Hacker News: iamevn

New comment by iamevn in "“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)"

iamevn — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 05:09:17 +0000

I can't speak to any sort of scalability but I can definitely say that not everything needs to be built for millions of users. There's plenty of utility in tools you use to help even a single person (even yourself!)

New comment by iamevn in "Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward"

iamevn — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 22:00:29 +0000

Pebble smart watches are tethered (to an android/ios device via bluetooth), do not talk to a cellular network, and have had an especially good battery life because of that and their low-power displays which are always on and visible with external light, only turning on the backlight when you are using it (e.g. hitting buttons or after giving the watch a little shake). afaik, every Pebble watch has had a significantly longer battery life than all of Apple's watches even though they're always displaying.

The newer Pebbles do have a better battery life, lasting multiple weeks maybe thanks of better battery tech.

New comment by iamevn in "End of Japanese community"

iamevn — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 06:20:52 +0000

Please reread what you wrote and try to see if you can see how it comes off as at least culturally insensitive if not outright racist.

New comment by iamevn in "When if is just a function"

iamevn — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:52:59 +0000

See the `either` function further down

  either some-condition { print "was true" } { print "was false" }

New comment by iamevn in "Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission"

iamevn — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 01:47:08 +0000

No? I don't think this is the trap you think it is.

New comment by iamevn in "Why tail-recursive functions are loops"

iamevn — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 23:41:43 +0000

I'm in the same boat, recursion tends to be easier for me to reason about because I'm expressing the problem in terms of some base case that incoming parameters are being reduced to rather than some condition that an iterative approach is working towards.

New comment by iamevn in "I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)"

iamevn — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 03:00:27 +0000

I'm very happy with my Unihertz Jelly Max aside from the camera being not great. I think it's the smallest it can reasonably be (62.7mm wide) while still having its touchscreen keyboard be usable and because it's fairly thick it actually feels good to hold in my hands and I don't need to stick one of those silly pop sockets on the back.

New comment by iamevn in "Uncommon Uses of Python in Commonly Used Libraries (2022)"

iamevn — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 06:07:17 +0000

Seems fairly standard stuff for libraries to consider. I was really hoping for some weird stuff like patching bytecode or implementing entire different languages as a python library.

New comment by iamevn in "Silly job interview questions in Haskell"

iamevn — Fri, 23 May 2025 08:50:22 +0000

can you not narrow it down further to O(k * nCr(n, k)) (n=size of input, k=combination size) since it does k conses for each of the nCr(n, k) combinations?

(the final filter sums k elements nCr(n, k) times as well)

New comment by iamevn in "Silly job interview questions in Haskell"

iamevn — Fri, 23 May 2025 08:13:52 +0000

with N as the length of the subsets and X as the length of input, `combinations n xs` basically walks through list xs and at each element, conses that element onto each combination of size n-1 of later elements in the list then appends those resulting lists together. this is on the order of N * nCr(X, N) aka O(NX!/(N!(X-N)!)) which dominates the overall runtime. the final filter walks through each combination and does O(N) work at each element to find the ones that sum to the desired amount, again O(NX!/(N!(X-N)!))

New comment by iamevn in "Parser Combinators Beat Regexes"

iamevn — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 05:38:31 +0000

I don't follow why parser combinators would be a bad tool for CSV. It seems like one would specify a CSV parser as (pardon the pseudocode):

  separator = ','
  quote = '"'
  quoted_quote = '""'
  newline = '\n'
  plain_field = sequence(char_except(either(separator, quote, newline)))
  quoted_field = quote + sequence(either(char_except(quote), quoted_quote)) + quote 
  field = either(quoted_field, plain_field)
  row = sequence_with_separator(field, separator)
  csv = sequence_with_separator(row, newline)

Seems fairly natural to me, although I'll readily admit I haven't had to write a CSV parser before so I'm surely glossing over some detail.

New comment by iamevn in "Nine – seemingly impossible C64 demo"

iamevn — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 01:55:49 +0000

This is probably a really basic question but why does the wizard need to stop being drawn with characters when the sprites move out past the left/right borders? Is this a hardware restriction where those lines aren't able to have text on them when there are sprites on the edges?

New comment by iamevn in "GenChess"

iamevn — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:23:47 +0000

This is super frustrating to use. There's a character limit of 30 but it seems like whenever it tries to put a line break in the input it just deletes what I was typing.

New comment by iamevn in "Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions"

iamevn — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 05:11:26 +0000

Why would people need to invest in a neighborhood? Houses are for living in.

New comment by iamevn in "Azure Central US region is currently down"

iamevn — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 23:50:40 +0000

I think the parent meant Azure DevOps which is Microsoft's jira and was completely down for the duration of this outage.

New comment by iamevn in "How to implement a hash table in C (2021)"

iamevn — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 08:32:15 +0000

if (size + size < size) {

I know size_t wraps around on overflow so this would actually work, but this still makes me do a double take.

New comment by iamevn in "Kien, the most-delayed video game in history, released after 22 years"

iamevn — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 09:48:29 +0000

looks like there's a digital version for sale on the same site as the physical version https://incube8games.com/collections/vendors?q=AgeOfGames

The DJI Drone Ban: A Uniquely American Clusterfuck

iamevn — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 21:06:30 +0000

Article URL: https://www.404media.co/the-dji-drone-ban-a-uniquely-american-disaster/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40743381

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by iamevn in "Wordle in legal row with geography spinoff, Worldle"

iamevn — Fri, 31 May 2024 17:51:00 +0000

I don't think it's at all reasonable to say that https://worldledaily.com/ is typosquatting https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html

New comment by iamevn in "Tail Recursion Elimination (2009)"

iamevn — Tue, 28 May 2024 17:38:43 +0000

I feel like this part has little to do with TCO and TFA is overly focused on the recusion part of things. Even in the case of that example, there's still a function that directly returns the result of another function call. That's a tail call and can be optimized the same way it could if it were recusion optimized to reuse the current stack frame.