Hacker News: crux

New comment by crux in "After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell"

crux — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:40:59 +0000

I strongly agree with the premise of this article, which is why I am surprised that the author moved away from Haskell to Python.

For some time now it’s felt clear (or at least extremely) compelling that agents need fast compile times in order to be effective, especially when you’re working in parallel. But the other thing that has felt just as obvious is that agents need strong type systems and narrow guardrails in order to constrain their outputs. These two things felt clear enough to me that, like the author, I wanted to choose a language ecosystem that maximized them. There _are_ languages that both have expressive type systems _and_ fast compile times. I wonder if the author investigated any of them, before deciding that no compilation time at all was acceptable.

In my case I landed in OCaml. I think there are other options in the space—Go if you want less typing but faster compiles; Rust if you want more types but slower compiles. My mostly vibes-based evaluation landed on OCaml, and I’ve been pretty happy with the results.

Show HN: Pantagruel, an Accessible Specification Language

crux — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:05:08 +0000

Hi HN!

Seven years ago I posted the very first version of PANTAGRUEL (my phone has started autocorrecting to all-caps; I have no idea why but I like it), a “lightweight formal methods” language.

Since then it’s gone through many iterations. I want to post it here because in the recent months it’s acquired a consistent, well-formed and documented type system, and an actual model checker.

In other words, it’s now a language of the same kind as something like TLA+ or Alloy. It differs from those in being (hopefully) radically simpler. It’s designed to be approachable with far less learning and specialization, and it’s designed to be effective in specifying not just software, but any type of formal system, including poetry and games.

If you’ve ever been interested in “tools for thought” and ways to make your own descriptions of things more precise and rigorous, it might be worthwhile to you.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129643

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Stolze-Smith Shorthand

crux — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 01:39:03 +0000

Article URL: https://stolze-smith.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460416

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Two Bites of Data Science in K

crux — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 18:29:18 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.zdsmith.com/posts/two-bites-of-data-science-in-k.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42832482

Points: 72

# Comments: 10

New comment by crux in "Fogus: Things and Stuff of 2024"

crux — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 15:54:05 +0000

Thank you - I wrote that!

Happy to discuss further if anyone has any thoughts.

Tacit Talk 5: Combinatory Programming with Zach Smith

crux — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 01:29:15 +0000

Article URL: https://tacittalk.com/2024/09/27/Episode-5.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41772934

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Smith Shorthand

crux — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 17:12:40 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.zdsmith.com/posts/smith-shorthand.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41751322

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by crux in "The Composer Has No Clothes"

crux — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 01:34:04 +0000

I came away with the exact same conclusion as you. The article describes a rather commonplace career of fraud; more or less every industry has them. There’s nothing unique to classical music here; it’s human nature to generally take people at their word about their past accomplishments, to be impressed by famous names, and to allow their critical judgment to be influenced by what they think they know.

New comment by crux in "Building and scaling Notion's data lake"

crux — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 01:54:25 +0000

Hi all—I'm the EM for the Search team at Notion, and I want to chime in to clear up one unfortunate misconception I've seen a few times in this thread.

Notion does not sell its users' data.

Instead, I want to expand on one of the first use-cases for the Notion data lake, which was by my team. This is an elaboration of the description in TFA under the heading "Use case support".

As is described there, Notion's block permissions are highly normalized at the source of truth. This is usually quite efficient and generally brings along all the benefits of normalization in application databases. However, we need to _denormalize_ all the permissions that relate to a specific document when we index it into our search index.

When we transactionally reindex a document "online", this is no problem. However, when we need to reindex an entire search cluster from scratch, loading every ancestor of each page in order to collect all of its permissions is far too expensive.

Thus, one of the primary needs that my team had from the new data lake is "tree traversal and permission data construction for each block". We rewrote our "offline" reindexer to read from the data lake instead of reading from RDS instances serving database snapshots. This allowed us to dramatically reduce the impact of iterating through every page when spinning up a new cluster (not to mention save a boatload in spinning up those ad-hoc RDS instances).

I hope this miniature deep dive gives a little bit more color on the uses of this data store—as it is emphatically _not_ to sell our users' data!

A Combinatory Rosetta Stone

crux — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 15:48:26 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.zdsmith.com/posts/a-combinatory-rosetta-stone.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40088298

Points: 23

# Comments: 4

New comment by crux in "Master of the Playing Cards"

crux — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 14:43:00 +0000

Tarot (tarock, tarok, tarokk, tarocchi) games are all played with five suits.

An Algebraic Sketch of Poetic Form

crux — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 13:59:57 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.zdsmith.com/posts/an-algebraic-sketch-of-poetic-form.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37370492

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

On Culture-Games

crux — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 00:22:23 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.zdsmith.com/posts/on-culture-games.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34649810

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

On Culture-Games

crux — Sat, 03 Dec 2022 15:33:29 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.zdsmith.com/posts/on-culture-games.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33844204

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by crux in "Teach your kids bridge, not poker"

crux — Sat, 21 May 2022 19:06:18 +0000

Teach your kids Tarock, not Bridge.

Ok, that phrasing is mostly just to keep the pattern going. But I do want to bring to light the fact that there are actually a larger class of games of the same sort as Bridge - imperfect information, high skill, with a body of strategy and discussion - than most Americans are aware of.

I think it’s worth mentioning these for two reasons:

1. They’re really wonderful games! And they have deep cultural roots, which can be added delight for those of us who enjoy engaging with other cultures.

2. Bridge players can be kind of… dicks? That is, it’s unfortunate but true that the culture of Bridge can often be quite rigid and unfriendly. Especially to newcomers. As mentioned elsewhere, a surprising amount of Bridge has to do with the conventions encoded in the bidding, and if you don’t know those conventions you might feel rather lost, and your partner might get very annoyed at you.

Luckily, there are other games in the world that are the ‘Bridge’ of their own countries of origin - deep, strategic, rewarding years of play and study - that the average English speaker has never heard of.

I won’t go into too much detail but some highlights are:

- Preferans, a straight-trick-taking game for three from Russia;

- Skat, a point-trick-taking game from Germany;

- Tarocchino, a point trick taking game played with a 62 card tarot deck from Bologna;

- Koenigrufen, a point trick game played with a 54 card tarot deck from Austria;

- Danish tarok, a point trick game played with a 78 card deck;

- Vira, a straight trick taking game from Sweden;

- a half dozen incredibly deep and challenging games from Hungary alone. Something in the water over there.

In point of fact, Bridge is quite interesting, especially if you’re interested in the meta game of communicating through bidding conventions. I am not; there are other games out there that have really interesting features, lots of strategy, and a history dating back hundreds of years. Check them out!

Because I’m an annoying evangelist for this sort of thing, I’ll make sure my email is in my profile in case you’d like to know more.