Hacker News: sweeneyrod

New comment by sweeneyrod in "The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism"

sweeneyrod — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 21:57:26 +0000

Actually it's very controversial if we should spend marginal resources on deworming. It may have very large economic benefits, but the evidence isn't clear (https://unherd.com/2020/08/what-worms-can-teach-us-about-the... has some details).

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Real World OCaml – 2nd Edition (2021)"

sweeneyrod — Fri, 06 May 2022 21:00:03 +0000

I agree that dune is worse in many important ways than the build systems of languages like Rust and Go (where they were developed at the same time as the language, rather than 20 years later). But dune config files aren't lisp. They're s-expressions, which have the same syntax as lisp but are just static data like json/yaml/toml (and once you get used to them, I think most people prefer them to those).

New comment by sweeneyrod in "I analyzed 20k recommendations made by Jim Cramer during the last 5 years"

sweeneyrod — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 00:10:06 +0000

It's fine to trade when you know something that the general public doesn't. Indeed that's really the only time you should trade: you presumably want to make a profit, and society wants relevant information to be incorporated into prices. The thing that's not fine is trading on secret information that belongs to someone else. Insider trading is about theft, not fairness. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-04-01/anothe...

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Features of a dream programming language"

sweeneyrod — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 23:03:25 +0000

I believe Ruby and OCaml have both anonymous positional arguments and keyword arguments with punning (i.e. `f ~arg` expands to `f ~arg:arg` in OCaml).

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work"

sweeneyrod — Sat, 13 Nov 2021 17:27:51 +0000

You can get those cool features in languages such as OCaml/F#/Scala/Haskell, and then you don't have to worry about managing memory because you have a GC.

New comment by sweeneyrod in "What's the best SaaS starter kit?"

sweeneyrod — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 18:31:32 +0000

It is quite possible that an Erlang dev billing 3x more than a PHP dev will be more than 3x as productive.

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Code Review from the Command Line"

sweeneyrod — Sat, 25 Sep 2021 21:16:51 +0000

There is an interesting take on command-line code review from Jane Street here https://blog.janestreet.com/putting-the-i-back-in-ide-toward...

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Kubernetes is our generation's Multics"

sweeneyrod — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 20:21:00 +0000

Unit tests and "type systems" have very little in common with Kubernetes and GraphQL.

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Etsy to buy fashion reseller Depop for $1.63B"

sweeneyrod — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 19:24:07 +0000

It's interesting that they have a much higher valuation (and from some cursory research, moderately more users) than Depop, despite (AFAIK) being completely obscure in the US/UK.

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer"

sweeneyrod — Sun, 30 May 2021 16:59:58 +0000

There are various universities that teach Haskell or similar languages in first year.

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Replacements for existing software written in Rust"

sweeneyrod — Fri, 28 May 2021 22:17:15 +0000

Yes, I think everyone would agree that OCaml has gone from competing with the predominant high-level language of 1996 (C) to the predominant languages of today (definitely not C).

Another factor is that creating a language (Rust, Go etc.) from scratch lets you have nice unified tooling to an extent that is probably just not possible with languages with baggage. So I doubt OCaml will ever manage to be quite as seamless as those, but IMO it's already gone from significantly worse tooling than e.g. Python/Java to significantly better, and is still improving all the time!

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Replacements for existing software written in Rust"

sweeneyrod — Fri, 28 May 2021 20:45:11 +0000

Would you consider using a non-GC language that isn't Rust outside the various domains where C/C++ is the only realistic (non-Rust) choice?

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Replacements for existing software written in Rust"

sweeneyrod — Fri, 28 May 2021 20:38:51 +0000

I think you are definitely pointing at something that has been a weakness of OCaml for a long time (but as you say is happily changing). But I wouldn't characterise it as elitism; IME the OCaml community is very friendly.

Instead, I think it comes from the fact that when it was first developed in the 90s, it was viewed in the context of C (and this attitude has carried over somewhat to the modern day where it makes much less sense). For example, building non-trivial projects with just the compiler is very painful from most modern perspectives, but it's very similar to what you have to do for C.

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Replacements for existing software written in Rust"

sweeneyrod — Fri, 28 May 2021 20:21:45 +0000

I don't think memory safety bugs are the most widespread kind at all, unless you add the qualification "in languages with manual memory management".

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Anthropic raises $124M to build more reliable, general AI systems"

sweeneyrod — Fri, 28 May 2021 17:39:07 +0000

As well as the Amodei siblings in charge, various other ex-OpenAI people are involved (Chris Olah, Amanda Askell, Jack Clark).

Anthropic raises $124M to build more reliable, general AI systems

sweeneyrod — Fri, 28 May 2021 17:28:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.anthropic.com/news/announcement

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27318193

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Counterexamples in Type Systems"

sweeneyrod — Mon, 24 May 2021 18:20:15 +0000

I am pretty sure anyone for whom the notation in `\forall n \in \mathbb{N}` presents a barrier to learning meaningful amounts of type theory will have greater problems from lack of mathematical background.

New comment by sweeneyrod in "An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements"

sweeneyrod — Sat, 22 May 2021 17:43:33 +0000

I think many mercurial users would disagree with you about git.

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Half a million lines of Go"

sweeneyrod — Sun, 16 May 2021 20:05:31 +0000

"But the argument thrives because there's a kernel of truth to it, in that if you wanted to pick a programming language based purely on expressive shininess, you'd write in OCaml."

Eh, I think OCaml is actually the least shiny language in its reference class: Haskell, Scala and Rust are all shinier.

I think that taste for languages varies a lot, and certainly plenty of excellent programmers find Go is to their taste and statically typed functional languages are not. But I think it's also true that there are lot of people who like Go with Java/Python/JavaScript as their only points of comparison, and who would actually prefer OCaml or F# if they tried them.

New comment by sweeneyrod in "Multicore OCaml: April 2021"

sweeneyrod — Thu, 13 May 2021 21:35:35 +0000

Also, if no multicore blocks you from using OCaml, you also have to stay away from Python/Ruby/JavaScript which also lack it.