Hacker News: sullyj3

New comment by sullyj3 in "Why Algebraic Effects?"

sullyj3 — Sat, 24 May 2025 23:49:03 +0000

Functions can be polymorphic in their effectfulness, so the coloring problem isn't. Functions only become incompatible where you've made them incompatible on purpose - the whole point of annotating functions' effectfulness is to statically know you're not accidentally invoking particular effects where you promised you wouldn't.

New comment by sullyj3 in "Fold-... and Monoids"

sullyj3 — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 10:02:09 +0000

Can you elaborate or point to resources?

New comment by sullyj3 in "Training LLMs to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space"

sullyj3 — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 08:04:19 +0000

That only shows that word prediction isn't necessary, not that it's insufficient

New comment by sullyj3 in "Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative"

sullyj3 — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 15:56:09 +0000

It could be a tmux alternative if the session persistence is the only feature of tmux you care about, and you don't like the rest of it.

New comment by sullyj3 in "Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years"

sullyj3 — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 03:42:43 +0000

Learning a new language is basically trivial relative to the effort of bootstrapping everything yourself to compensate for a lacking ecosystem, or the effort of banging your head against the fundamental unsuitability of a tool for a job.

Anyone who's learned one or two languages should be able to pick up the basics of any of the standard ones pretty much instantaneously.

New comment by sullyj3 in "Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years"

sullyj3 — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 03:29:35 +0000

Which is which and why?

New comment by sullyj3 in "Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’"

sullyj3 — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 12:09:30 +0000

Whenever you're asking for an explanation this deep in the ontology stack, you need to think about what kind of explanation would be satisfying to you, and whether you can reasonably expect intuitive answers in domains that lie far outside of your everyday experience. Human brains aren't built to grasp this stuff intuitively.

At a certain point, the reason we like some particular wacky physical model is always going to be "it has the best combination of explanatory power and simplicity"

New comment by sullyj3 in "Advent of Code 2023's new AI/LLM Policy"

sullyj3 — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 01:01:57 +0000

Why not just make a separate leaderboard for autonomous AI solvers which are an interesting problem in their own right?

New comment by sullyj3 in "Uiua: A minimal stack-based, array-based language"

sullyj3 — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 10:10:29 +0000

> I feel like right-to-left requires you to think to the end of a line before you start typing anything at all

Maybe this will make people tend to shorter lines, counterbalancing the natural tendency towards incomprehensibility of array and stack languages

New comment by sullyj3 in "Uiua: A minimal stack-based, array-based language"

sullyj3 — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 09:54:19 +0000

The fact that you embed the entire program in the URL is a hilarious demonstration of its brevity

New comment by sullyj3 in "Why Fennel?"

sullyj3 — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:27:10 +0000

well, nfnl transpiles it for you

New comment by sullyj3 in "Why Fennel?"

sullyj3 — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 22:28:56 +0000

It's a runtime check. The following fennel:

    (fn add-1 [x] (+ x 1))

    (lambda add-2 [x] (+ x 2))

transpiles to the following lua:

    local function add_1(x)
      return (x + 1)
    end
    local function add_2(x)
      _G.assert((nil ~= x), "Missing argument x on /home/sullyj3/tmp/fn-vs-lambda/fnl/x.fnl:3")
      return (x + 2)
    end
    return add_2

New comment by sullyj3 in "Lean 4.0"

sullyj3 — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 12:26:32 +0000

For that you'd use Applicative

  (*) <$> [1..10] <*> [2,3,5]
  -- or
  liftA2 (*) [1..10] [2,3,5]

Admittedly also not accessible to non-haskellers. But on the other hand, if you're going to learn a language, you ought to learn its idioms at some point.

New comment by sullyj3 in "Deep Learning Is Easy – Learn Something Harder"

sullyj3 — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 09:06:37 +0000

Pretty straightforward case of the curse of knowledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge), in my opinion.

New comment by sullyj3 in "Leaving Haskell behind"

sullyj3 — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 00:04:15 +0000

Possibly you were using "algebraic data types" as a general stand in for fancy type system stuff, but algebraic data types are actually one of the least fancy haskell features. They're much more straightforward than the name might lead you to believe. I think there's a broad consensus that new statically typed languages ought to have them, eg they've been adopted by rust and swift. I find languages that don't support them very irritating to use.

New comment by sullyj3 in "NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally"

sullyj3 — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 07:58:46 +0000

Yeah, I'd much rather just install with pacman than manage them manually though.

New comment by sullyj3 in "NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally"

sullyj3 — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 07:39:33 +0000

I empathise with this uncertainty. As I understand it, flakes aren't incompatible with the previous way of doing things. Rather they represent an additional feature which can be used on top of them.

For example if you have a shell.nix that you were running with `nix-shell` which defaults to using channels to obtain nixpkgs

    { pkgs ? import  {} }:
      pkgs.mkShell {
      # ...

You can reuse it in your flake.nix

    devShells.${system}.default = import ./shell.nix { inherit pkgs; };

And it will use the locked nixpkgs input defined in your flake. You can run it with the new `nix develop` command, but `nix-shell` will continue to work, giving you the previous behaviour.

New comment by sullyj3 in "NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally"

sullyj3 — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 07:22:28 +0000

> A 'flake' is more/less a set of inputs and a set of outputs. I'd say it's less complicated than a package.json file in an NPM project.

It's conceptually comparably complicated, but the actual practical experience of writing flakes is much more complicated. This is not the fault of flakes specifically, but rather due to the complexity of nixpkgs. Although on second thoughts the fact that there are a bunch of libraries like flake-utils and flake-parts out there does seem to point at a verbosity UX issue.

New comment by sullyj3 in "NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally"

sullyj3 — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 07:17:26 +0000

I'm running home-manager on arch and it's fantastic. I'm only using it for cli/tui programs, as I've had trouble getting gui software to correctly create desktop entries which show up in my menus. You can use it alongside pacman just fine.

New comment by sullyj3 in "Superintelligence: An idea that eats smart people (2016)"

sullyj3 — Tue, 30 May 2023 04:24:10 +0000

I see your point, but relative capability levels aren't the only relevant factor here, absolute capabilities matter as well.

It seems plausible to me that even if we are to the AI as cats are to us, we've reached an absolute threshold of generality that allows the AI to be confident in our ability to follow simple (to it) instructions, in a way that cats can't for us.