Hacker News: tome

New comment by tome in "After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell"

tome — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 08:03:57 +0000

It's easy to talk at cross purposes in discussions like this. There are two implicit claims

* Few bugs occurred due to type issues (which I think you are asserting)

* You can design your program with types so that what would be a bug due to a type issue doesn't compile (which IshKebab may be thinking)

Both of these can be true at once

New comment by tome in "Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place"

tome — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:36:36 +0000

Thought experiment: suppose company C does a small IPO. I'm rich and buy all their offering.

Scenario 1: I hold all the stock for decades until I die. Under your terminology, I am the sole "investor". Fine.

Scenario 2: 1 millisecond after my purchase I sell everything I bought in the IPO to thousands of market participants. Under your terminology they are not "investors". I can't be an investor either, since I hold no more of the stock. Does the company no longer have investors?

New comment by tome in "How to earn a billion dollars"

tome — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:00:59 +0000

So it's not the stealing that was wrong, but what the proceeds were put to?

New comment by tome in "How to earn a billion dollars"

tome — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:43:33 +0000

Yeah, it should be about the value everyone gets from billionaires. I would love there to be more billionaires. It would be a sign that more and more wealth is being created in society. More billionaires should exist!

New comment by tome in "How to earn a billion dollars"

tome — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:33:24 +0000

Oh, I don't know any of those. The only billionaires I know of are those providing service to consumers or businesses that people can freely decide whether to pay for or not. I just subscribed to another thing on Amazon for far less in price than the value I get for it. Thanks Bezos!

The selfish people I know of are politicians and online commenters who think they're entitled to the wealth built by other people.

New comment by tome in "How to earn a billion dollars"

tome — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:31:53 +0000

I fear you are right, but I feel like trying it anyway.

New comment by tome in "How to earn a billion dollars"

tome — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:12:37 +0000

> Once they define it as stealing, then it's morally indefensible, by definition.

Right, similar to the equivocation around the meaning of earn in this thread. I've started to wonder whether it's possible to push by accepting that framing and then asking for a justification rather than quibbling about what "stealing" is.

New comment by tome in "How to earn a billion dollars"

tome — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:46:09 +0000

Yeah I was more interested in why you haven't saved a baby's life for $4000. Maybe I'm being presumptuous, but even if you don't have $4000 in savings and liquid investments you could probably get a loan for $4000, or extend your mortgage. A baby is going to die if you don't.

New comment by tome in "How to earn a billion dollars"

tome — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:38:43 +0000

Why haven't you saved a baby's life?

New comment by tome in "How to Earn a Billion Dollars"

tome — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:28:17 +0000

How many would it be?

New comment by tome in "How to earn a billion dollars"

tome — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:27:46 +0000

Do you have a want to please millions of people whose lives are improved by exactly the product that your company sells? I could certainly do without that, but it does sound nice.

New comment by tome in "How to earn a billion dollars"

tome — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:26:40 +0000

Sadly, I don't believe that many college grads reasonably well educated in anything other than a scientific field understand exponentials.

New comment by tome in "How to earn a billion dollars"

tome — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:23:39 +0000

What's morally indefensible about that?

New comment by tome in "How to earn a billion dollars"

tome — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:09:25 +0000

What AOC is trying to do here is shift the debate from extracting retribution on people who have violated specific laws (a fair and an honest way to enforce justice in a civil society) to extracting retribution on people who she insinuates "must have done something immoral" based on their net worth (a selfish, dishonest, envious and greedy way to run a society). It's a clever play, and unfortunately for the people of the world who value freedom and a high standard of living, it's going to work. There is enough of the population filled with envy and greed that they'll lap up whatever a politician tells them bogie man of the day is. Historically it's been the aristocracy, Jews, immigrants, but those don't work any more, so now it's generally "the rich". Billionaires are the thin end of the wedge. After them it will be business owners of all kinds, people with second homes, people who send their children to private schools, and generally anyone who has anything else that someone might envy. It's clear that the way society is going people are going to keep lapping this stuff up.

HN used to be open minded about people creating wealth. The change is shocking to me, actually.

New comment by tome in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

tome — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:48:11 +0000

Silly question, but if you don’t look at the code, how do you know if the test is implemented?

New comment by tome in "Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us"

tome — Sun, 31 May 2026 11:05:21 +0000

Ah yes, OK, I missed the point that the timeout is applied to the entire continuation, not just the part of the computation until the next await. Bluefin can't currently do that. I think I could make it do that, using the same implementation strategy as awaitYield (fork a thread, communicate through an MVar) but I wonder what the point is, given that Bluefin allows you to run the continuation at most once. Is the use case of "run the continuation in a modified environment (e.g. with a timeout)" really that compelling? Maybe it is! But I don't see it yet.

On the other hand, I don't see any difficulty with implementing a scheduler using Await/Yield. I don't think it needs access to the full continuation.

New comment by tome in "Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us"

tome — Sun, 31 May 2026 09:58:55 +0000

Thanks! This begins to make more sense to me

> effects are handled by handlers

OK, and in the general case a handler allows its body to "perform" an action, and when the action is performed it has the ability to "respond" to it in (in some cases) a very flexible way, running it never, or multiple times, or in a modified environment, or possibly even passing it out of the scope of the handler entirely.

> function signatures describe the effects that are used

Would you say this is not possible in an untyped language then?

> effectful code is written in direct style, not monadic style

I don't understand the distinction here

New comment by tome in "Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us"

tome — Sun, 31 May 2026 09:56:04 +0000

> Example 2.3 in the paper states that IO is an algebraic effect

Oh, I meant what Haskell calls `IO`, which includes the ability to launch threads, use delimited continuation primops, abort the program, communicate with the FFI, and all sorts of other things that I would guess don't have an algebraic presentation.

New comment by tome in "Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us"

tome — Sat, 30 May 2026 19:59:16 +0000

Ah, thanks, maybe this holds a clue! (Clearly I have been interested in getting to the bottom of this for a while.)

So maybe an "algebraic effect" is one that's isomorphic to a free monad of a functor that itself is an algebraic data type. That seems to give an unambiguous specification for what it means to handle an effect (a natural transformation) and to take a "free product" of effects (sum the functors).

On the other hand I think it would mean that things like Future and general IO wouldn't be algebraic effects.

New comment by tome in "Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us"

tome — Sat, 30 May 2026 19:52:48 +0000

Right, I understand the history (although I'm not sure I'd say that exception don't compose well) and I understand that "algebraic effects" are an attempt at something better. But I don't understand whether they're something that can be precisely defined or just informal terminology for "a better sort thing for dealing with effects".