Hacker News: Xophmeister

New comment by Xophmeister in "Type systems are leaky abstractions: the case of Map.take!/2"

Xophmeister — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:50:12 +0000

Surely type checking on the keys of effectively arbitrary maps is just a folly. Maps shouldn’t be used for these purposes. If you know the members at compile time, then put them in a proper record type, like a struct or dataclass, etc.

New comment by Xophmeister in "Number of UK workers on zero-hours contracts hits record high ahead of crackdown"

Xophmeister — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:18:03 +0000

We have "part time" as well, but it's different from zero hours. Part timers are usually (AFAIK) salaried employees that work a fixed <1 FTE (but not zero) and paid pro rata, with the usual statutory benefits such as holiday entitlement, pension, etc. You _could_ work multiple PT positions, if you could get them to line up and your employment contracts say it's fine.

Zero hours, to my understanding, is different: I'm not sure what statutory benefits you're entitled to, but yes, I believe you can be signed up to many zero hour contracts and it's up to you whether you take a job with (in theory) no repercussions if you choose not to.

New comment by Xophmeister in "Doctor Xælong, or: How I learnt to stop worrying and love AI"

Xophmeister — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:53:28 +0000

I’m the author — shameless self-promotion, on my behalf, I’m afraid — AMA :)

Doctor Xælong, or: How I learnt to stop worrying and love AI

Xophmeister — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:00:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tweag.io/blog/2026-02-12-doctor-xaelong/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47047557

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by Xophmeister in "The Gentle Seduction (1989)"

Xophmeister — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 15:37:06 +0000

A chilling vision of the future, where phone books and checkbooks still exist ;)

I have the impression that nanotechnology was very in vogue for science fiction around the late-80s and early-90s…and yet, these days, it’s seemingly disappeared; both as a sci-fi trope and, AFAIK, an area of industrial/medical R&D. Why is that? Did it just atrophy, perhaps combined with unmet expectations, or did we discover some limit that makes the technology infeasible?

New comment by Xophmeister in "A faster path to container images in Bazel"

Xophmeister — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 20:24:18 +0000

It’s not. It’s been through several editing rounds. (I was one of the editors.) In theory, we don’t have a problem with AI generated content if it meets our high editorial requirements, but all Tweag technical blogs go through a rigorous, manual review and editing process to keep standards high.

New comment by Xophmeister in "Liskell – Haskell Semantics with Lisp Syntax [pdf]"

Xophmeister — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:50:15 +0000

Didn’t D get an ownership model, a la Rust’s affine types, relatively recently?

New comment by Xophmeister in "Stacked Diffs with git rebase —onto"

Xophmeister — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:52:13 +0000

Nice; thanks :) I usually squash-merge. Does that break this workflow?

New comment by Xophmeister in "Stacked Diffs with git rebase —onto"

Xophmeister — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 14:15:51 +0000

Yeah, I do this too: The `--onto` solution feels a bit too magical at times and an interactive rebase is pretty clear about what's happening.

New comment by Xophmeister in "Show HN: Strange Attractors"

Xophmeister — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 02:06:50 +0000

Neat :) When I was a teenager, some 25+ years ago, I wrote a chaotic attractor visualiser like this — but only in 2D — and it occurred to me, “What if instead of visualising it, I rendered it to audio?” I don’t remember the details: I think frequency was correlated with polar angle and amplitude to magnitude. It forced me to learn how to write WAV format — which was my first introduction to endianness — but the result wasn’t completely inaudible! A bit like the sound effects for computers in old sci-fi movies; random(ish) but not discordant beeps and boops!

New comment by Xophmeister in "Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything"

Xophmeister — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:02:48 +0000

I've done this in my Claude settings, but it still doesn't seem that keen on following it:

> Please be measured and critical in your response. I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I highly doubt everything I say is “brilliant” or “astute”, etc.! I prefer objectivity to sycophancy.

New comment by Xophmeister in "Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole"

Xophmeister — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 21:31:23 +0000

I seem to remember a similar Star Trek episode; DS9, IIRC.

New comment by Xophmeister in "Chairs, Chairs, Chairs"

Xophmeister — Wed, 28 May 2025 10:23:29 +0000

I have a similar problem: For purely vanity reasons, I have a .co e-mail. Whenever giving it over the phone, I say something like "blah blah blah, dot co; no UK, just dot co". So far this has worked, but -- along with my difficult to spell domain -- I somewhat regret my decision!

New comment by Xophmeister in "My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)"

Xophmeister — Tue, 20 May 2025 21:08:23 +0000

Palatino with Microtype is my go to for all my LaTeX documents. It looks so good.

New comment by Xophmeister in "Show HN: I vibecoded a 35k LoC recipe app"

Xophmeister — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 08:30:20 +0000

April fools day has messed with my ability to identify satire at this time of year. Let's look at the evidence:

Posting date: 2025-04-02T01:57:13 1743559033 <-- too late

LoC: 35,000 <-- That's a _lot_

Front page: "Elon Musk Dirty Pants", "Heroin Hashbrowns", "AI Slop Stew", "Sweet Tooth Delight Made with Human Teeth" <-- WTF?

This is a joke, right?

New comment by Xophmeister in "Rost – Rust Programming in German"

Xophmeister — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 11:58:40 +0000

He's Finnish, not Swedish.

New comment by Xophmeister in "WASM Wayland Web (WWW)"

Xophmeister — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 10:08:36 +0000

Part of the beauty of the (current) WWW is that last W: the web. By design, everything is (or at least "can/should be") interlinked and scripting/computation is a layer on top of that. (See Fielding's thesis.[1]) Inverting to opaque WASM blobs as the information layer seems like throwing all that out.

Sure, WASM could still simulate interlinking -- because it's so general -- but that generality also imposes an implementation bar. Who's going to write an HTML renderer in WASM just so they can get links to work how they used to? If someone comes up with some simpler WASM-linking solution, how long will it be before there are 15 competing simpler solutions which are all mutually incompatible?

[1]: https://ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/fielding_dis...

New comment by Xophmeister in "The Human Alphabet"

Xophmeister — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 21:39:12 +0000

Bumblebee headband?

Wikipedia's Manual of Style

Xophmeister — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:38:15 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43010785

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Xophmeister in "Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more"

Xophmeister — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 18:04:06 +0000

Prince Harry’s real name is Henry.