Hacker News: ramchip

New comment by ramchip in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

ramchip — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:15:30 +0000

> you don't get bugs related to typing because elixir is somehow magic

Really? All the Elixir fans were saying that?

New comment by ramchip in "What I've Learned (So Far) Building Online Mini Games with Elixir and Swift"

ramchip — Wed, 27 May 2026 09:37:01 +0000

I love the BEAM and programmed on it for many years, but it really does not provide anything like durable objects.

1) It's very difficult to ensure globally serialized ownership with strong consistency in a distributed Erlang cluster when nodes are allowed to fail. Stuff like Horde will let you do some rough "run an instance of this process somewhere in the cluster", but it's eventually consistent (you may have multiple instances at times) and doesn't deal with netsplits well.

2) Mnesia is fine to replicate state within a network switch or very reliable LAN, but not over WLAN/Internet. It can enter split brain conditions and require external reconciliation. RabbitMQ suffered from Mnesia problems for many years and ended up replacing it with their own DB implementation using the Raft protocol.

New comment by ramchip in "Content-defined chunking added to Bazel"

ramchip — Sat, 16 May 2026 23:53:20 +0000

The same is true without CDC, and you can configure a maximum size.

New comment by ramchip in "Erlang/OTP 29.0"

ramchip — Sat, 16 May 2026 04:51:21 +0000

It's still referred as such through the official documentation: https://www.erlang.org/faq/introduction.html#idm24

You may be thinking of comments like: https://erlangforums.com/t/should-otp-be-the-standard-librar...

New comment by ramchip in "Getting arrested in Japan"

ramchip — Mon, 11 May 2026 08:39:20 +0000

It'd be a pretty horrible system if it was possible to get anyone you dislike tortured for a month by mailing them CSAM they didn't ask for...

New comment by ramchip in "My adventure in designing API keys"

ramchip — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:37:19 +0000

That second hash is called a Message Authentication Code (MAC), it's what the JWT HS256 algorithm does

New comment by ramchip in "My adventure in designing API keys"

ramchip — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:44:36 +0000

The purpose of the checksum is to help secret scanners avoid false positives, not to optimize the (extremely rare) case where an API key has a typo

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.