Hacker News: shakadak

New comment by shakadak in "Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI"

shakadak — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:34:51 +0000

> what society looks like when humans are subpar in every domain

> when AI can do most of the work

You're not really responding to the core hypothetical of his comment

To me it reads as that: for utopians, you may benefit from LLMs now, but they'll still surpass you later, what then ?

New comment by shakadak in "Clojure Zippers (2021)"

shakadak — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 20:08:01 +0000

Yes, although it's usually defined as:

    {
      slides_shown: List,
      slides_left: List
    }

Where the head of slides_left is the current slide. Pretty much any recursive data structure can be derived into a zipper.

New comment by shakadak in "LoC is a dumb metric for functions"

shakadak — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 11:22:57 +0000

> If you never do that computation a second time anywhere else, I would argue that a new function is worse because you can't just scan in it quickly top to bottom.

I do the computation in my head each time I read it. If it is a function I can cache its behavior more easily compared to a well defined block of code. Even if it's never used anywhere else, it's read multiple time, by multiple people. Obviously, it has to make sense from a domain logic perspective, and not be done for the sake of reducing lines of code, but I have yet to see a function/module/file that is justified in being gigantic when approaching it with domain logic reasoning instead of code execution reasoning.

New comment by shakadak in "How the AI Bubble Will Pop"

shakadak — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 13:44:28 +0000

The ~woman~ teenager knew she was pregnant, Target's algorithm noticed her change in behavior and spilled the beans to her father.

New comment by shakadak in "How to stop functional programming (2016)"

shakadak — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 23:00:44 +0000

You've mentioned list comprehensions, map, and filter, so I suppose you mostly used these concepts with lists/arrays.

One question you could ask yourself is, how could you reproduce list comprehensions without special syntax ?

Another way to view monads is by following the types. With map, you can chain pure functions from one type to another to be applied on lists (hence the (in -> out) -> ([in] -> [out]) ) . How would you do that chaining with function from one type to another but wrapped in a list ( (in -> [out]) -> ([in] -> [out]) ) ?

Then you can think about how it could be applied to other types than lists, for example, nullable/option types, result types, async/promise types, and more hairy types that implement state, reading from an environment, etc...

New comment by shakadak in "A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs"

shakadak — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 14:46:10 +0000

> I don't see why it couldn't just one shot it without all the reasoning.

That's reminding me of deep neural networks where single layer networks could achieve the same results, but the layer would have to be excessively large. Maybe we're re-using the same kind of improvement, scaling in length instead of width because of our computation limitations ?

New comment by shakadak in "What “work” looks like"

shakadak — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 14:11:28 +0000

Hi, do you have some resources I could check out to understand the concept of what infinite configurability is, and how to recognize it ?

New comment by shakadak in "The Word “Million” Didn’t Exist Until We Needed It"

shakadak — Sun, 01 Nov 2015 09:47:59 +0000

Would the concept of thousand be a mistake since it does not represent a hundred hundreds ? Or it did not really appear with the same needs as million ?

New comment by shakadak in "Think women in tech is just a pipeline problem?"

shakadak — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 11:48:10 +0000

"Your data suggest a strong association of Female with Career and Male with Family compared to Male with Career and Female with Family."

I didn't expect that result at all. My family is balanced in term of gender composition, and my parents both work the same amount. But my mother still has a tendency to do more of the housework. I'm curious whether having to pass the test in my native language would have significantly influenced the outcome.

Side note: rereading a bit the descriptions of the tests, it seems these are targeted toward an American audience. Could it have an influence in the tests too ?