Hacker News: sunshowers

New comment by sunshowers in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

sunshowers — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:17:24 +0000

One might argue that the composition of higher abstractions is the next token predicted after "here is a higher abstraction:"

New comment by sunshowers in "Cutting inference cold starts by 40x with LP, FUSE, C/R, and CUDA-checkpoint"

sunshowers — Tue, 19 May 2026 03:44:11 +0000

There are two ways to express such ratios, and both are equally valid. (Though "x" is usually reserved for "40x" and "%" for "97.5%".)

New comment by sunshowers in "Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]"

sunshowers — Sun, 17 May 2026 20:23:23 +0000

Olivia uses she/her, and I believe she is now retired :)

I owe her and the Mercurial community a great debt. The community taught me how to think like an engineer building infrastructure and the importance of backwards compatibility, something I've tried to carry forward in tools like cargo-nextest.

New comment by sunshowers in "For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions"

sunshowers — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:25:03 +0000

Yes? "Different cultures" doesn't just mean different countries; there are many cultures within infosec.

New comment by sunshowers in "GitHub Stacked PRs"

sunshowers — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:56:42 +0000

I don't think mailing stacks of patches is that different? As someone who built this stuff it was pretty obvious to me that web-based patch stack management was a relatively small evolution over mailing lists. Tools like patchwork bridged the gap initially, and we were quite familiar with them.

New comment by sunshowers in "GitHub Stacked PRs"

sunshowers — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:47:00 +0000

To my knowledge, stacked diffs were first done in the Linux kernel as stacks of patches sent over email. From there they spread to Google and Facebook. (Source: I worked on Facebook's source control team from 2012-2018 and did a lot of work to enable stacked diffs there.)

New comment by sunshowers in "Open source security at Astral"

sunshowers — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:28:51 +0000

If it doesn't work on Windows, it is not a full replacement.

New comment by sunshowers in "Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis"

sunshowers — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:56:31 +0000

Yep! Here's an experience report: https://github.com/hegeldev/hegel-rust/issues/148

New comment by sunshowers in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"

sunshowers — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:52:10 +0000

A big issue with the macOS style I'd that there isn't a modifier key free for the user to build their own shortcuts around. The Win/Super key is a very good place to hang custom shortcuts off of on Windows and Linux.

New comment by sunshowers in "Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis"

sunshowers — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:54:49 +0000

A fun recent experience I had with Claude was I asked it to write a model for PBTs against a complex SUT, and it duplicated the SUT algorithm in the model — not helpful! I had to explicitly prompt it to write the model algorithm in a completely different style.

New comment by sunshowers in "Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis"

sunshowers — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:57:19 +0000

Thank you! I have some particularly annoying proptest-based tests that I'll try porting over to Hegel soon. (Thanks for writing the Claude skill to do this.)

New comment by sunshowers in "Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis"

sunshowers — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:30:11 +0000

Hi David, congratulations on the release! I'm excited to play around with Hypothesis's bitstream-based shrinking. As you're aware, prop_flat_map is a pain to deal with, and I'd love to replace some of my proptest-based tests with Hegel.

I spent a little time looking at Hegel last week and it wasn't quite clear to me how I'd go about having something like a canonical generator for a type (similar to proptest's Arbitrary). I've found that to be very helpful while generating large structures to test something like serialization roundtripping against — in particular, the test-strategy library has derive macros that work very well for business logic types with, say, 10-15 enum variants each of which may have 0-10 subfields. I'm curious if that is supported today, or if you have plans to support this kind of composition in the future.

edit: oh I completely missed the macro to derive DefaultGenerator! Whoops

New comment by sunshowers in "Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft"

sunshowers — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:16:50 +0000

My understanding is that that is a maximalist position for the avoidance of risk, and is sufficient but probably not necessary.

New comment by sunshowers in "Welcome (back) to Macintosh"

sunshowers — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:45:37 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(rhetoric)

New comment by sunshowers in "Building a TUI is easy now"

sunshowers — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 03:22:18 +0000

History search, like in shells. My most used TUI shortcut!

New comment by sunshowers in "Building a TUI is easy now"

sunshowers — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:37:33 +0000

A very important thing about constraints is that they also liberate. TUIs automatically work over ssh, can be suspended with ctrl-z and such, and the keyboard focus has resulted in helpful conventions like ctrl-R that tend to not be as prominent in GUIs.

New comment by sunshowers in "Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)"

sunshowers — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:31:58 +0000

I'm not a professional, but to me it's clear that whether i and -i are "the same" or "different" is actually quite important.

New comment by sunshowers in "U.S. jobs disappear at fastest January pace since great recession"

sunshowers — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 22:22:51 +0000

I believe that countries and borders exist as a descriptive fact about the world. But I also believe that it's impossible to square immigration control regimes with any robust notion of freedom and liberty, and also that there isn't room for much disagreement on this specific point once you understand the intrinsic nature of such regimes. See Kukathas, Immigration and Freedom for more.

I know most people (of any nationality, not just Americans) don't understand this, but you and I are not most people. I believe things because it is correct to believe them, not because most people believe them (or not).

edit: to be clear, you can say "immigration control lessens freedom, but I'm willing to give up freedom—both yours and mine—because I value certain things more". That is a reasonable point, though I might as a follow-up probe into the motivation behind that. "I think the government gets to stop you from living with your spouse, but I'm okay with that because XYZ" better have a pretty robust XYZ behind it!

New comment by sunshowers in "U.S. jobs disappear at fastest January pace since great recession"

sunshowers — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 20:31:28 +0000

I need you to understand that immigration controls are fundamentally and inherently antithetical to freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and freedom of association. And this applies both to immigrants and to citizens.

Imagine if you needed government approval to live with the one you love! What a completely unreasonable intervention into the private lives of ordinary people. Oh wait, that's the actual reality immigrants live in.

New comment by sunshowers in "U.S. jobs disappear at fastest January pace since great recession"

sunshowers — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 19:43:44 +0000

Migrating to a place where people can contribute more to society is both a core tenet of individual liberty and one of the most positive-sum things any human being can do.

But given that you both feign concern over visa holders' working conditions [1], while at the same time advocating for policies that lead to worse working conditions [2], perhaps you just hate freedom and were never acting in good faith in the first place.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45656527

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323501