willrshansen's comments

willrshansen | 6 days ago | on: Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config

The way sidebery let's you customize it's right click menu seems to be the right way to go about it

willrshansen | 1 month ago | on: AI is a horse (2024)

AI is a quantum horse

willrshansen | 2 months ago | on: Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards

The first example on the main page has a formula with two variables being updated from changing one value. The immediate question I have is if I change the output, where does the extra degree of freedom come from on the inputs? Does one stay locked in place? Unclear.

I am a huge fan of the concept though. It's been bugging me for years that my spreadsheet doesn't allow editing text fields after filtering and sorting them down to the subset I want. I have to go all the way back to the mess of unsorted input rows to actually edit them.

willrshansen | 3 months ago | on: The programmers who live in Flatland

Thought this was going to be about the new discovery of a 1d spaceship in conway's game of life. Stuff is nuts. https://conwaylife.com/book/conway_life_book.pdf

willrshansen | 3 months ago | on: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

I remain utterly baffled how they made a lisp compiler with malbolge

willrshansen | 4 months ago | on: How devtools map minified JS code back to your TypeScript source code

2nd order offset. The offset from the <offset from the start of the file>

willrshansen | 4 months ago | on: Are-we-fast-yet implementations in Oberon, C++, C, Pascal, Micron and Luon

MicrOberon

willrshansen | 5 months ago | on: Is life a form of computation?

And so it falls to me to link the relevant SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-17

willrshansen | 8 months ago | on: Proposal: GUI-first, text-based mechanical CAD inspired by software engineering

I got into FreeCAD's python interface, and then Cadquery for 3d printing a few years back, and I think you've got about 70% of the solution.

Things you've got right:

   - Human-readable text file is source of truth
   - GUI editing is first-class, because it's easier to work on (most of the time)

Features your proposed solution is missing that I want:

   - Full power of an established programming language.  Yaml or json won't cut it.
   - Code and GUI on equal footing.  Edit in GUI -> see generated code.  Edit in code -> see result on model.

The main problem with Cadquery is that it's entirely code-first, and you lose out on the intuitiveness of GUI editing

One of the less obvious things I really like about dealing with code cad is that feature selection can be based on intent. Like "upper-rightmost feature" rather than "feature closest to this coordinate I just clicked". There's got to be a good way to incorporate this aspect into the "edit in GUI -> code is generated" step (without just requiring manual code editing), but I'm not good enough at UX immediately see it.