Hacker News: ctenb

New comment by ctenb in "The Dark Night of Mathematics"

ctenb — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:40:22 +0000

I never felt that the theorems were the most useful part of mathematics, strange as that may sound. In my professional experience, math offers a framework, a language of expressing ideas in an exact way. It clears things up for the writer and the reader. It is like speech; would we stop talking if a machine could utter all phrases?

New comment by ctenb in "G# – A modern .NET language with Go, Kotlin, and Swift ergonomics"

ctenb — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:23:26 +0000

Looking at the code and the commit log, this is a large pile of slop

New comment by ctenb in "Australian energy retailers must provide three hours of free daytime electricity"

ctenb — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:40:34 +0000

Link? I never heard of this and I'm very interested

New comment by ctenb in "Show HN: Jacquard, a programming language for AI-written, human-reviewed code"

ctenb — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 06:14:30 +0000

Why not use an existing language with proper algebraic effects? This language seems to be a language with something that looks like algebraic effects, but it doesn't look like it properly implemented those.

The Widening Gap: The Benefits and Harms of Generative AI for Novice Programmers

ctenb — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 07:35:37 +0000

Article URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632620.3671116

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48814743

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ctenb in "What AI does to the minds of novice coders [video]"

ctenb — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 07:34:48 +0000

Read the research this video is based on about the "widening gap" here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632620.3671116

What AI does to the minds of novice coders [video]

ctenb — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 07:34:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTUh0OO6Kmo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48814736

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by ctenb in "Prism: An Impure Functional Language With Typed Effects"

ctenb — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 06:49:33 +0000

For a second I thought the syntax was Koka, which is also a language with effects. But it's not, there are some syntax differences later in the post.

New comment by ctenb in "Ask HN: Who is quitting? (July 2026)"

ctenb — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:46:55 +0000

If you literally can't quit your job, that's called slavery, you realize that?

New comment by ctenb in "Show HN: Zanagrams"

ctenb — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 18:22:54 +0000

Cool that they list the definitions of the words afterwards. This makes it even more fun for non-native speakers, as it adds a free learning aspect to it.

New comment by ctenb in "IBM claims first sub-1 nanometer chip technology"

ctenb — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 16:29:42 +0000

Dupe news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674967

New comment by ctenb in "My Opinion on RL"

ctenb — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 08:48:26 +0000

It's not good practice to use acronyms without introducing them. From the title alone it's unclear what this is about, from the text it still had me guessing for a while.

Ask HN: What rules does your team have for using AI in a durable codebase?

ctenb — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:45:50 +0000

What guidelines/manifest do you have set up in your team for using AI responsibly to generate production code that has to be maintained long-term?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48627038

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by ctenb in "Flipper One – we need your help"

ctenb — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:18:37 +0000

I was hesitant to post my comment. It's the first time I've complained about this on HN I think. And it's not only about the flow of the words at all, it's more about reading something that no one wrote. Especially if it's about a project that seems interesting, having AI written text tells me it's maybe not the passion project I otherwise would think it was.

New comment by ctenb in "Flipper One – we need your help"

ctenb — Thu, 21 May 2026 11:59:13 +0000

Most articles I click on in the HN homepage turn out to be written by AI, judging from the phrasing. I'm weirded out by the fact that people don't seem to find it important to write their own thoughts down. The writing in TFA is clearly supervised by a human, but still, the wording is not human at all.

New comment by ctenb in "Building ML framework with Rust and Category Theory"

ctenb — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:44:34 +0000

Maybe expand ML to Machine Learning to avoid confusing with the programming language

New comment by ctenb in "Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons"

ctenb — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:11:26 +0000

Have you tried that, or is it just a random thought?

New comment by ctenb in "I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator in my own programming language"

ctenb — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:11:43 +0000

Tangentially related, this post git me reading about the spectre language. In the spectre docs you write: "There is a notable lack of contract based programming languages that enforce correctness at a low level.". What is the difference between a function checking arguments and throwing exceptions and contract-based functions, apart from perhaps a more concise syntax to specify it?

New comment by ctenb in "The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI"

ctenb — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:31:15 +0000

While the message is valid, it's ironic that this was clearly written by AI.

New comment by ctenb in "Helix: A post-modern text editor"

ctenb — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:18:58 +0000

Worth noting: the plugin system is steadily approaching maturity and will probably be integrated and released soonish™ https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675