Hacker News: thwd

New comment by thwd in "DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation"

thwd — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 16:18:24 +0000

It's a write-only language.

New comment by thwd in "Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on?"

thwd — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 10:33:54 +0000

Agreed. Once long (10+ years) ago, google3 may have been peak codebase. Nowadays, not so much.

Edit: I guess it also depends at what level of abstraction you work. High: can be easy breezy. Low: oh boy.

New comment by thwd in "Testing the memory safe Rust implementation of Sudo/Su"

thwd — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 16:26:24 +0000

Well, I can't speak for you, of course. I also haven't seen that code you reviewed. And I won't try to evangelize you. I'd say, in a nutshell, that Go is readable and reviewable because its grammar consists of the C-style basis that most every imperative language has, and not much more. It's the lack of features that makes it very 'WYSIWYG'.

New comment by thwd in "Testing the memory safe Rust implementation of Sudo/Su"

thwd — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 15:30:11 +0000

Huh? Go has its tradeoffs, some people don't like it and that's fine. But nobody can deny that it is by far one of the most 'readable and reviewable' (the argument in question) mainstream languages.

New comment by thwd in "PRQL: a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement"

thwd — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 09:32:53 +0000

Merging as a one-keyword feature for all flavors of SQL is almost impossible.

It gets hairy when you have columns with composite types. E.g. depending on database, records can be JSON objects, protobufs, structs, or other composite types, like tuples.

It is possible to define semantics to merge each of these, but they vary and the merge operation becomes verbose to allow to handle each weirdness of each of these underlying types.

Merging is also sensitive to NULL vs 0 vs a DEFAULT, plus in some databases, NULL is still allowed even when a column is marked NOT NULL.

You'd almost need a sub-language for the merging operation, specifying how to handle each corner case.

New comment by thwd in "PRQL: a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement"

thwd — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 09:22:08 +0000

Some databases like ArangoDB (https://www.arangodb.com/) allow you to use Javascript instead of SQL.

However, using a type-unsafe (read weak typing), turing-complete language introduces the usual problems we know and love, such as infinite loops, runtime type errors, exceptions, and the like.

Personally, I'm looking forward to a WASM runtime for databases -- so we can run webassembly on the database. This COULD be carefully designed to be statically checked and, possibly, make it really hard to write runaway loops.

New comment by thwd in "I stopped working on black hole information loss"

thwd — Sat, 23 Apr 2022 14:31:34 +0000

Gravity is infinite at the singularity (the middle of the black hole). Everything gravitates towards that point. Our best understanding is that no information can exist here.

Black holes "evaporate" over time -- by emitting Hawking radiation. This is probably where the information goes, in my layman understanding.

New comment by thwd in "Cdecl: C Gibberish ↔ English"

thwd — Sat, 23 Apr 2022 13:56:50 +0000

Go solves 99% of the problem quite nicely. You don't often deref pointers in Go, because of auto-addressing. E.g. there's no arrow operator as in C, the dot derefs when necessary.

I would say `v := (p.)` could've been the deref operator, but what do I know.

New comment by thwd in "All Horses Are the Same Color"

thwd — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 00:28:11 +0000

I understand and agree but read carefully. The assumption _is_ the (entire) hypothesis. It is not existentially quantified or set in the base-case. It is the entire hypothesis.

New comment by thwd in "All Horses Are the Same Color"

thwd — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 00:15:45 +0000

> We will show, by induction, that [for all sets] of n horses, every horse in [each] set has the same color.

> Now [assume that] for all sets of n horses, every horse in [each] set has the same color.

QED.

This is just tautology. No further analysis needed, really.

(If your proof includes your hypothesis as an assumption, then it must be a proof by contradiction.)

EDIT: Before you refute, read again carefully. The assumption _is_ the hypothesis. It is not existentially quantified or set in the base case. It is the entire, universally quantified hypothesis.

New comment by thwd in "Facebook Recruiter Correspondence"

thwd — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 06:46:53 +0000

That's only if you equate the recruiter to a minimum wage worker and yourself to their customer. There's a superiority bias in that rhetoric. The recruiter is a well-employed tech worker. And you're not their client or superior.

New comment by thwd in "Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit"

thwd — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 15:47:18 +0000

Personal opinion: Google carefully treads the gray lines of legality and morals/ethics. Facebook leadership, on the other hand, decided a long time ago that they care about legality only. They seem very proud of that decision, too.

New comment by thwd in "Sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation"

thwd — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 23:44:35 +0000

You have a box with random garbage in it. I have a box with a football in it. We entangle the football and the garbage. You stand far away from me. If you randomly open your box now, you may either see a football or random garbage. If I call you on the phone (classically) and tell you to open the box tonight at precisely 8:12pm, you're guaranteed to find a football then and hence, I will have the garbage.

There's no parsing; it's all or nothing.

New comment by thwd in "A Bank Behind the Fintech Boom"

thwd — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 14:40:06 +0000

"The Bank Behind High-Interest Loan Apps"

New comment by thwd in "Clear is better than clever"

thwd — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 20:57:24 +0000

Good prose often involves misdirection. Making the reader believe something to be one way, while it was something else all along. Then, in a built up climax, undo the knot in a single pull to blow the reader's mind. That, to me, is the antithesis of the article's argument.

New comment by thwd in "We Can Do Better Than SQL"

thwd — Thu, 09 May 2019 20:08:02 +0000

They're saying that both of those expressions are valid, not equivalent.

SELECT count(star) FROM table

and

SELECT star FROM table

Are both valid, not equivalent.

Furthermore, listing any kind of set depends on some ordering, be it random.

New comment by thwd in "A 'Blockchain Bandit' Is Guessing Private Keys and Scoring Millions"

thwd — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 07:53:26 +0000

It's much easier! Just call ethereum's `crypto.ToECDSA` [1] with a big-endian encoded 256-bit unsigned integer of interest, e.g. 0x1 or 0x100, as described in the article. Try the resulting private key.

[1] https://godoc.org/github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/crypto#ToE...

New comment by thwd in "Fast Directory Listing on Linux"

thwd — Sun, 07 Apr 2019 17:28:44 +0000

But why? Why create a tool that does `git status` 10x faster?

New comment by thwd in "Systemd is bad parsing"

thwd — Sat, 27 Oct 2018 15:16:05 +0000

Array-indexing in C and C++ _is_ pointer arithmetic! It's syntactic sugar. Array-indexing in safe languages is bound checked iff the compiler can't prove the index value to always be in-bounds.

New comment by thwd in "Systemd is bad parsing"

thwd — Sat, 27 Oct 2018 14:55:57 +0000

Pointer arithmetic is abstracted away for _safety_, not convenience. You can read about in e.g. Go's FAQ.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32700999/pointer-arithme...