Hacker News: cjfd

New comment by cjfd in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

cjfd — Sun, 24 May 2026 05:43:27 +0000

Well, the short summary of it all is that the US is the very curious case of a superpower attempting to become a third world country.

New comment by cjfd in "Idempotency Is Easy Until the Second Request Is Different"

cjfd — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:28:55 +0000

"assuming you have a real engineering job" does a lot of work there. You could also do a lot of work the other way by stating "assuming you are getting a real education". I studied physics when I was young and that field is a lot deeper than my current work in programming. Computer science can also be quite deep if one considers things like the halting problem, type theory and proof assistants.

New comment by cjfd in "Floats Don't Agree with Themselves"

cjfd — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:09:33 +0000

On the other hand, if you store a small integer in a float it is generally reliable to compare to it. E.g., setting a float to zero and comparing whether the float is zero.

New comment by cjfd in "The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code"

cjfd — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:42:19 +0000

This sounds all true to me, but I think there is more. It is not just decisions by management, it is also the wider economic context. Low interest rates and, for the US, having the world reserve currency as your own currency both seem to make many of these changes attractive or even inevitable. Low interest rates lead to 'innovation' which I put in scare quotes because besides real innovation it can also mean something that passes as innovation but in the end just turns out to be a bubble of stuff that was not valuable enough. The 'innovation' then crowds out investments in more boring sectors like manufacturing. This is also not good for the population in general because fewer jobs are left for people who are not suited for working in highly 'innovative' sectors.

New comment by cjfd in "Pope Leo XIV denounces the 'delusion of omnipotence' he says fuels the Iran war"

cjfd — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:34:56 +0000

From the quotes in the article it sounds pretty simple. These are words that everyone can understand. Of course, the fascist right is attempting to 'inform' the public at a level where even two-syllable words are a bit too complicated. But maybe the general public also should attempt to be at a level a bit higher than cattle.

New comment by cjfd in "AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel"

cjfd — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:26:02 +0000

All kinds of worries are possible. (1) It turns out that all this AI generated stuff is full of bugs and we go back to traditional software development, creating a giant disinvestment and economic downturn. (2) sofware quality going way down. we cannot produce reliable programs anymore. (3) massive energy use makes it impossible to use sustainable energy sources and we wreck the environment every more than we are currently doing. (4) AIs are in the hands of a few big companies that abuse their power. (5) AI becomes smarter than humans and decides that humans are outdated and kills all of us.

It obviously depends on how powerful AI is going to become. These scenarios are mutually exclusive because some assume that AI is actually not very powerful and some assume that it is very powerful. I think one of these things happening is not at all unlikely.

New comment by cjfd in "Conway's Game of Life, in real life"

cjfd — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:38:50 +0000

When I was a teenager, I read a book about assembly language for the commodore and implemented the game of life in a really simple way. I just used the text screen. To switch on a cell, I would put an asterisk ('*') in it. Then I could run my machine code program and it would evolve according to the rules of the game of life.

New comment by cjfd in "Leanstral: Open-source agent for trustworthy coding and formal proof engineering"

cjfd — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:13:15 +0000

Well, if you do not need to care about performance everything can be extremely simple indeed. Let me show you some data structure in coq/rocq while switching off notations and diplaying low level content.

Require Import String.

Definition hello: string := "Hello world!".

Print hello.

hello = String (Ascii.Ascii false false false true false false true false) (String (Ascii.Ascii true false true false false true true false) (String (Ascii.Ascii false false true true false true true false) (String (Ascii.Ascii false false true true false true true false) (String (Ascii.Ascii true true true true false true true false) (String (Ascii.Ascii false false false false false true false false) (String (Ascii.Ascii true true true false true true true false) (String (Ascii.Ascii true true true true false true true false) (String (Ascii.Ascii false true false false true true true false) (String (Ascii.Ascii false false true true false true true false) (String (Ascii.Ascii false false true false false true true false) (String (Ascii.Ascii true false false false false true false false) EmptyString))))))))))) : string

New comment by cjfd in "“This is not the computer for you”"

cjfd — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:44:20 +0000

There are also some funny humorous pieces on this site.

