Hacker News: cptroot

New comment by cptroot in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

cptroot — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:14:42 +0000

If we're talking about recursion, Patrick's Parabox is another stellar pick.

New comment by cptroot in "Surelock: Deadlock-Free Mutexes for Rust"

cptroot — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:02:32 +0000

I appreciate that this appears to be an incremental improvement on Fuschia's tree_lock, with the sharp edges sanded off. Good work! I hope I won't have to use it :p

New comment by cptroot in "We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How"

cptroot — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:12:02 +0000

I really appreciate how this finds a common thread through all of my current engineering anxieties.

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

cptroot — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:39:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47544980

Points: 414

# Comments: 383

New comment by cptroot in "Torturing Rustc by Emulating HKTs"

cptroot — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:18:20 +0000

This was incredible, even as it rapidly outpaced my PL and mathematics knowledge.

New comment by cptroot in "Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill"

cptroot — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:21:52 +0000

Please explain how this law (or the CA one for that matter) require government IDs. It is worded specifically to _not_ require ID.

New comment by cptroot in "I built a programming language using Claude Code"

cptroot — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:00:35 +0000

If you read TFA, you'll find that the author agrees with you - at least on your first point.

While I agree "AI is bad", well-written posts like this one can provide real insight into the process of using them, and reveal more about _why_ AI is bad.

New comment by cptroot in "Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy"

cptroot — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:23:48 +0000

I think you'll find the luddites to be a more informative historical analogy. A new tool arrives in an industry staffed by craftsmen, providing capital a lever to raise profits at the expense of quality. Is it surprising that worker co-ops would choose not to pull that lever?

New comment by cptroot in "A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification"

cptroot — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:51:24 +0000

So because there is no requirement for the age to be accurate, it would be pretty easy to say "all student accounts are the age of the youngest allowed school entrant for that school year", right? That resolves the age issue and also prevents both PII leakage as well as possible school bullying opportunities.

New comment by cptroot in "2028 Global Intelligence Crisis"

cptroot — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:44:13 +0000

Here's an annotated version of this post (TW Ed Zitron) that I found more informative than reading the original: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1p1n0y1ip48ianok9dvbp/Annotat...

New comment by cptroot in "Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects"

cptroot — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 21:06:27 +0000

Aha, here's the syntax in case you're curious (using an example lifted from the playground)

  [type Shape
    [Circle f64]
    [Rect f64 f64]
    Point
  ]

  [sig test_sig : Shape -> Float]
  [fn test_sig [shape]
    [match shape
      [Circle r] [* 3.14159 [* r r]]
      [Rect w h] [* w h]
      Point 0.0
    ]
  ]

Unfortunately it seems like this doesn't currently work as expected when I use it in the playground, so I'm going to go file an issue

New comment by cptroot in "Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects"

cptroot — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:43:55 +0000

Good news, there's a line in the "Coming from Rust"[1] page that says

> You never annotate a function signature unless you want to for documentation purposes.

so it sounds like function annotation is still an option for the purposes of communication, just no longer required in all cases.

[1] https://loonlang.com/concepts/from-rust

New comment by cptroot in "Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects"

cptroot — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:14:40 +0000

Neat! I think the website could use a bit more information about how the "global" Effect handlers work, and whether it's possible to opt-in to that functionality yourself when writing Effects.

That being said I took a look at the roadmap and the next major release is the one that focuses on Effects, so perhaps I'm jumping the gun a tad. Maybe I'll whip this out for AoC this year!

New comment by cptroot in "Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court"

cptroot — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:07:54 +0000

Very few people voted for tariffs, specifically. They voted for a promise of a return to a world where they were on top.

New comment by cptroot in "Attention at Constant Cost per Token via Symmetry-Aware Taylor Approximation"

cptroot — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:50:14 +0000

I don't think this is an accurate characterization of the error magnitude? Their error plots (from appendix 3) are all showing `log_10(|Y - \dot{Y}|)` as having a median of ~-3 (difference of 0.001) and a max of ~1.5 (difference of 0.035), and this is with only 3 Taylor terms.

New comment by cptroot in "Amazon cuts 16k jobs"

cptroot — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 04:05:08 +0000

Would you like to elaborate why the math doesn't work out? An article explaining your position would be nice, but I'd settle for some broad gestures.

New comment by cptroot in "Steam "Offline" status leaks exact login timestamps (Valve: Won't Fix)"

cptroot — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:31:32 +0000

You do know that you don't have to have Steam turn on on boot, right? You can launch Steam only when you want to play video games.

New comment by cptroot in "California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years"

cptroot — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:05:01 +0000

Can I ask why you see this as a clearcut issue? Dams have environmental costs, upfront monetary costs, maintenance costs, and can't prevent drought if conditions persist for multiple years. Why are dams the best way to address drought?

New comment by cptroot in "How a French judge was digitally cut off by the USA"

cptroot — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:37:40 +0000

This is strictly false. Plenty of working age people went, and many brought their children.

New comment by cptroot in "Show HN: a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU – even in the browser"

cptroot — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 18:05:18 +0000

If you click into the code you can see that it depends on `wgpu`, which is a wrapper that uses whichever native API would be appropriate for the platform you're working with. If you run the native compiled version you won't be using WebGPU.