Hacker News: shadowfox

New comment by shadowfox in "Typechecker Zoo"

shadowfox — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 14:50:12 +0000

While that is an excellent book, I would say that it focuses on type theory from a somewhat more theoretical perspective than (say) TAPL which is more on type _systems_ from a programming languages perspective. Both are great reads though.

New comment by shadowfox in "Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz"

shadowfox — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 14:28:23 +0000

> By forcing you to make a decision without context.

Not the OP, but what would be the point to that? In any practical scenario there is always context, isnt it? I guess I don't quite get what we are trying to measure here.

New comment by shadowfox in "U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites"

shadowfox — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 10:08:39 +0000

What exactly is an "evangelical atheist" ?

New comment by shadowfox in "FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI"

shadowfox — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 14:57:56 +0000

I don't think the OP is talking about usefulness at all, that is on a completely different dimension I would say.

New comment by shadowfox in "Persuasion through status rather than argument"

shadowfox — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 15:54:02 +0000

> Not everybody has a body of beliefs that guides him.

Not the OP, but this got me curious. How does one reason about things if you have no axioms (i.e. "body of beliefs")? Are you using some non-axiomatic systems of reasoning or just saying that some people don't reason at all ?

New comment by shadowfox in "How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet"

shadowfox — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 21:39:16 +0000

I think I am confused by your comment in the context of Larry Sanger: are you suggesting that rationalwiki is incorrect and that Larry did not say any of the things quoted?

New comment by shadowfox in "Handbook of Rationality (2021)"

shadowfox — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:54:11 +0000

That seems like a very interesting collection :) Do you have any recommendations for unusual or particularly interesting ones?

New comment by shadowfox in "The Forbidden Topics"

shadowfox — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 14:54:11 +0000

Given that the "First Amendment" is purely a US thing, and applies only to the Government curbing speech, I am not sure how much of this really applies anywhere else and in any other context?

New comment by shadowfox in "Nvidia Offices Raided by French Law Enforcement"

shadowfox — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 14:42:17 +0000

Not altogether sure what this has to do with the article and/or the raid?

New comment by shadowfox in "Lazygit: Simple terminal UI for Git commands"

shadowfox — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 11:59:49 +0000

I vaguely remember doing similar things with Matlab, but it has been a while and I don't recollect fully.

New comment by shadowfox in "Who employs your doctor? Increasingly, a private equity firm"

shadowfox — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 17:40:47 +0000

> At least in the US we (try) and make donations public. The places where it’s “banned” are black holes.

That is definitely an interesting take. So, is your ideal society one where anybody is allowed to give and take bribes as long as it is public?

New comment by shadowfox in "Learn how to design systems at scale and prepare for system design interviews"

shadowfox — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 20:18:47 +0000

Do you have any pointers to these research papers?

New comment by shadowfox in "Bret Victor update"

shadowfox — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 13:03:20 +0000

From what I can tell, at least for academic wet labs, robots seem fairly unavailable/unaffordable.

New comment by shadowfox in "Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA"

shadowfox — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 15:38:28 +0000

> This is a distinctly Western perspective: that intent matters

I am kind of curious about the perspective here. Is the argument that "eastern" (I assume, as opposed to "western") perspectives do not consider intent in evaluating actions?

New comment by shadowfox in "A novel the CIA spent a fortune to suppress"

shadowfox — Wed, 24 May 2023 18:21:36 +0000

> because it is the only document/philosophy in history that has determined the limits the people place on government rather than government determining the limits on the people

Really? The only document in history?

New comment by shadowfox in "Jeff Bezos announces $3.4B NASA contract to land astronauts on lunar surface"

shadowfox — Fri, 19 May 2023 20:14:27 +0000

Curious, what about that triggers your wish for mass extinction events?

New comment by shadowfox in "Ask HN: Why are there no traditional language compilers that target the JVM?"

shadowfox — Tue, 09 May 2023 13:46:47 +0000

Very curious what bytecode manipulation libraries you would recommend. I am aware of ASM [1], which was pleasant, but written in Java itself, I was wondering about something in (say) C, so that it can be used from other languages more easily.

[1] https://asm.ow2.io/

New comment by shadowfox in "12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields"

shadowfox — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 14:20:16 +0000

Yes indeed! There are so many disturbing bits in that article, but somehow in these comments it is getting conflated with a sort of character-building-by-hard-work and pulling-oneself-up-by-the-bootstrap narrative, which is mostly orthogonal to much of the stuff in the article.

New comment by shadowfox in "ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it"

shadowfox — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:21:45 +0000

> In most subjects I have found ChatGPT to be fairly reliable.

Not the OP, but I am very curious what subjects you have experimented with and whether you used any special prompt techniques.

My experience has been quite on the contrary: on the few subjects I have some understanding of, ChatGPT appears to do fine for basic questions and attempts to summarize concepts at a high-level, but any attempt at drilling in to specifics seem to cause it to hallucinate quite a bit, particularly with regards to concrete facts or citations or anything of that sort.

New comment by shadowfox in "Ask HN: Which ideological software factions do you know of, and do you like any?"

shadowfox — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 23:51:17 +0000

What are some entry points for (say) a motivated programmer to the topic of formal verification?