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Hillel is taking a break

@hillelwayne.com

5.2K followers 100 following 4.4K posts

Formal methods, software history, chocolatiering. DMs open and happy to meet up in Chicago. Currently writing *Logic for Programmers* (out Q1 2026) Newsletter: https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/

buttondown.email

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 1d

P => Q means that Q is true in all cases P is true, meaning that P is a "stronger" statement (assuming P != Q)

Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 1d

(Not back for good, just popped in to do my small part in helping with the current crisis)

Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 1d

Help us feed Chicagoans who lost their SNAP benefits! Until the end of the month, buy Logic for Programmers with the coupon `feedchicago` to get 50% off. All royalties from the coupon will be donated to the Greater Chicago Food Depository (@fooddepository.bsky.social) leanpub.com/logic/c/feed...

Logic for Programmers

The mathematics that will help you in your everyday programming.

leanpub.com

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 18d

Doom spiraled today, taking a short bsky break until I'm in a better place

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 18d

Being really into the Roman Empire is a major red flag, because you should be really into the Roman Republic instead

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 18d

Logic for programmers is now the 136th best-selling book on Leanpub! "Building Backbone Plugins", your days are NUMBERED

Logic for Programmers

The mathematics that will help you in your everyday programming.

leanpub.com

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 18d

You can measure the economic value of something in Garfields. Garfield makes about 1 billion USD in revenue annually, so if an industry is smaller than that it's worth less to the world than Garfield

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 19d

Leanpub can do PDF and Epub but I don't believe they offer print options, you'd have to go somewhere else for that

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 19d

What are you looking for in a self-publishing platform?

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 19d

The three hardest problems in LaTeX are line breaks, page breaks, and tweaking fonts

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 19d

Yup@

Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 19d

Do you have a good example?

Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 19d

In two hours (11:40 central time) I'll be speaking about designing distributed systems with TLA+ at #P99conf! It's a free virtual conference, so no excuses not to go :)

www.p99conf.io

P99 CONF Event 2025 – All Things Performance On-Demand

P99 CONF is a cross-industry virtual event for _engineers_ and by engineers, centered around low-latency, high-performance design.

www.p99conf.io

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 20d

It's the changing of the seasons. Too cold outside

Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 20d

Kinda listless today, got basically nothing done :/

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 20d

Yeah, Tesler had a lot of influence on the development of Smalltalk too. Of note though is he had a very expansive definition of "modes". He'd have considered the bash shell "modal" because ctrl+r puts you in the `reverse-i-search` mode

Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 20d

Blargle, this should work gist.github.com/hwayne/c8ffe...

AHK rework

AHK rework. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

gist.github.com

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 20d

I am not 100% sure but I think there's some CHIP DNA in Gecode (one of the solvers used)

Reposted by Hillel is taking a break

Ken Shirriff @righto.com · 24d

The New York Times recently introduced daily puzzles called Pips. You place the dominoes on the grid so the numbers satisfy the labels.

I solved Pips with cool software called a constraint solver. You give the constraints, e.g. "sum to 8", and it "magically" finds a solution. Let's look closer...

A three-by-three grid of squares with four dominoes below it. Two squares are labeled with "8", indicating that the numbers in that region must sum to eight. Another square is labeled "<5", indicating that the number in that square must be less than 5. The three bottom squares are labeled with an equals sign, indicating that the three numbers must be the same. The upper-right square is missing so there are 8 squares in total, able to hold four dominoes.

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 20d

Protip: when editing new scripts, you have to reload it a lot. So I like adding this to shorten that feedback loop:

F3::Reload

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 20d

2. Instead of using a series of Sends, `writeFunctionsAndReturn` uses multiline strings and Format to only need one send. This makes it easier to see what the output will be. The other send functions can be improved in the same way

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 20d

Sure! Made a new version at pastebin.com/d1waR7VmI . Didn't edit the style or structure, but added in two AHK features that will improve your QoL:

1. Instead of InputHook, I get the inputs with InputBox. That way you can see what you typed in, erase mistakes, and paste with ctrl-v

pastebin.com

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 21d

Noicenoice! Do you want feedback from an internet stranger or are you happy with what you got?

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Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 21d

AHK is amazing. Any questions? I've been doing it for like tennish years now

Hillel is taking a break @hillelwayne.com · 21d

Anywhere I can read more about search mode? My prior is that it would behave more like a mix of a prompt and contextual keybindings vs modal editor. Which I am 100% sure sounds like quibbling but I think there's subtle operational differences