Hacker News: TwentyPosts

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta"

TwentyPosts — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 13:07:34 +0000

The reality is that it's much easier to bring a lawsuit over damage done to shareholders (dropped stock value is measurable and easy to see, security fraud), than it is to bring a lawsuit over damage done to users (harm done to individual users is hard to measure).

Solving LeetCode problems with Racket: I don't know what I expected

TwentyPosts — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 14:24:13 +0000

Article URL: https://herecomesthemoon.net/2024/11/leetcode-with-racket/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42221030

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by TwentyPosts in "I Feel Unsafe"

TwentyPosts — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 10:44:08 +0000

Pretty sure this is generally called "Anarcho communism".

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Hazel: A live functional programming environment featuring typed holes"

TwentyPosts — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 14:12:22 +0000

All of this could've been prevented if Go just had two ways to compile. Debug and release.

The go devs decided against this since they didn't want to build a highly optimizing (read: slow) compiler, but that is missing the point of developer ergonomics.

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Benchmarks of Google's Axion Arm-Based CPU"

TwentyPosts — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 19:51:14 +0000

> These new C4A instances are advertised as offering up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy efficiency than their current generation x86 instance types.

Hardware (see also, Google's TPUs and their performance vs. energy cost) is one reason why I'm fairly bullish on Google.

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Mojo clarifies meaning of "Python superset""

TwentyPosts — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 18:07:18 +0000

Is anyone surprised by this? Chris Lattner in high regard, sure, but I always expected them to have to quietly walk this one back.

It just didn't seem feasible, for a lot of reasons.

Of course, how feasible it sounded will depend on your interpretation of "superset". I wonder what was the straw that broke the camel's back.

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Adding syntax to the CPython interpreter"

TwentyPosts — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 14:27:39 +0000

Do we really need more syntactic sugar? Frankly, I am still confused why Python is going for a separate syntax for if expressions instead of just making its regular ifs into expressions

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Rewriting Rust"

TwentyPosts — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 10:57:58 +0000

Zig is not even close to a 1.0 beta this year. Or even next year.

For example, the async problem still exists and still has absolutely no viable path forward, or even MVP approach.

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Rewriting Rust"

TwentyPosts — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 10:56:18 +0000

Afaik specialisation (in full generality) would cause soundness issues, so it's not even just blocked by the trait solver, it's also blocked by figuring out a 'slimmed down' proposal that fixes those.

And that's not even getting into the problem that it's a fairly controversial feature, since people are worried about terrible, hard to track specialisation trees. (See, inheritance.)

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say"

TwentyPosts — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 02:16:46 +0000

I don't think civilians regularly carry military-grade pagers.

And fwiw, I heard of two tragic cases of children dying, which sounds remarkably low to me so far. If this were truly indiscriminate, this number would be significantly higher and we would've heard of it by now.

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say"

TwentyPosts — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 02:08:03 +0000

Apart from the issue where this ignores how many people got injured (a much larger number), there's a very simple "survival bias" reason (ironically) why this argument doesn't work.

Children (and potentially health workers, as opposed to men of fighting age) are much more likely to die of such an explosion than men of fighting age. In other words, children will be significantly overrepresented here.

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon"

TwentyPosts — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 22:14:05 +0000

Honestly struggling to comprehend how this one isn't neutral.

As far as we know this was a supply-chain attack specifically on military pagers actively used by Hezbollah, and (right now) it looks like most injured are in fact Hezbollah members (which makes sense, since no one else has any reason to carry such a pager). (With some sad and unfortunate exceptions.)

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Why Haskell?"

TwentyPosts — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 13:34:22 +0000

This is semantically not the same as a sum type (as understood in the sense of Rust, which is afaik the academically accepted way)!

Python's `A | B` is a union operation, but in Rust a sum type is always a disjoint union. In Python, if `A = B = None`, then `A | B` has one possible instance.

In Rust, this sum type has two possible instances. This might not sound like a big deal, but the semantics are quite different.

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Why Haskell?"

TwentyPosts — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 13:21:04 +0000

The original rust compiler was written in OCaml. That's not evidence it "had an influence", but it's highly striking considering how many other languages Greydon could've used.

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era Announced for 2025"

TwentyPosts — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 12:23:05 +0000

HOTA?

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Why Does Elisp Suck"

TwentyPosts — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 12:00:49 +0000

You sound like you'd enjoy giving the Helix editor a try. It replaced neovim completely for me.

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Writing a Rust compiler in C"

TwentyPosts — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 22:30:26 +0000

So now you're writing two compilers.

What did you actually gain from this, outside of more work?

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Async2 – The .NET Runtime Async experiment concludes"

TwentyPosts — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 17:30:13 +0000

Have you read the article?

> As async is already used as an identifier in C#, the team decided to use async2 as a codename for the experiment. If that thing ever makes it into the runtime, it will be called async - so it will be a replacement for the current async implementation.

New comment by TwentyPosts in "From Sets to Categories (2023)"

TwentyPosts — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 19:11:26 +0000

How much of a background do your have in abstract algebra? I don't think category theory makes much sense or is very satisfying unless you can already list a bunch of categories you interact with regularly, and have results which can be expressed in terms of categories.

New comment by TwentyPosts in "Go 1.23 Released"

TwentyPosts — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 19:17:38 +0000

The first time I looked at the syntax, it honestly looked like gibberish to me.

It's probably simple, but the control flow just felt convoluted.