Hacker News: jwdunne

Beginner resources for formalizing lambda calculi

jwdunne — Sun, 11 May 2025 14:41:24 +0000

Article URL: https://chrishenson.net/posts/2025-05-10-formalized_lambda_calculus.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43954165

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Bifurcate the Problem Space

jwdunne — Fri, 02 May 2025 17:38:45 +0000

Article URL: https://potetm.com/devtalk/bifurcate-the-problem.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43872717

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Lode Coding

jwdunne — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 11:01:56 +0000

Article URL: https://fjzeit.github.io/coding/lode-coding

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43760791

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jwdunne in "Ozempic Can Cause Major Loss of Muscle Mass and Reduce Bone Density"

jwdunne — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 19:45:27 +0000

Makes sense really. The fat stores will go a longer way with less muscle. I imagine that would work brilliantly during the cold winter months living in a cave, where theres less reason to move much. Unfortunately, this is dysfunctional in the developed world.

New comment by jwdunne in "My frugal indie dev startup stack (2022)"

jwdunne — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 11:21:50 +0000

We thought that at the SaaS I’m working at but AWS scheduled maintenance in our AZ and that led to significant downtime with nothing we could do about it, no compensation, nada. It was basically our fault because we didn’t use multi-AZ. I can’t remember if this was RDS or ECS but we figured if it could happen to one critical service in a single AZ, it could happen to another.

I think Proxy _is_ overkill and perhaps expensive for what it is. For a pg install, running pgBouncer isn’t difficult. But I guess that depends on whether you’re authenticating with IAMs, which doesn’t sound trivial with bouncer (it might be).

Finding Your Weak Spots

jwdunne — Sat, 27 May 2023 08:59:31 +0000

Article URL: https://jamesdunne.dev/posts/weak-spots/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36093139

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jwdunne in "Go with PHP"

jwdunne — Thu, 11 May 2023 06:15:45 +0000

You’re right. Psalm has been a god send on the project I’m working on.

Unfortunately, it’s taking far too long for Laravel to catch up so parts of its API are a black hole for types.

Especially things like request input, which returns a union of string and array as opposed to using a conditional return type.

You end up with assertion soup every time you touch Laravel so over time the project uses less and less of it.

A well-typed framework and set of libraries would be very nice.

The real “must have” tools for programming

jwdunne — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 16:42:27 +0000

Article URL: https://jamesdunne.dev/posts/must-have-programming-tools/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456926

Points: 114

# Comments: 25

New comment by jwdunne in "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4"

jwdunne — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 06:58:41 +0000

Hang on, let me cover B:

tHiS sHoUlDn’T bE oN hAcKeRnEws

New comment by jwdunne in "Zantac’s maker kept quiet about cancer risks for 40 years"

jwdunne — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 21:30:52 +0000

Nexium, or esomeprazole, works well, or better than Zantac, and can be purchased OTC (at least here in the UK). It’s pricey but usually lasts a couple of days or more so it stretches further.

New comment by jwdunne in "Show HN: Shite – little hot-reloadin' static site maker from shell"

jwdunne — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 18:32:40 +0000

Northern English dialect too…

New comment by jwdunne in "Citizen scientists report global rapid reductions in the visibility of stars"

jwdunne — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 22:57:05 +0000

I noticed the difference too when moving to a town just outside of Snowdonia in Wales, UK. It’s truly wonderful - you just don’t see it growing up in a city like Manchester.

It’s Bortle 4 where I live and it drops down to 3 just 20 minutes down the road. One of the best perks of living here.

Time is ripe to invest in a good telescope, I think :)

New comment by jwdunne in "Show HN: Socketify.py: Http/Https and WebSockets servers for PyPy3 and Python3"

jwdunne — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 14:57:46 +0000

Yes. I was thinking exactly this when coming into the comments.

Real world benchmarks take more time to prepare, we get that, but let’s be honest: a bold claim _needs_ bold evidence.

New comment by jwdunne in "Ask HN: I have diagnosed ADHD and cannot work with Slack anymore – advice?"

jwdunne — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 09:17:24 +0000

I have ADHD and this is what I would recommend. Dual screen is okay if you implement the rest as long as the task occupies both screens (e.g code in one and tests, type checking or a live demo on the other).

I’d go further and suggest turning off _all_ sounds and vibrations your phone period, including for calls.

If that’s a bit extreme, do it for work hours, but turning them off completely is life changing. With them on, it’s too easy for your phone to dominate your attention.

Your phone needs to be something you give attention to on your own terms, as a tool that you control.

You might wonder about urgent alerts, like waiting for an important call or on call notifications. Your habits simply change to give the appropriate amount of attention, like a quick glance every now and then at an interval of your choosing. And, more often than not, an urgent call can be called back.

New comment by jwdunne in "Why Lisp?"

jwdunne — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 09:12:43 +0000

I think a lot of the evangelism happened before Python and other languages both picked up steam and integrated some of the powerful ideas, e.g first class functions / closures or a powerful object system, so the chasm is now much narrower.

I’ve read a few pieces by prominent lispers who moved on to Python for similar reasons, along with wider adoption with a bigger ecosystem.

So you’re not wrong in thinking that. But I do believe there are a few things beyond macros that Lisp makes fantastically trivial that wouldn’t be so in other languages. It just doesn’t seem as magical anymore since we’ve raised the baseline for what is possible, for what to expect from a language. That is due in part to the influence of Lisp itself - lambda the ultimate own goal.

New comment by jwdunne in "Stop Writing Dead Programs [video]"

jwdunne — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 07:47:46 +0000

Yes, I find it harder to read code at lengths much longer than this. 120 is quite difficult. It also makes it even harder to read if you split the screen vertically, which I do all the time.

That said, I don’t think it should be a hard limit and it’s fine if a lines a bit over, +/- 10 like you said. Certainly not something that we should contort into multiple lines just to keep under a hard limit. Unfortunately, a few auto formatters only do hard limits - it’d be interesting to see how an acceptable interval around the limit would work.

Plus, I’ve noticed the limit makes more of a difference for comments than code so I try to keep comments under that. The written word appears more sensitive to line length.

New comment by jwdunne in ""The Social Network" synth sounds"

jwdunne — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 07:59:42 +0000

I didn’t know this until I read it. Whenever I listened to Ghosts, I’ve hit a few tracks and thought “I’m sure this was on The Social Network”. And then some time later, I’ve done the same thing listening to TSN OST. Never clicked!

New comment by jwdunne in ""The Social Network" synth sounds"

jwdunne — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 07:52:08 +0000

I really loved the soundtrack when watching this film. I was thinking this is some of the best New Age music I’ve ever heard. And, to my complete surprise, it was scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. NIN has been my all time favourite band since I was a kid. That made me chuckle.

New comment by jwdunne in "Ask HN: Do you think Hacker News should begin with “subreddits”?"

jwdunne — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 21:42:06 +0000

Indeed, it’s hard to read about naughty Orcas and Postgres internals on a single feed, despite both being inherently interesting to me. It’s a refreshing change from the Reddit homepage, with topics I have to piece together myself.

Fact is, I can’t fully predict what I will find interesting so HN regularly offers me a good few dark horses that Reddit simply cannot.

Not long ago, there was a series on the history of bread. I’m sure there’s some kind of subreddit for this but I’d never have sought it out.

New comment by jwdunne in "Orcas are breaking rudders off boats in Europe"

jwdunne — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 20:19:20 +0000

Let’s hope they don’t start eating tide pods.