New comment by cjfd in "Warn about PyPy being unmaintained"

cjfd — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:50:00 +0000

The short summary of it being that these people are beyond terrible at giving names to things.

New comment by cjfd in "On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]"

cjfd — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:57:57 +0000

Well, I think there is something to it. Computers were at some point newly invented so research in algorithms suddenly became much more applicable. This opened up a gold mine of research opportunities. But like real life mines at some point they get depleted and then the research becomes much less interesting unless you happen to be interested in niche topics. But, of course, the paper mill needs to keep running and so does the production of PhDs.

New comment by cjfd in "I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services"

cjfd — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:03:38 +0000

There are some services where it makes sense. E.g., submitting taxes with the government, logging into the banking website. Apart from that kind of service, yes I don't think I would want my identity or age verified on more or less any website.

New comment by cjfd in "The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers"

cjfd — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:38:42 +0000

The article talks about 'software development will be democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much more democratic.

New comment by cjfd in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

cjfd — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:53:26 +0000

Sure, we can run the math on heat dissipation. The law of Stefan-Boltzman is free and open source and it application is high school level physics. You talk about 50 MW. You are going to need a lot of surface area to radiate that off at somewhere close to reasonable temperatures.

New comment by cjfd in "Coding is when we're least productive"

cjfd — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 10:04:56 +0000

E.W. Dijkstra: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight".

Personally, I think, much of the art of programming is to do as much as possible with as few lines of code as possible.

New comment by cjfd in "Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon"

cjfd — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:51:58 +0000

Whether or not a 'LIO' exists is not that interesting to me. What is interesting is what actually exists and what has happened in history. What actually exists is an enormous shock after, for instance, world war one where the question arose how it is possible that basically an entire generation of young men was slaughtered. E.g., every small village in France has a memorial of the fallen soldiers during world war one. For many decades after the war commemoration were/are still being held. It used to be that competing for territory was just the normal thing countries did. Then, it became clear that this has a potentially enormous cost in human lives. The obvious conclusion for people who are not sleepwalking through life and through history, is that any political leader who advocates for a change in country borders and does so much as hint to violent means of doing so is totally deranged and immoral. A similar shock has gone through the world after world war two, which, for instance, lead to the creation of the declaration of universal human rights. Among the decent public, it is also concluded that a violation of human rights is deranged in immoral.

New comment by cjfd in "Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon"

cjfd — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 08:47:28 +0000

They say that prediction is difficult, especially when it is about the future. Unwise economic policies may be punished quickly, slowly or might be revoked before punished severely. The question is how much risk one is willing to take. Another matter is of morality. Being invested into something means supporting its practices and being partly responsible for them.

New comment by cjfd in "Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon"

cjfd — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 06:16:35 +0000

Incorrect. The rules based order was first attempted after the first world war and then created after the second one. These are lessen that have been bought with blood. Lots of blood. Megaliters of it. The incredible stupidity of throwing that away is absolutely disgusting.

New comment by cjfd in "Idiocracy"

cjfd — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 14:52:53 +0000

Idiocracy is a very interesting documentary but I do wonder why the Portuguese wikipedia article was posted here.

New comment by cjfd in "High-Level Is the Goal"

cjfd — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 08:10:37 +0000

Sure, high level is the goal. But the question is whether the abstractions are the correct ones that fit the problem. Almost all software that I have encountered that was painful to work with chose a framework that did not apply to their situation.

E.g., develop a generic user interface framework which makes it very quick to produce a standard page with a series of standard fields but at the same time makes it very painful to produce a non-standard layout. After that is done it is 'discovered' that almost all pages are non-standard. But that 'discovery' could also have been made in five minutes by talking to any of the people already working for the company....

Another example: use an agent system where lots of agents do almost nothing, maybe translate one enum value to another enum value of another enum type. Then discover that you get performance problems because agent traffic is quite expensive. At the same time typical java endless typing occurs because of the enormous amount of agent boilerplate. Also the agents that actually do something useful become god classes because basically all non-trivial logic goes there....