Hacker News: gylterud

New comment by gylterud in "Using the internet like it's 1999"

gylterud — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:44:46 +0000

As a university professor, I still get random people e-mailing me “dumb questions” every once in a while. And I still try my best to answer them – in the spirit of keep the Internet alive!

Online community and connections are very valuable, and I also get genuinely interesting e-mails from random people. Usually someone who has read something I wrote, and want to discuss it. I also send out random e-mails, and my experience is that many people will answer, if you write to them about something they care about.

New comment by gylterud in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

gylterud — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 06:09:36 +0000

No changing when schools and kindergartens are open. Where I live, kindergarten closes 16:30. So 8–16 it is!

New comment by gylterud in "H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright typographic mystery"

gylterud — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:24:01 +0000

Not sure why the comments here are so negative! I found it mildly interesting, and worth a few minutes on a Sunday!

New comment by gylterud in "Claude becomes number one app on the U.S. App Store"

gylterud — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:31:46 +0000

I did not realise there are ads for LLMs. Of course if I thought about it, I would conclude that there must be. But somehow the concept seems strange to me. What do they advertise? The LLM can do so many different things… I guess they are all “welcome! To the world of tomorrow!”

Then again, I know nothing about ads these days. Last time I had any ad exposure was twenty years ago, when I lived at home with my parents.

New comment by gylterud in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

gylterud — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 08:14:25 +0000

Countries do not do, things people do.

Dehumanising “the others” is a human trait, and a very destructive one. Just like violence and greed. People have different susceptibility for these, but we should all work to counter them and it is in its place to point it out when observed.

New comment by gylterud in "The Monad Called Free (2014)"

gylterud — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:39:34 +0000

I owe so much to this blog! It was such an inspiring read when I started out programming in Haskell back in 2007.

Today I am a professor in computer science and still draw on it for examples in my advanced functional programming course. Just last week we did the loeb function, as an example of interesting use of Functor.

Loeb function: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/11/from-l-theorem-to-spreadsheet...

New comment by gylterud in "How does misalignment scale with model intelligence and task complexity?"

gylterud — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:26:51 +0000

No, but they emulate intelligence by making up connections between seemingly disparate things, where there are none.

New comment by gylterud in "State of the Windows: What is going on with Windows 11?"

gylterud — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 22:55:32 +0000

Well, with the help of Microsoft and Apple, who knows? This might just be the years of the Linux desktop!

Valve has made Linux gaming a thing. So, even normies are trying it…

New comment by gylterud in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

gylterud — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:47:16 +0000

https://hakon.gylterud.net/

I write there about anything which interests me. My site is written in Markdown and an mkfile builds it using Pandoc. There is even an atom feed for my diary entries. Also generated using Pandoc!

New comment by gylterud in "Gentoo Linux 2025 Review"

gylterud — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 13:29:22 +0000

I used Gentoo for ten years (2005–2015), and I was very happy with it! Stable was not the word I would use, in that updating frequently broke and required manual intervention. But it was so flexible! The easily accessible options one has for choosing everything about the system is unparalleled in any system I have tried since. I would still use it if I had more tinkering time. These days I am on NixOS, mostly to have the same setup on every machine I use.

New comment by gylterud in "AI coding assistants are getting worse?"

gylterud — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 14:43:21 +0000

One would then maybe suspect breaking up alliances with Europe is the point of the whole thing.

New comment by gylterud in "I program without syntax highlighting"

gylterud — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:00:02 +0000

I had not thought about this perspective (I wrote this essay many eons ago). But now I have a good colleague who is dyslexic, and he said the same thing. He says, for him, the colours carry more meaning than the characters often.

New comment by gylterud in "Type-machine"

gylterud — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 06:28:37 +0000

I guess they were confused by the GHc documentation which says that the language option TraditionalRecordSyntax was introduced then, and enabled by default. Of course, the actual syntax was always part of the language. There just wasn’t an explicit option to enable/disable it.

New comment by gylterud in "Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team"

gylterud — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 14:06:49 +0000

Cool. I might go back to it sometime some time! I really liked the routing protocol and the ease of setting up services for it.

New comment by gylterud in "Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team"

gylterud — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 19:35:27 +0000

What is the status on I2P these days? I used to run a lot of stuff on it. It was a lot of fun. It was like this cozy alternative development of internet, where things still felt like 1997.

New comment by gylterud in "OCaml as my primary language"

gylterud — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 11:09:39 +0000

The day when LLMs generate useful code with dependent types! That would be awesome!

New comment by gylterud in "OCaml as my primary language"

gylterud — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 11:07:10 +0000

The way code is written in Haskell, small laser focused functions and clearly defined and mockable side effects, lends itself very well to property based testing.

This might not be impossible to achieve in other languages, but I haven’t seen it used as prevailently in other languages.

New comment by gylterud in "OCaml as my primary language"

gylterud — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 07:40:55 +0000

I have found that Haskell has two good things going for it when it comes to LLM code generation. Both have to do with correctness.

The expressive type system catches a lot of mistakes, and the fact that they are compile errors which can be fed right into the LLM again means that incorrect code is caught early.

The second is property based testing. With it I have had the LLM generate amazingly efficient, correct code, by iteratively making it more and more efficient – running quickcheck on each pass. The LLM is not super good at writing the tests, but if you add some yourself, you quickly root out any mistakes in the generated code.

New comment by gylterud in "OCaml as my primary language"

gylterud — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 07:30:18 +0000

I usually treat the LLM generated Haskell code as a first draft.

The power of Haskell in this case is the fearless refactoring the strong type system enables. So even if the code generated is not beautiful, it can sit there and do a job until the surrounding parts have taken shape, and then be refactored into something nice when I have a moment to spare.

New comment by gylterud in "The Anti-Pattern Game"

gylterud — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 13:50:17 +0000

Great explanation!

I guess it also hints at why the sequences keep getting smaller when you compress it several times (as mentioned in a footnote). Each compression peels away layers in this expansion. That’s my intuition at least.