Hacker News: ramchip

New comment by ramchip in "A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines"

ramchip — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:36:19 +0000

He's obviously not saying that you can "trust blindly" any PQ algorithm out there, just that there are some that have appeared robust over many years of analysis.

New comment by ramchip in "The future of version control"

ramchip — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 22:41:27 +0000

Looks like it's "Show Base" under the top-level "..." menu when working on a merge conflict

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/155277#issuecomme...

New comment by ramchip in "I wasted years of my life in crypto"

ramchip — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 12:52:33 +0000

These kind of things are part of transparency log threat models, for example: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6962.html#page-24.

New comment by ramchip in "I wasted years of my life in crypto"

ramchip — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 04:44:48 +0000

You're describing a transparency log, which doesn't require a blockchain.

New comment by ramchip in "Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control"

ramchip — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 14:04:26 +0000

Sometimes it's impossible even with an account. I can't search in English on my phone in Japan. If I go into options and change the language, the moment I click OK, it switches everything right back to Japanese. I know multiple colleagues who've had the same issue for years.

New comment by ramchip in "Becoming a compiler engineer"

ramchip — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 06:44:24 +0000

It's incredibly rude, and wrong, to assume that a woman was hired because she "checks off a bunch of HR checkboxes" rather than skill or hard work when you know nothing about her.

New comment by ramchip in "Frozen String Literals: Past, Present, Future?"

ramchip — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 07:18:52 +0000

An iolist isn't a string, you can't pass it to the uppercase function for instance. It's really meant for I/O as the name implies. Regular string concatenation is optimized to avoid copying when possible: https://www.erlang.org/doc/system/binaryhandling.html#constr...

New comment by ramchip in "A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool"

ramchip — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 11:54:38 +0000

> This by itself means that it is not potable

Do you mean because it's distilled? Distilled water is perfectly safe to drink.

New comment by ramchip in "A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool"

ramchip — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 03:29:28 +0000

From: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-nuclear-plant-worker-fell-...

> According to federal reports, the contractor ingested some of the reactor water before being yanked out, scrubbed down, and checked for radiation. They walked away with only minor injuries and about 300 counts per minute of radiation detected in their hair.

> That sounds like a lot, but apparently it isn't terribly serious. He underwent a decontamination scrubdown and was back on the job by Wednesday.

New comment by ramchip in "The working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn't see in the movies"

ramchip — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 22:46:17 +0000

One-time pads are not vulnerable to gardening.

New comment by ramchip in "Don't Build Multi-Agents"

ramchip — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 23:30:13 +0000

Personally I found the article informative and well-written. I had been wondering for a while why Claude Code didn't more aggressively use sub-agents to split work, and it wasn't obvious to me (I don't build agents for a living).

New comment by ramchip in "Don't Build Multi-Agents"

ramchip — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 22:52:31 +0000

I've done a lot of Erlang and I don't see the relation? Supervisors are an error isolation tool, they don't perform the work, break it down, combine results, or act as a communication channel. It's kind of the point that supervisors don't do much so they can be trusted to be reliable.

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

ramchip — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 14:03:39 +0000

If you dereference it you get back an integer, not a variable. A variable is a name that identifies a value; the pointer points to the value, not to the name.

New comment by ramchip in "Claude Sonnet will ship in Xcode"

ramchip — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 10:19:30 +0000

There's a free tier, and various paid tiers: https://github.com/features/copilot/plans

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

ramchip — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 09:43:26 +0000

That's a pointer to an integer.

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

ramchip — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 09:03:17 +0000

> There, the reference to `i` is being mutated.

That's rebinding. Mutation is when you change the state of an object. Variables are not objects. You can't have a reference (aka pointer) pointing to a variable.

New comment by ramchip in "Claude Code is all you need"

ramchip — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 05:50:03 +0000

It's a wide field so it depends on the specialization. I did computer engineering 15+ years ago and we never touched SQL, but I think the software engineering people did have a class on it.

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

ramchip — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 22:27:58 +0000

I think you're confusing mutation and variable reassignment?

New comment by ramchip in "Don't “let it crash”, let it heal"

ramchip — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 04:42:54 +0000

I recommend https://ferd.ca/the-zen-of-erlang.html starting from "if my configuration file is corrupted, restarting won't fix anything". The tl;dr is it helps with transient bugs.

New comment by ramchip in "GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that's not the worst of it"

ramchip — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 01:00:20 +0000

> Gary Marcus always, always says AI doesn't actually work - it's his whole thing. If he's posted a correct argument it's a coincidence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44278811

I think you're absolutely right about this being a wider problem though.