H
HXA7241
hxa.name · Personal blog · on HN since 2008
HXA7241 is a long-running handmade personal site with essays on programming, philosophy, software engineering, and small graphics projects.
What HN saysHN commenters describe it as lightweight, handmade, and unusual in design, and discuss its Wittgenstein-for-programmers essay and its idea of part blindness.
17HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
23stories submitted
146story points
4 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Wittgenstein for programmers4 people · 44 points · first shared 2011 · 7 comments on HN
- 2Tiny Global Illumination renderer in C++, AS3, Ruby, Python, Lua, Scala and OCAML4 people · 8 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 3Genetics Basics for Programmers2 people · 8 points · first shared 2009 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Software as web2 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 5In Lisp, should lists be replaced with trees?1 people · 47 points · first shared 2011 · 40 comments on HN
- 6The aim of software engineering - HXA72411 people · 8 points · first shared 2011 · 2 comments on HN
- 7A fault in blogs - HXA72411 people · 7 points · first shared 2011 · 6 comments on HN
- 8Programming language power versus genome: can they be compared?1 people · 3 points · first shared 2010 · 1 comments on HN
- 9What part of design *is* possible?1 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 10The second basic question of software engineering1 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 11Reusability by Orthogonalysis1 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 12Distinguishing abstraction and change - HXA72411 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 13Is parsing not an illusory problem caused by using the wrong data structure?1 people · 2 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 14Software Engineering And Civil Engineering1 people · 2 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 15The 'ideology' of software engineering1 people · 1 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
hxa7241 · 2022-04-07
https://www.hxa.name/
‒ lightweight, handmade, maybe a little bit of unusualness of design, quite a few writings, some software, other oddities, and almost 20 years old.
aphextron · 2018-04-17
I'd argue that every programmer interested in language design needs to read Wittgenstein. His later work in ethics and epistemology (that the article recommends, Philosophical Investigations) is hit or miss, but his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which deals with the nature of language as it relates to our ability to think and formulate ideas, is undeniable. He essentially builds a framework for breaking reality down into logically composable components which can be reasoned over in their own right, regardless of semantics.
See this article which was posted here a few years ago: Wittgenstien for Programmers http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20110219T1113Z.html
yolesaber · 2011-09-12
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
It has been a while since I read it, but I had always imagined the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" as a large function in which you input syntactically-correct sentences and it returns the truth-value, which can then be used to determine the clarity of the "picture" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus#The_Pictur… Truly fascinating. I should re-read it sometime. I feel like it has some parallels with the work I am doing in my "Design of Programming Languages" course.
If you have a background in analytic philosophy, you may find this of interest: http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20110219T1113Z.html [Wittgenstein for Programmers]
edit: well I'll be, hxa7241 himself just posted the link. Great minds think alike perhaps? ;)
ableal · 2009-05-08
Excellent taste in tinkering, but ... ahem ... aren't those a tad on the infrastructure side ? ("Is this the right room for an argument ?", or are you setting a subtle trap ? ;-)
I don't doubt that most of the (non-idle, non-phone/TV/etc.) CPU cycles in the world are probably being burned by executing code written in C/C++. But the stuff in my shopping bag probably also did better than 90% of its movement by truck/train/ship.
P.S. Mark Dufour's ShedSkin may have you covered for 100x of that 200x speed hit you mentioned in another thread: http://www.hxa.name/minilight/#comparison is instructive (one small case, restricted, etc. Void where prohibited by law).
d3nj4l · 2023-01-02
I’ve seen the general idea here called “part blindness” before: https://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20131124T0927Z.html
kbob · 2011-02-21
I found Minilight yesterday. It is both more and less than a ray tracer, being a global illumination renderer. It was created as an exercise to learn new languages. Its creator has implemented it in C, Scheme, Scala, C++, OCaml, Lua, Ruby and Flex 2. Others have implemented it in Python, Java, F#, C#, and Clojure.
http://www.hxa.name/minilight/