Hacker News: GregDavidson

New comment by GregDavidson in "The Beauty of Roundabouts"

GregDavidson — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 23:05:38 +0000

A UK roundabout us not a European traffic circle or a new traffic calming device. The commentary is conflating at least four entirely different things! A UK roundabout has no place for a decorative feature in the middle. It is a device of ruthless efficiency with typically nothing in the middle but a shiny brass plate in the center set flush with the pavement. Traffic barely slows and rarely stops in the UK, necessitating pedestrian underpasses, Pelican crossings, et al.

New comment by GregDavidson in "Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation"

GregDavidson — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:19:03 +0000

I'm delighted this exists as all too many students have used Mathematica in their education and now can't afford it. Yet I'm always wondering why one would write an interpreter for something like this. I've used Maxima much longer than Mathematica has existed. There's no Maxima interpreter or compiler. It's just a read table in Common Lisp. So you're really using CL without needing to know that and some CLs, e.g. SBCL, are extraordinarily efficient. Doing such a thing for other SW tools also gives you seemless interop!

New comment by GregDavidson in "The AI jobs apocalypse probably isn't coming anytime soon"

GregDavidson — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:35:11 +0000

If someone can't implement the very simplest Graph Structure, Linked Lists, then I assume they can't implement any linked data structure. Learning variations of Linked Lists is where you start, e.g. https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

New comment by GregDavidson in "After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell"

GregDavidson — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 19:46:57 +0000

I've been successfully practicing programming with proof of correctness since the 1970s. The confusion I see with most people failing at this is that they're trying to write code first and then prove it correct. The idea promoted by Dijkstra, Hoare, et al is to write the code and the proof together, with each of these aspects of the task supporting the other. The result is (in my experience) a better program developed as quickly (even when not counting on vastly decreased debugging time) as pure coding. Similarly with strong lexical typing: One does not try to create a typing model for a hunk of arbitrary code. Instead, one develops the type model along with the code, with each of those aspects supporting the other. Putting it all together: Coding, Typing (and other Constraining) and Proving are done together, with each of these activities supporting the others. It does take time to learn such a methodology. And it takes extra understanding to maintain types, constraints and proofs as the program evolves, i.e. "maintenance".

New comment by GregDavidson in "In Emacs, everything looks like a service"

GregDavidson — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 01:39:10 +0000

Emacs is a Platform. Operating Systems are also Platforms. Many other things are platforms. A platform is a layer of software designed to enable you to build new things on it. This should raise the question: What platform X would be good for building this thing Y I want to build? I often find X = Emacs, but also Racket, Rust, et al. An application which is also a good platform may be worth a greater learning investment than a simpler application would justify.

New comment by GregDavidson in "What can you confidently guarantee about your software?"

GregDavidson — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 23:03:44 +0000

I use formal verification as part of my development process. The needs of the proof guide the development of the code as much as vice-versa. The result is usually cleaner, simpler, smaller and usually more efficient programs developed much faster as debugging effort is minimal. I still create complete test cases. Proof maintenance as code changes is a pain and I would like LLMs and/or other tools to help with that. I would never try to formally verify code written with regular processes!

New comment by GregDavidson in "My Students Can't Read"

GregDavidson — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:57:16 +0000

I learned to read English the same way I learned to understand it spoken: exposure. As a young child a relative would put me in their lap and a book I liked in my lap and read to me. After awhile I was reading fluently without effort. Most schools teach reading as a conscious intellectual decoding task which leaves little brain power left to engage with the material - the same way most schools teach "foreign" languages. Engage the brain's language centers and language skills will be fluent.

New comment by GregDavidson in "I keep bouncing off the Scheme language"

GregDavidson — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:14:02 +0000

I started with Fortran 2 which has subroutines which don't behave as black boxes. It took me months of frustrated study to understand procedure calls in decent languages as delegation. That opened up the world of high-level computing. Later I would teach this using problems that were a good fit for "recursion". Recursion is not a feature, it's just an obvious pattern of the more general and important nature of delegation. While recursion is occasionally a useful technique, it's tremendously valuable as a tool for learning how to think about procedures as black boxes!

