Hacker News: mrcsd

New comment by mrcsd in "The Lost Art of Logarithms"

mrcsd — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 11:02:21 +0000

I really disagree with the straightforward reduction of engineering to 'math but practical', but I'm finding it hard to express exactly why I feel this way.

The history of mathmatical advancement is full of very grounded and practical motivations, and I don't believe that math can be separated from these motivations. That is because math itself is "just" a language for precise description, and it is made and used exactly to fit our descriptive needs.

Yes, there is the study of math for its own sake, seemingly detached from some practical concern. But even then, the relationships that comprise this study are still those that came about because we needed to describe something practical.

So I suppose my feeling is that, teaching math without a use case is like teaching english by only teaching sentence construction rules. It's not that there's nothing to glean from that, but it is very divorced from its real use.

New comment by mrcsd in "How does Ada's memory safety compare against Rust?"

mrcsd — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 12:44:59 +0000

I don't think this is quite the same comparison. In Rust, multiple mutable pointers to the same object can exist at the same time. So, it's similar to C in this way. It is mutable references that must be exclusive.

New comment by mrcsd in "Life is more than an engineering problem"

mrcsd — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 17:58:18 +0000

Words are not reducible to technical statements or algorithms. But, even if they were, then by your suggestion there's not much point in talking about anything at all.

New comment by mrcsd in "Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?"

mrcsd — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:37:57 +0000

This is abhorrent. The feeling of safety underpins emotional well-being. What you advocate is only the repetition of past suffering. Without safety, what is left but fear?

New comment by mrcsd in "Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?"

mrcsd — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 08:23:43 +0000

I am often left confused by responses like this. I think it would be fair to suggest that some significant percentage of chidren suffer in schools or have harrowing experiences that they are going to carry with them through life until dealt with. If this is the case, why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn? I don't believe you are meaning to suggests that the situation as it stands doesn't need change, but that is nonetheless implicit in your statements.

From my position, saying: "I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it." Comes close to invalidating the experience of another.

New comment by mrcsd in "Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?"

mrcsd — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 08:15:29 +0000

I'm 34, grew up in London, went to state primary school and private secondary school. dijit's account of schooling ressonates strongly with me.

New comment by mrcsd in "Be Aware of the Makefile Effect"

mrcsd — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 15:57:31 +0000

If all disrespecting is to belittle and look down upon, then fair enough, I agree with you. What I meant, in perhaps an ill-phrased manner, was that overemphasised respect can often lead to stasis, where people might not want to change in case they are seen as disrespectful. Hence my use of disrespect, in that it is a relative judgement, and which can and has been used to discourage creative difference or just difference in general.

New comment by mrcsd in "Be Aware of the Makefile Effect"

mrcsd — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 22:34:21 +0000

Disrespect is part of progress, respectful humans are liable to blindness of flaws. Just as part of youthful creativity is disregard for what has come before.

New comment by mrcsd in "It's time to get back to our roots around free expression"

mrcsd — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 14:09:58 +0000

So, just like normal then?

I don't disagree with being cynical about social media, but community belief is the overwhelming mechanism by which fact is decided throughout history, including now.

New comment by mrcsd in "Property-Based Testing for the People"

mrcsd — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 22:06:39 +0000

Care to expand upon the issues you were running into with hypothesis? I'm genuinely curious as I may soon be evaluating whether to use it in a professional context.

New comment by mrcsd in "Floridians have no right to bodies of water 'free of pollution,' court rules"

mrcsd — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 20:00:42 +0000

Surely an ability to balance requires that both sides of an issue be deemed somehow legitimate, no? In which case, surely there must be some sort of "right" which forbids injuries to nature, without which there can be no legal standing to prevent such injuries. In other words, why is there a procedural right to pollute and yet no right to stop pollution?

New comment by mrcsd in "When Zig Is Safer and Faster Than Rust"

mrcsd — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 13:50:41 +0000

> Writing a substantial amount of unsafe Rust really sucks the beauty out of the language.

I really disagree with this take, given the examples of unsafe code the article chose to exhibit. Trying to write C in Rust totally goes against the grain of Rust's ergonomics, which are oriented towards discouraging unsafe code patterns. It should be a pain to attempt something dangerous, and it should feel really easy to write safe code, because this setup naturally encourages the vast majority of code to be written safely.

New comment by mrcsd in "That's not an abstraction, that's a layer of indirection"

mrcsd — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 12:10:26 +0000

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but not the literal fact of it. Sure, interesting proofs require pulling out some interesting knowledge in the reasoning, but notions like "surprising" or "interesting" are about human subjectivity and don't really exist as a property of a deduction. Surprising or interesting knowledge is not somehow new knowledge that wasn't there before, it's just that we didn't see it previously.

New comment by mrcsd in "That's not an abstraction, that's a layer of indirection"

mrcsd — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 11:38:52 +0000

Just thinking on my feet as to how I separate abstractions from indirections and it seems to me that there's a relatively decent rule of thumb to distinguish them: When layer A of code wraps layer B, then there are a few cases:

    1) If A is functionally identical to B, then A is a layer of indirection
    2) If A is functionally distinct from B, then A is likely an abstraction
    3) If A is functionally distinct from B, but B must be considered when 
       handling A, then A is a leaky abstraction.

The idea is that we try to identify layers of indirection by the fact that they don't provide any functional "value".

New comment by mrcsd in "That's not an abstraction, that's a layer of indirection"

mrcsd — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 11:29:01 +0000

Funnily enough, logical deductions or formal theorem proofs can be seen as a set of transformative steps from the initial premises to the conclusion, where no new information is added in the process. Which makes the conclusion (at a stretch) a bit like "just" rephrasing the initial premises.

New comment by mrcsd in "Cognitive load is what matters"

mrcsd — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 20:26:27 +0000

IMO cognative load is much easier to manage when required (human) memory use is less of a factor. In practical terms, this means maximising the locality of reasoning, i.e., having everything you need in front of you to make a decision. One of the reasons I favour rust is precisely because this factor has been a focus in the design.

New comment by mrcsd in "Four limitations of Rust's borrow checker"

mrcsd — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 23:46:36 +0000

Not necessarily. Since the argument to `.or_else` is a function, the fallback value can be lazily evaluated.

New comment by mrcsd in "C++ is an absolute blast"

mrcsd — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 23:39:10 +0000

How can we make better tools if we don't blame tools?

New comment by mrcsd in "Japanese workers turn to resignation agencies"

mrcsd — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:36:39 +0000

In my experience, the connotations are very similar to English use. What matters is the context. Say sekuhara or sexual harassment at work: very serious connotation. Amongst friends or in media (comdey/anime/etc): potentially frivolous/unserious connotation.

New comment by mrcsd in "Shields up: New ideas might make active shielding viable"

mrcsd — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 18:05:02 +0000

> Based on their simulations, Fry and Madzunkov built small-scale models of their electrostatic shields and tested them in a particle beam at Brookhaven National Laboratory with good results—they showed that the ASPP software was fairly accurate in its predictions. “We are at the stage where we need to start looking at building larger demonstrators. Stojan and I proposed putting a device on a lunar surface as a technology demonstration for the plasma mitigation method. Sometimes, you’ve just got to focus on applications that perhaps you don’t want to do first,” said Fry.

It is only a small scale model, but your comment really doesn't warrant such certainty about simulation only.