Hacker News: afrisch

New comment by afrisch in "Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message"

afrisch — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:53:27 +0000

There are still subscriptions that give access to both ChatGPT and Codex, but with a much smaller usage quota than before the change (which came at the same time as the end of the 2x promo). I couldn't find the equivalent in terms of credit for the usage included with these $20/25 seats...

AWS CodeCommit Returns to GA

afrisch — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 11:11:54 +0000

Article URL: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/aws-codecommit-returns-to-general-availability/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46133110

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by afrisch in "When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”"

afrisch — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 15:39:17 +0000

But -10 is smaller than -2, right?

New comment by afrisch in "A Postmark backdoor that’s downloading emails"

afrisch — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 09:20:26 +0000

Giving AI agents permission to do things on your behalf in your computer is obviously dangerous. Installing a compromised MCP server is really the same as installing any compromised software. The fact that this software is triggered by the user or an agent doesn't really change anything. I don't think that humans are more able to decide not to use a tool that could potentially be compromised, but that they have chosen to install already.

New comment by afrisch in "A Postmark backdoor that’s downloading emails"

afrisch — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 16:37:45 +0000

How is this different from a backdoor in, say, a Thunderbird extension? I've maintained an extension for Thunderbird and, when I was no longer interested in it, a guy pushed hard to take over the project after sending a few legitimate contributions. I declined because it seemed crazy to give the keys to tens of thousands mailbox to a guy I didn't really know. I also found it crazy that people would trust me initially, but well, I know I'm a good guy :-)

New comment by afrisch in "Jane Street's sneaky retention tactic"

afrisch — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 17:56:15 +0000

> Having worked with OCaml at Jane Street is not, I think most of us would agree, going to be, going to be a serious barrier to getting hired to work with another language somewhere else.

The retention factor is *not* that other companies wouldn't want to hire them, but rather that these employees are likely to dislike being forced to use something other than OCaml.

New comment by afrisch in "Microsoft needs to remove GUI from kernel: BSOD with WinForms after KB5034848"

afrisch — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 07:51:34 +0000

No doubt excessive nesting is bizarre, although the end user might not notice (nested panels that fit in their parent are not visible). That's not a reason to have your entire OS break :-(

New comment by afrisch in "Microsoft needs to remove GUI from kernel: BSOD with WinForms after KB5034848"

afrisch — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 07:45:13 +0000

It has been fixed but a similar problem (with the same repro case) reappeared with a recent Windows update, only now when closing the popup.

New comment by afrisch in "Microsoft needs to remove GUI from kernel: BSOD with WinForms after KB5034848"

afrisch — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 16:20:14 +0000

So at least they should really work hard to not let a BSOD happen in case of excessive nesting of widgets. The repro case is actually the same than the one for a bug which was fixed 6 years ago, and it is straightforward (just nest enough panels in a modal popup, and close it). It's hard to understand how this could not be caught by a non regression test.

New comment by afrisch in "Microsoft needs to remove GUI from kernel: BSOD with WinForms after KB5034848"

afrisch — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 15:20:43 +0000

It's crazy a such a simple script, which is actually the same as 6 years ago, can produce a BSOD in a deterministic way with the latest update of Windows. And nobody at MS seems to care about it.

New comment by afrisch in "CDuce: XML-oriented functional language"

afrisch — Sun, 24 Nov 2019 23:03:02 +0000

CDuce was the result of my PhD thesis (about 20 years ago); mostly just a research prototype with enough engineering efforts to make it usable for small enough projects. It came after XDuce, which introduced the idea of building a functional language around regular expression types (used to XML schema languages, DTD, XSD, Relax). My work focused on distilling the theory from XDuce into more primitive constructs from type theory (products, unions, recursion), and embedding them into a more expressive type system and language (with set-theoretic intersection and negation, function types, extensible records -- used to model XML attributes, etc), also with a powerful XML pattern matching engine and an efficient implementation of type-checking (just deciding subtyping is in theory exponential in the size of schema, but works well in practice). The theory could probably be used to serve as the basis of statically-typed languages working, on, say, "typed" JSON structures. The work was/is continued by my PhD advisor and other colleagues to include parametric polymorphism (original CDuce supported ad hoc overloading polymorphism only).

The idea was just that if your language could directly express constraints on your document types in its native type system, the compiler could directly type-check statically complex transformations and make sure they produce documents from the expected output schema (assuming the input complies with the announced input schema). This is more direct than having to rely on mapping between XML and "native" data types, which (usually) don't fully preserve constraints imposed by XML schema languages, and are themselves tedious and fragile to write. This works well for XML->XML transformations. Of course, in most applications, XML parsing and/or generation is just a tiny part, which shouldn't affect the choice of an implementation language. With OCamlDuce, I explored the idea of extending OCaml to include XML types. The combination felt a bit ad hoc, but was ok. Today, it could be rebuilt indeed about PPX extension points + some type-checking hooks in the OCaml compiler.

New comment by afrisch in "EU and Japan create world's biggest free trade zone"

afrisch — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 15:31:14 +0000

The best part is that tree trade is not contradictory with setting standards!

> For the first time, the trade agreement includes countries' Paris climate deal commitments.

> The text also addresses sustainable development and sets standards for labor, safety, environmental and consumer protection.

New comment by afrisch in "EU and Japan create world's biggest free trade zone"

afrisch — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 15:26:35 +0000

Of course. As a matter of fact, UK was never part of the Schengen Area.

New comment by afrisch in "Yellow vests knock out 60% of all speed cameras in France"

afrisch — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 09:43:33 +0000

> and lose at least 2 points from any speeding

(Nitpicking: actually only one point if driving less then 20 km/h above the limit.)

New comment by afrisch in "LiteTree: SQLite with Branches"

afrisch — Wed, 29 Aug 2018 07:17:42 +0000

According to Wikipedia[1], SQLightning -- a port of Sqlite using LMDB -- was 20x faster than original sqllight. It could thus be interesting to compare LiteTree with SQLightning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Memory-Mapped_Databa...

New comment by afrisch in "The Elm Architecture"

afrisch — Mon, 27 Aug 2018 09:55:07 +0000

Shameless plug: ocaml-vdom[1] is another implementation of TEA in OCaml (with js_of_ocaml)

[1]: https://github.com/LexiFi/ocaml-vdom

New comment by afrisch in "A Brief History of the BEAM Compiler"

afrisch — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 22:02:57 +0000

I could have added reasonml to the list indeed, but reasonml really is (a different syntax for) ocaml.

New comment by afrisch in "A Brief History of the BEAM Compiler"

afrisch — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 22:01:31 +0000

Yes sorry, Elm is indeed implemented in Haskell.

New comment by afrisch in "A Brief History of the BEAM Compiler"

afrisch — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 15:33:01 +0000

Well, OCaml is indeed rather popular for implementing compilers for new languages (sometimes later bootstrapped), including ones which became rather popular. I can think of F#, Rust, Elm, Haxe, FlowType for instance.

New comment by afrisch in "Transaction Costs and Tethers: Why I’m a Crypto Skeptic"

afrisch — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 07:05:20 +0000

Yes, well, I can imagine that under the assumption that people loose "faith" in Bitcoin, it's still possible to assign a "value" to the Bitcoin network, e.g. the hardware that makes it (miners and nodes) -- I wouldn't count the electricity usage as part of its value, though. But the point is that holding units of Bitcoin, i.e. knowing the secrets that allow spending them, does not give any rights on those hardware assets, so the value of the network cannot provide a lower bound to the value of Bitcoin units, in the same way that industrial or jewelry usages of gold does give it a lower valuation bound.