Hacker News: dunham

New comment by dunham in "What's a mathematician to do? (2010)"

dunham — Sun, 10 May 2026 15:50:51 +0000

For context - the top answer was written by Bill Thurston, who was awarded a Fields Medal. (Kind of like a nobel prize for mathematics.)

New comment by dunham in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

dunham — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:12:17 +0000

I don't see how this is going to work when every application decides to ship and run a 4GB model, competing for video memory. It's going to be the Electron problem times 10.

New comment by dunham in "Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months"

dunham — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:03:06 +0000

I recently saw this with the logseq api - the published api was an auto-generated stub. So I tried to grep the source code for the function and found detailed documentation written for claude. So I guess one benefit of all of this is that it's making people actually document things and maybe plan a little bit before implementing.

New comment by dunham in "Show HN: GhostBox – disposable little machines from the Global Free Tier."

dunham — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:15:32 +0000

Yeah, I think that's what the program creates in your github account. I see the source to those files embedded in the executable. (I'm not running the executable, but I downloaded the linux one to my mac to take a look inside.)

New comment by dunham in "Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell"

dunham — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 03:46:52 +0000

For caveman debugging, if I'm not sitting in a monad, I usually reach for something like Debug.Trace. Typically that's in Idris or my own language, but I see that haskell has it too.

For my own language, I have the syntax highlighting set to put the `trace` keyword in red, so I can easily clean up.

New comment by dunham in "Different language models learn similar number representations"

dunham — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 02:01:21 +0000

Yeah, I think Swiss French had more? (It's been about four decades since I took French, and high school classes are not very effective.)

New comment by dunham in "Different Language Models Learn Similar Number Representations"

dunham — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:44:09 +0000

Historically, quite a few languages were (or are) vigesimal. Perhaps decimal is also unnatural.

New comment by dunham in "Your hex editor should color-code bytes"

dunham — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 03:00:50 +0000

There is an app for that, too: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/

It has a little window you can move over the screen to simulate a few varieties of color blindness.

New comment by dunham in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

dunham — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:21:52 +0000

The other day they blocked me from accessing Kagi's web site because I was using Kagi's web browser.

New comment by dunham in "It's OK to compare floating-points for equality"

dunham — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:44:35 +0000

I was bit by this years ago when our test cases failed on Linux, but worked on macos. pdftotext was behaving differently (deciding to merge two lines or not) on the two platforms - both were gcc and intel at the time. When I looked at it in a debugger or tried to log the values, it magically fixed itself.

Eventually I learned about the 80-bit thing and that macos gcc was automatically adding a -ffloat-store to make == more predictable (they use a floats everywhere in the UI library). Since pdftotext was full of == comparisons, I ended up adding a -ffloat-store to the gcc command line and calling it a day.

New comment by dunham in "Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner"

dunham — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:23:52 +0000

> and need to be prepared to manage things like upgrading firmware

At one point in the early 2000's, my brother was soldering new capacitors onto dell raid cards. (I like to call that full-stack ops.)

New comment by dunham in "Signals, the push-pull based algorithm"

dunham — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:45:51 +0000

I know it is out of scope for this article, but there are variants where the operations are monadic rather than applicative and the shape of the graph can change depending on values. And also variations with state - where history can be taken into account.

Jane street briefly summarizes some options here: https://blog.janestreet.com/breaking-down-frp/

And they have an interesting talk on the trade-offs and how their own system, incremental, evolved: https://blog.janestreet.com/seven-implementations-of-increme...

New comment by dunham in "iNaturalist"

dunham — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:17:39 +0000

I've been using birdnet, but it seems to want an internet connection to do the identification and sometimes that is dicey when there is a bird that I want to identify. (Also birds seem to shut up around the time you get the app open.)

I'm going to give Merlin a try - the app has UI to download the network for offline use.

New comment by dunham in "CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font"

dunham — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:15:46 +0000

Yeah, a few years ago I tried the free ones, but eventually settled on Comic Code. I've been using it ever since - it's pleasant to code with. (If anyone is considering this - the "essentials" set with bold/italic is around $30. You don't need the full set.)

New comment by dunham in "How long does it take to get last liquid drops from kitchen containers?"

dunham — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:34:50 +0000

I typically wash my wok (and any carbon steel skillet) before eating. They seem to be easier to clean while hot.

But I use an outdoor butane burner for the wok, so I'm not heating it back up afterwards. I usually wash and set it upside down on the counter to drain.

New comment by dunham in "XML is a cheap DSL"

dunham — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 17:11:55 +0000

Worse than that - people will start tagging "this value is a Date" via comments, and you'll need to parse ad-hoc tags in the comments to decode the data. People already do tagging in-band, but at least it's in-band and you don't have to write a custom parser.

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

dunham — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 17:50:58 +0000

As someone who cut their teeth on a sun "programmer" layout, I really need control to be in that position. I might try mapping the vestigial control key to escape though. Or maybe the hack that dtj1123 describes (tap is escape, hold is control), if I can pull that off on macos.

New comment by dunham in "Lil' Fun Langs"

dunham — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 17:01:26 +0000

Yeah it has been fun. Lots of directions I can take it:

Since I have an LSP, I've got faster turn around and can add editor functionality that requires poking at the compile state. That's my current thread.

I have a C backend on hold, while I think about how I want to represent data without boxing everything and about whether I want to do reference counting or GC. (Reference counting unlocks "counting immutable beans" if I decide to give that a go, but I'd also like to try implementing GC someday.)

I should do some browser interop stuff and write something other than a compiler in my language.

And there are language enhancements: implementing "Do unchained" from Lean, automatic handling of lazy and/or async modalities, deriving implementations of classes, ...

New comment by dunham in "Lil' Fun Langs"

dunham — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 03:14:06 +0000

I've always found OCaml's (* ... *) comments annoying, because it needs shift for both characters. But I suspect it's easier to type on a french keyboard.

Knuth solves the bracket issue by redefining his keymap to swap () with [] and + with = (macos keymap files found at the bottom of this page: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html )

New comment by dunham in "Facebook is cooked"

dunham — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:43:20 +0000

I commented on a relatives post about a giant zucchini, and started getting posts about zucchinis in my feed. A couple of years ago, Facebook noticed that I stopped scrolling for calvin and hobbes comics and started showing me a bunch of those for a while.

I finally got the deletion thing to not error out and am almost at the end of the 30 day deletion period.