most of my questions on tex.SE are about ConTeXt, simply because all paths in ConTeXt are less explored than LaTeX. The frontier is nearer. But I have never failed to get a useful and informative solution from one of the handful of experts.

I wish I had sources for my other comments handy. If I have time I will try to dig some up.


This complaint is basically the reason XeTeX was written, which accesses your standard system fonts instead. LuaTeX also handles TTF and OpenFont without trouble. These both produce PDFs instead of DVI or Postscript output (per your comment below).


I'm not sure why you're not replying to that comment, but yes, there's a bunch of software created to have better defaults than vanilla TeX. This reinforces the point.


Not really, because when people say "use LaTeX", they don't really mean you should use only the original version of the software, they're talking about the overall suite of TeX derived programs.


Really, because workarounds prove the point. Actual TeX doesn't do what people want.


Even the article says there's a LaTeX fetish. Nobody is pushing vanilla TeX, the point is arguing against a strawman.


Evolution through composition is not a bug.


Judging by how hard it is to hire web developers, yes.


I did this dance last year, so let me give you some free advice.

Show your kids how to save and how NOT to overwrite your save in BoTW.

Having my kids blow away my ~20 hours of work completely deflated me and I have not been able to get back into it since.


I have fond memories of playing Final Fantasy II as a kid. I downloaded Octopath Traveller on the Switch and couldn't get through the introduction I was so bored. Going back and playing Final Fantasy on the NES Classic, I can't believe I used to have so much time on my hands and so much patience to play this stuff.

Then again, I've gotten deeply in chess lately...


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