Hacker News: grndn

New comment by grndn in "Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs"

grndn — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:03:23 +0000

Or in one of my favorite coinages: "Moral Crumple Zones". "Just as the crumple zone in a car is designed to absorb the force of impact in a crash, the human in a highly complex and automated system may become simply a component—accidentally or intentionally—that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions." See https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moral-crumple-zones.html

New comment by grndn in "F*: A general-purpose proof-oriented programming language"

grndn — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:08:19 +0000

Matthew Crews has a done a number of videos on high-performance F# and there are some things you can do that give a big boost over the default coding approach.

Why F# for Performance -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIBRoNEpg6c

F# for Performance-Critical Code -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ5Lwzrdoe8

New comment by grndn in "The Kaiser and a "Mediocre Man" Theory of History"

grndn — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:46:37 +0000

"Understandably, there has been much speculation as to [leader]’s mental fitness. It has been marked that [leader] possessed a perpetual immaturity. He had great difficulty in taking matters seriously, and tended to fixate on surface level details that caught his fancy to the neglect of the heart of the matter. He spoke without preparation or consideration, seemingly unaware of the consequences this brought about.

However, the influence of the [leader] on [country] politics made [country]’s isolation inevitable. A byzantine system where promotions were based on the favor of a man who did not have the character to set a consistent policy made for a state that was not a credible partner."

New comment by grndn in "Four-year wedding crasher mystery solved"

grndn — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 12:49:31 +0000

Two separate Sherlock Holmes stories have a "stranger at a public wedding ceremony" as a plot point!

New comment by grndn in "Pa. House passes 'click-to-cancel' subscription bills"

grndn — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:39:07 +0000

Personal anecdote: I had a subscription to the Philly Inquirer. They made it very easy to sign up online, but there was no way to cancel online. The website only said "call the sales team to cancel".

I changed my home address to California, and shortly after, a new "Cancel Subscription" button appeared on the PI website, which worked great.

New comment by grndn in "Locally hosting an internet-connected server"

grndn — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 17:44:54 +0000

Fellow Branestawm enthusiast here. That is the first time anyone has ever mentioned Professor Branestawm on HN, as far as I can tell! It's triggering deep memories.

New comment by grndn in "Gleam, Coming from Erlang"

grndn — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 19:00:09 +0000

As another comment said, you can write client side code in F# which gets transpiled to JS, just like Typescript or CoffeeScript. This approach allows you to use JSX components directly from your F# code. It's very cool. Other FP languages have something similar.

https://www.compositional-it.com/news-blog/fsharp-react-seri...

New comment by grndn in "SQL pipe syntax available in public preview in BigQuery"

grndn — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 17:09:15 +0000

Elixir took the pipe symbol from F# (See Jose's comment at [1]). For more details see my other comment below.

[1] https://elixirforum.com/t/which-language-first-introduced-th...

New comment by grndn in "SQL pipe syntax available in public preview in BigQuery"

grndn — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 17:07:07 +0000

OCaml took the '|>' pipe symbol from F#. And F# was the language that made the '|>' pipe symbol popular in mainstream programming (as opposed to the unix '|' pipe symbol), afaik. According to Don Syme, it was used in F# in 2003 (see "Early History of F#", section 9.1, [1] which references [2]).

Here's his full comment:

/quote

Despite being heavily associated with F#, the use of the pipeline symbol in ML dialects actually originates from Tobias Nipkow, in May 1994 (with obvious semiotic inspiration from UNIX pipes) [archives 1994; Syme 2011].

... I promised to dig into my old mail folders to uncover the true story behind |> in Isabelle/ML, which also turned out popular in F#...

In the attachment you find the original mail thread of the three of us [ Larry Paulson; Tobias Nipkow; Marius Wenzel], coming up with this now indispensable piece of ML art in April/May 1994. The mail exchange starts as a response of Larry to my changes.

...Tobias ...came up with the actual name |> in the end...

/endquote

Haskell has had "$" or "backwards pipe" for ages, but that is just another way of doing function application and it does not feel the same as (and is not used the same way as) the unix-style piping paradigm.

[1] https://fsharp.org/history/hopl-final/hopl-fsharp.pdf

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190217164203/https://blogs.msd...

New comment by grndn in "The Global Climate Change Consensus: My Experiment (2007)"

grndn — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 17:31:45 +0000

Peter Norvig does his own research: "When faced with a controversy like this, the great thing is that you can do your own research. If you suspect Oreskes or Peiser (or both) might be biased, you can look at the data yourself."

Also, AFAIK, one of the first uses of "do your own research" in the modern sense. Google hits before 2009 do not use it in this way. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22do+your+own+research%22&t...

The Global Climate Change Consensus: My Experiment (2007)

grndn — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 17:31:45 +0000

Article URL: https://www.norvig.com/oreskes.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42368214

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

New comment by grndn in "European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls"

grndn — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 14:09:06 +0000

As one of the comments pointed out, it's even funnier if you turn on the automatic captions :)

Railway-Oriented Programming in Java

grndn — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 12:09:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zpDZ8gwmc4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27446970

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by grndn in "Who builds a house without drawing blueprints? (2015)"

grndn — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 12:24:09 +0000

Agreed about the TLA docs, but it is worth persisting, as TLA is very useful in some situations. These slides cover the basic syntax enough to get started.

https://www.slideshare.net/ScottWlaschin/tla-for-programmers...

New comment by grndn in "Write your own Excel in F# (2018)"

grndn — Sun, 25 Aug 2019 10:18:11 +0000

The original title is "Write your own Excel in 100 lines of F#." I don't know why the F# part was removed either. HN guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.". Having read the article, I don't think the "in 100 lines of F#" part is misleading, nor is it Buzzfeed-style clickbait.

New comment by grndn in "How many keywords I can fit into a single C# expression?"

grndn — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 13:02:20 +0000

C# Light (from 2014) - https://www.slideshare.net/ScottWlaschin/c-light

New comment by grndn in "Ask HN: Any recommended resources to develop system thinking?"

grndn — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 15:15:05 +0000

+100 "The Logic Of Failure" is a great starting point, and everything by Gerald Weinberg is worth reading.

New comment by grndn in "In web design, everything easy is hard again"

grndn — Sat, 10 Feb 2018 10:47:47 +0000

I came here to say the same thing. :)

The fundamental problem is that you want one piece of (semantic) content to be presented on many different platforms with very different design approaches.

The current approach uses if-then-else conditions in CSS, and when that fails, if-then-else conditions in JS, and when that fails, complex JS to transform the DOM. The XML/XSLT approach, although clunky, might actually be better in many cases.

New comment by grndn in "JS things I didn’t know existed"

grndn — Sat, 20 Jan 2018 19:23:13 +0000

Here is the history of the |> symbol as best as I can tell:

1994: Isabelle/ML (part of Isabelle proof assistant tooling) (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2011/05/17/archeologi...)

2005 and earlier: F#

2012: Elm

2013: Elixir (https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/pull/751)

2013: OCaml (https://ocaml.org/releases/4.01.0.html)

New comment by grndn in "It’s a Wonderful Loaf"

grndn — Sat, 06 May 2017 14:46:49 +0000

For a counterpoint, see the "Victorian Bakers" doc from the BBC: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4h8mty. See 11 min mark for bakery conditions and 23:30 for flour adulteration. The free market at its finest with no regulation.