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Hi everyone, I wanted to share a language I made that only uses a series of bracket characters. All operations are prefix-free, meaning one can follow another without ambiguity.

The following program prints "Hello, world!"

  (0)(10)(33)(100)(108)(114)(111)(119)(32)(44)(111)(108)(108)(101)(72)>><<[<><>><<>><<]>>><<
The following prints 25th Fibonacci number:

  (1)(25)(1)><>(1)(0)><>(1)>>>>>><<[(0)><>(1)>>>>>><<[>><>(1)><>>><<(0)><>>>><>(1)><><<<>><>>>><>(0)><>>><>(1)>>>>>><<](0)](1)><><><>><>>>><<


Same. Having finished the course years ago, I remember most vividly the following: never implement your own crypto. Not many details survived the time but it was intellectually rewarding.


Interesting point. While I sympathize with the cause, I personally wouldn't find it the best money spent, had I donated, because it is impossible to measure the impact of the money spent.


For me, Spotify's personalized recommendations (e.g. discover weekly, release radar) have been quite consistent in quality.


> I tag each text file with topic, date and context keywords.

Nice idea. How are you doing that? Also, do you version control your notes?

> What does not work great is on the phone

I maintain an open source project called Dnote (https://github.com/dnote/dnote) which solves this problem for you. It's basically a command line notebook using SQLite + a mobile friendly web interface to which you can sync your notes.

Agree with you that we should avoid being locked into a proprietary formats or platforms. Businesses and platforms come and go, but our notes should stay as readily accessible as possible.


Dnote looks interesting. I don't quite get how it addresses searching and listing notes on the phone.

I add "topic:...", "date:..." and "keyword:" lines in each file, grep through the files to list all topics or sort by topic and group notes by topic/keyword. I also keep the date I started the note in the filename itself.

I just need a good way to search through them on my phone.


Adding lines such as "topic:..." sounds like a very useful and low key solution. I might start trying that. Thanks.

You can use Dnote web app on the phone to do full text search and list notes by book. You can also install the website as a progressive web app for usability.

On the downside, using this web interface subjects users to a third party system (albeit open source) and forces them to give up the autonomy that they enjoy by simply using plaintext files.


That's nice, but it would be awesome to be able to synchronize plain text files using rclone/syncthing - without using dedicated server.


Thanks for the compliment. It is possible to use any other methods to synchronize notes because Dnote stores everything in a single SQLite file. The dedicated server becomes useful for providing a web interface and API access to the notes.


Nice work.

1. What do you mean by "true random"? Aren't the bits generated by a hardware pseudo random at best?

2. Why and how should users trust the randomness of a third party solution that they do not control or see the implementation of?


Hey thanks for the great questions! Happy to elaborate on anything below if it's helpful.

1/ It might be easiest to define in terms of suitability for a particular application. As you probably already know there are a number of industry tests which are useful in evaluating the effectiveness of a random number generator (Diehard, NIST, etc). Our service is built on top of industrial-grade hardware that passes these tests and is suitable for use in cryptography.

2/ Great question. It's easier to reason about in the context of specific use cases. For certain applications it increases trust to outsource RNG to a neutral third party that doesn't have a stake in the outcome.


I'll also add that we're considering open-sourcing our implementation of raw hardware bytes => data as a way to build trust and transparency in how we're generating data.


I always think of this blog post when these posts come up about generating random numbers.

http://gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic

There is a link to ver 1 built out of Legos.


Could you elaborate how that might be the case? Is the argument that the $10 will somehow trickle down into the local economy?


How is it going somewhere else? If course it's being spent in the economy. Essentially it's an export of services.

For large amounts I'm sure some is saved but most workers whether local or foreign bringing in overseas dollars are contributing far more to overall improvement of the economy than someone working at a retail store earning the exact same amount while shuffling around domestic dollars.


I believe he is saying this is inflating the fiat money due to new money throw in the economy not being in sync with the local production, causing the Cantillon effect[1]

[1]: https://mises.org/library/money-inflation-and-business-cycle...


Very nice. What I liked about it is that thumbnails to the article allows readers to skim through the list more quickly and still understand more clearly what they are about.


Personally I have noticed some changes, but nothing that impacted my productivity in any significant way, and paid no more attention.

I believe sometimes we tend to overreact to certain changes that have minimal impact on our lives, because of our attachments to the tools. For instance, on HN, we seem to get a sea of "That's it I'm moving to Firefox/GitLab/etc.." comments often when their counterparts change something. Sometimes those reactions seem warranted, and in this case, not really.


Beanstalk is cool. Just curious, in what ways could it be more simplified? I think we can already just upload our code and forget about it. It could be that I am missing something.


There's a lot of configuration, and not a lot of debug output. Simple things that should be defaults like HTTPS forwarding instead require a barely-documented ngnx patch. If something goes wrong before your app comes up, it doesn't tell you. Logs are spread across several files, most of them meaningless because they're details about the AWS-generated environment.

It does a good enough job of staying running once it's up though, so at least it's easy to forget why it was a pain to set up.


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