New comment by GregDavidson in "Framework Laptop 13 Pro: Major Upgrades and Linux Front and Center"

GregDavidson — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:23:15 +0000

Everything I run on servers I also run on my laptop. Occasionally I get crashes or corruption because of the lack of ECC memory. I'd also like to be able to swap parts between a modular laptop and a home/small-office server, but again - I want ECC. If framework had a model with ECC I'd be all in!

New comment by GregDavidson in "The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure"

GregDavidson — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:05:16 +0000

Regulatory systems need omsbuds within the government who can ask for help and explanations from all the agencies regulating a project yet are (primarily) accountable for helping projects succeed as soon as possible and (secondarily) responsible for providing transparent feedback to those agencies and the public where regulation is malfunctioning.

New comment by GregDavidson in "Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation"

GregDavidson — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:07:20 +0000

This technology is completely amazing - for large fleet vehicles like buses, trucks, ferries, etc. Also airplanes! Getting this so compact and refined is a technological miracle. Now put it where it fits!

New comment by GregDavidson in "Ask HN: Is there a no-LLM license yet?"

GregDavidson — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:11:13 +0000

Do what Linus does: Focus on code quality!

New comment by GregDavidson in "Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings"

GregDavidson — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:07:24 +0000

Culture is huge nested networks of memes[1] which reinforce themselves and evolve via natural selection. Their substrate is our brains. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

New comment by GregDavidson in "Covering electricity price increases from our data centers"

GregDavidson — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:57:48 +0000

Only train when the Sun shines.

New comment by GregDavidson in "Where did all the starships go?"

GregDavidson — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 23:13:43 +0000

Realistic Hard SF has to deal with Accelerating Change making technology vastly powerful yet still limited. The hardest thing to write about is cognitively enhanced humans or any other entities (AI, aliens, etc.) exceeding human cognitive limits. JW Campbell famously said it couldn't be done, but without that depictions of the future or wider universe fall flat. Vernor Vinge became the master of such SF and showed several ways to do it. I recommend everything he wrote! Good Hard SF requires an author who has a good grasp of science without that stifling their imagination. It's easy if you cheat but Science Fantasy is unreadable by the science literate folks who frequent HN. Good Hard SF is out there, with and without spaceships, but you'll have to hunt for it - and thanks for all the recommendations here!

New comment by GregDavidson in "Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?"

GregDavidson — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:40:51 +0000

GTD in https://orgmode.org/

New comment by GregDavidson in "The case for having roommates even when you can afford to live alone"

GregDavidson — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 15:41:37 +0000

I'm a geek and have shared my home with housemates for 50 years. When I was poor and when I was prosperous. When I was married and when I was not. It's almost always been good for me, including for growth in my social intelligence. It was especially valuable when my wife died. Some of my housemates have been challenging. More became close friends. Living together people take their masks off. Quality social connections have been invaluable to me.

New comment by GregDavidson in "Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity"

GregDavidson — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 20:47:19 +0000

AI used to refer to the extensive range of techniques of the field of Artificial Intelligence. Now it refers to LLMs and maybe other multi-layer networks trained on vast datasets. LLMs are great for some tasks and are also great as parts of hybrid systems like the IBM Watson Jepardy system. There's much more to Artificial Intelligence, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation_and... et al.

New comment by GregDavidson in "How bad are childhood literacy rates?"

GregDavidson — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 22:53:17 +0000

I learned to read by being read to: typically on a relative's lap with the book in my lap. They were not trying to teach me how to read, but my language centers took care of the job, just like they did for spoken language, long before schools could muck it up. Reading has always been fast and effortless for me, requiring no conscious attention - again, just like spoken language. Much later I studied the linguistics of language, grammar, spelling systems, etc. which revealed the wonders of our natural language skills. I recommend the natural method for everyone. Be sure to check for eyesight problems, though.

New comment by GregDavidson in "The Collapse of the FDA"

GregDavidson — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 03:51:37 +0000

Important quote! Citation?