Hacker News: User23

New comment by User23 in "Show HN: Git for AI Agents"

User23 — Sat, 09 May 2026 01:33:30 +0000

I'm really pleased how wildly all the other commenters are misunderstanding this.

I was counting on this concept as competitive advantage.

But since the algorithm isn't going to surface me anyhow, for giggles I'll say I'm leaning more toward darcs than git.

New comment by User23 in "The Disappearance of the Public Bench"

User23 — Sat, 09 May 2026 01:31:32 +0000

You should read a little book called Games People Play. Focus particular attention on the section on the game "Indigent."

This isn't a resource allocation problem, or rather, it isn't a resource allocation problem the way you seem to think it is.

New comment by User23 in "The Disappearance of the Public Bench"

User23 — Sat, 09 May 2026 01:30:28 +0000

This postulates that policy is set by consensus.

Now I haven't done any scientific polling, but my informal anecdotal experience is so overwhelmingly to the contrary that I'm comfortable believing that consensus isn't determining policy here.

New comment by User23 in "The seven programming ur-languages (2022)"

User23 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 01:11:45 +0000

> To build a theorem prover you need to take away some capability (namely, the ability to do general recursion - the base language must be total and can't be Turing complete), not add new capabilities. In Haskell everything can be "undefined" which means that you can prove everything (even things that are supposed to be false).

Despite what the fanatical constructivists (as opposed to the ones who simply think it's pragmatically nice) seem to want us to think, it turns out that you can prove interesting things with LEM (AKA call/cc) and classical logic.

New comment by User23 in "The seven programming ur-languages (2022)"

User23 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 01:09:25 +0000

This is all of them, properly speaking.

Incidentally, this is pretty much what Algol 60 was designed for and why to this day many academic papers use it or a closely related pseudocode.

New comment by User23 in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

User23 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:23:05 +0000

How much of Mythos’s internals will researchers be able to recover from the flood of patches?

New comment by User23 in "430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found"

User23 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 04:21:12 +0000

I've felt for a long time that the field relies rather a bit too hard on absence of evidence being evidence of absence.

New comment by User23 in "A list of fun destinations for telnet"

User23 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 15:35:52 +0000

SillyMUD branches will always have a special place in my heart. Who doesn’t love leveling up in Sesame Street?!

How to Write a 21st Century Proof (2011) [pdf]

User23 — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 05:46:20 +0000

Article URL: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/proof.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46285208

Points: 24

# Comments: 3

New comment by User23 in "Ruby Symbols"

User23 — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 07:05:38 +0000

I meant more that symbols are a data structure with function and value slots. Last I knew strings, interned (which is also a Lisp reference) or not don't have that.

New comment by User23 in "Ruby Symbols"

User23 — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 14:05:02 +0000

That’s really not true for Lisp.

Ruby, like its predecessor Perl, is one of the finer examples of Greenspunning and shows a lot of Lisp influence.

Unfortunately I can’t read the actual submission right now due to the cloudflare outage.

New comment by User23 in "They Thought They Were Free (1955)"

User23 — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 14:49:02 +0000

This has been true in the USA since approximately 1965, at least. Analysis has shown the general public has absolutely no say in policy making; literally everything is for this or that influential “special interest.”

This is borne out in the erosion of what we now euphemistically call the middle class along basically every dimension that matters.

Some of the heat here is on account of members of this community are, or at least are used to being, special interests that have had a powerful voice in previous administrations and less of one in the current one. But let’s not pretend this is some sort of creeping fascism, it’s just a different faction of elites making their own plays.

New comment by User23 in "Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks"

User23 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 05:53:47 +0000

Has there been a supply chain attack with an LLM conduit yet? Because that would be spicy and is assuredly possible and plausible too.

New comment by User23 in "Asynchrony is not concurrency"

User23 — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 01:36:55 +0000

Asynchrony, parallelism, concurrency, and even deterministic execution (albeit as a degenerate case) are all just species of nondeterminism. Dijkstra and Scholten’s work on the subject is sadly under appreciated. And lest one thing this was ivory tower stuff, before he was a professor Dijkstra was a systems engineer writing operating systems on hilariously bad, by our standards, hardware.

New comment by User23 in "Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized"

User23 — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 12:30:28 +0000

Some people get literally high when running. Some don’t. The get high types invariably posture as if they have more dedication or willpower. Funny stuff.

New comment by User23 in "They tried Made in the USA – it was too expensive for their customers"

User23 — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 17:56:44 +0000

It took decades to gut American consumer manufacturing. Anyone who thinks it can be brought back without pain is deluded. But nevertheless, it’s worth that pain.

As the Chinese are well aware, every time in history a great financial power and a great industrial power have come into conflict, the industrial power wins.

New comment by User23 in "Central Park hits temp record last seen in 1888"

User23 — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 13:31:28 +0000

Given that we basically use the same technique for censuses today, the ancient ones probably weren’t especially less reliable.

New comment by User23 in "Scientists genetically engineer a lethal mosquito STD to combat malaria"

User23 — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 19:05:47 +0000

Next do ticks.

New comment by User23 in "The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)"

User23 — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 13:34:09 +0000

> You can’t avoid parentheses

Well, you can with reader macros, assuming you’re willing to consider an init file that you only look at when you write sufficiently avoidant.

It’s not done though, because experience has shown it’s not really worth it.

New comment by User23 in "The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)"

User23 — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 13:30:10 +0000

Have you seen LOOP[1]? That example barely scratches the surface too.

As for being able to make words mean different things and break grammatical strictures; that’s called poetry when we do it in English. And yes there is bad poetry, but some is superlative.

[1] https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/LWRM/html/lwref...