Hacker News: jwarden

New comment by jwarden in "Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)"

jwarden — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:09:42 +0000

This explanation seems very implausible to me. By lowering the rent by X%, and therefore reducing annual revenue by X%, you admit the building is worth X% less. But by leaving the building X% vacant, also reducing the annual income stream by X%, you and the bank can somehow pretend the building is worth what it would be if full? I doubt owners and banks actually believe this. Is there some policy that forces this?

New comment by jwarden in "Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country"

jwarden — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:03:37 +0000

Edward Abby wrote about southern Utah. Red rock country. Box Elder County is northern Utah. Night and day.

New comment by jwarden in "What async promised and what it delivered"

jwarden — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:11:44 +0000

I think this is right. More specifically, the problem is JavaScript function colors mean Sync/Async, whereas Zig's mean Non-IO/IO. Using function colors for async is fundamentally unnecessary, whereas for I/O it is fundamentally necessary. You should be able to define a synchronous function that calls an asynchronous function. But it makes no sense to define a non-IO function that calls a function that does IO.

EDIT: with the exception of doing IO on a freshly allocated, in-memory buffer that doesn't escape the function call.

New comment by jwarden in "A case against currying"

jwarden — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:19:34 +0000

Here’s an article I wrote a while ago about a hypothetical language feature I call “folded application”, that makes parameter-list style and folded style equivalent.

https://jonathanwarden.com/implicit-currying-and-folded-appl...

New comment by jwarden in "IDF killed Gaza aid workers at point blank range in 2025 massacre: Report"

jwarden — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:27:25 +0000

I think we should avoid suggesting that other people on this forum are evil, even if you think their ideas and arguments are harmful.

I think sometimes people are so certain about their beliefs that they perceive any argument that challenges them to be evil, bad faith trickery. But I think the best way to respond to these arguments is simply to give compelling reasons why they are wrong (and not why the person giving them is bad).

Otherwise, some people will be mislead by these bad arguments and you will have done nothing to help but say “don’t listen to him he’s evil”, which is not very convincing really.

New comment by jwarden in "US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere"

jwarden — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:44:33 +0000

What if the truth is that something is a lie?

Promoting truth and opposing lies are the same thing.

New comment by jwarden in "OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission"

jwarden — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 08:20:06 +0000

This writeup is very useful simonw.

But the title of this HN post is extremely misleading. What happened is that OpenAI rewrote the mission statement, reducing it from 63 words to 13. One of the 50 words they deleted happens to be "safely".

New comment by jwarden in "AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it"

jwarden — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:20:06 +0000

It’s like being a manager.

New comment by jwarden in "Slop Terrifies Me"

jwarden — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 14:28:02 +0000

Capitalism just means private citizens can own the means of production (e.g. start a business, buy stock) and earn a return on investment. It doesn’t mean only the rich must get richer. It means anyone who saves and invests their money instead of spending it gets richer.

However capitalism is perfectly compatible with a progressives taxation system such that the rich get richer at a lesser rate than the poor get richer.

New comment by jwarden in "Are arrays functions?"

jwarden — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:48:40 +0000

Right, so for a subset of functions, a language could implement an extensional equality test operator `==` for two functions by calling the functions for every possible input. It would be prohibitively slow for some functions, but correct.

But for other functions, even that won't be possible.

The point is that functions and arrays may be practically different. You can always do an `==` test on the contents of two arrays, but you can't do the same for two arbitrary functions.

New comment by jwarden in "I stopped following the news"

jwarden — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 08:14:54 +0000

Yes that’s a good point.

New comment by jwarden in "I stopped following the news"

jwarden — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 10:10:15 +0000

Reading the news and being informed are two separate things. Being an informed citizen, the kind that democracies need to survive, also requires 1) being informed of history and 2) understanding issues in depth.

People who consume a lot of news tend to have very shallow understanding of a broad range of current events. Worse they tend to be passive receivers of news instead of active seekers of information with intent to understand the world.

As a result, they are very susceptible to manipulation through selection of what makes the news they tend to consume. They become passive pawns in political power struggles.

New comment by jwarden in "Are arrays functions?"

jwarden — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:04:50 +0000

One case where a function is often not substitutable for an array is equality testing. In a language where any two arrays with the same elements in the same order are equal ([1,2] == [1,2]), the same cannot always be true of two equivalent functions. That is because extensionally equality is undecidable for arbitrary functions.

Arrays and functions may be mathematically equivalent but on a programming language level they are practically different.

New comment by jwarden in "I rebooted my social life"

jwarden — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 14:13:17 +0000

Ouch! I don’t think that’s fair.

It sounds like his professional life or personal interests naturally being him in contact with a social circle that isn’t fulfilling socially. Doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with him.

I say, look outward! Intentionally get involved with other social circles.

New comment by jwarden in "I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?"

jwarden — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 11:37:21 +0000

Listen to them.

New comment by jwarden in "Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds"

jwarden — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 14:42:29 +0000

Assuming a self-similar 80/20 Pareto wealth model (a fractal Lorenz curve), the headline number generalizes as:

    Just x%   | % wealth held | × poorest half
    ---------+---------------+----------------
    20%      | 80%           | 4.00x
    4.0%     | 64%           | 3.20x
    0.80%    | 51%           | 2.56x
    0.16%    | 41%           | 2.05x
    0.032%   | 33%           | 1.64x

New comment by jwarden in "Duplication Isn't Always an Anti-Pattern"

jwarden — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 16:41:13 +0000

This reminds me of the philosophical distinction between "sense" and "reference" introduced by Frege.

https://www2.lawrence.edu/fast/ryckmant/On%20Sense%20and%20R...

New comment by jwarden in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

jwarden — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 12:55:50 +0000

But you will never guess that the latest tik-tok craze will last another 50 years, and you'll never guess that Saturday Night Live (which premiered in 1075) will end 5-minutes from now. Your guesses are thus more likely to be accurate than if you ignored the information about how long something has lasted so far.

New comment by jwarden in "GPT-5"

jwarden — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 14:11:13 +0000

It does seem like common sense that they would be linked. But there is also research:

https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation...

New comment by jwarden in "GPT-5"

jwarden — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 14:09:14 +0000

I haven’t heard that statistic before. And the formulation seems imprecise? Does continuously beating the market mean that every single minute your portfolio value gains relative to the market?