Hacker News: taybin

New comment by taybin in "Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful"

taybin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:59:30 +0000

You should see his book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, which is entirely about his experiments with AI in The Fluid Analogies Research Group with his grad students. Although I wonder if those techniques could be paired with LLMs somehow.

New comment by taybin in "Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful"

taybin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:35:14 +0000

When I was a pretentious high schooler with fantasies of being an intellectual, I considered going there. I ended up not even applying. It just seemed too far out of the norm.

New comment by taybin in "Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful"

taybin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:23:30 +0000

How is it dated?

New comment by taybin in "Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful"

taybin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:20:51 +0000

He wrote a number of follow-up books. I love GEB, but the follow ups were often disappointing in surprising ways.

He has another book about the beauty and challenges of translating poetry, but it’s actually about the sudden death of his wife and it's been too sad for me to finish.

New comment by taybin in "Anthropic in Talks to Buy World Model AI Startup Decart for $6B"

taybin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 03:07:01 +0000

Before they buy Dehorse?

New comment by taybin in ""Clean" Code, Horrible Performance (2023)"

taybin — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:39:46 +0000

Yes, a toy problem only needs a simple implementation. This is a straw man. And I don't even like Robert Martin's Clean Code, but the author is not addressing where this style actually provides benefits. When you're updating 23 if-statements because you had to add support for some new business workflow, you'll wish you had a conceptual entity that encapsulated the operations on the type of workflows so you just had to implement them in one place.

New comment by taybin in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

taybin — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 13:27:13 +0000

I love Ray Bradbury. My favorite short story author.

New comment by taybin in "Why don't people use formal methods? (2019)"

taybin — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:00:39 +0000

To-does. Just like how a butler buttles.

New comment by taybin in "Why don't people use formal methods? (2019)"

taybin — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:02:24 +0000

I would love to see an example of a proof for something like a text editor. How can people be expected to do this when the examples are always trivial toys, like array sorting? Show me a formal proof of something that in the trenches programmers can copy from. A proof of a basic todo list or something like that.

New comment by taybin in "Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights"

taybin — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:42:14 +0000

Yes, that is also gross.

New comment by taybin in "Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights"

taybin — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:21:43 +0000

Maybe he's suggesting it for Canada?

New comment by taybin in "Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights"

taybin — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:20:48 +0000

The thing about this that's so distasteful is that it removes the basis of enfranchisement from being the inherent worth of a human life and moves it more to "what have you done for me lately". It's pretty gross.

New comment by taybin in "Claude Opus 5"

taybin — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:41:04 +0000

How long is a fable though?

New comment by taybin in "Cruller: Bun's Zig Runtime, Continued on Zig 0.16"

taybin — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 13:56:04 +0000

There are several possible reasons for that, but I'll just say it's a very common use case. It's actually the one of the original use cases for SCSs. How else could you revert to a prior commit?

New comment by taybin in "Superfile: A fancy, modern terminal file manager"

taybin — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:16:28 +0000

What does it mean to “obsessively craft every pixel?”

New comment by taybin in "Learning to code is still worthwhile"

taybin — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:14:00 +0000

That’s an interesting point about the tension between standardization and creativity. I’m going to think about that for a bit.

New comment by taybin in "Economists say 'we must act now' on AI's economic impact and job displacement"

taybin — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:08:56 +0000

I hate to be cynical but I expect this call will generate as much action as climate change warnings.

New comment by taybin in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

taybin — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:59:07 +0000

Did you have a hard time picking that up from the article itself? I don’t see the point of asking an LLM to tell you what to feel about the article.

New comment by taybin in "EVE Online's Carbon engine is now open source: Fenris Creations explains why"

taybin — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 10:28:43 +0000

For a long time I was convinced they used Erlang for handling all the distributed, concurrent state. I guess not.

New comment by taybin in "Learning to code is still worthwhile"

taybin — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:54:32 +0000

Coding is so rich that you can use it for artistic pursuits, but I argue that the output is the real art, and the code itself is not art and itself is not expressing anything.