Hacker News: vitriol83

New comment by vitriol83 in "Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap"

vitriol83 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:29:23 +0000

this has templeOS vibes

New comment by vitriol83 in "“Why not just use Lean?”"

vitriol83 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:18:46 +0000

Formalised proofs and Lean in particular are still too cumbersome for the ``working'' mathematician to use it day-to-day for research-level math. But clearly there is some interest on where it may take us in future.

New comment by vitriol83 in "We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year"

vitriol83 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:21:05 +0000

this seems to be the way. make great technical improvement in a way that's nothing to do with AI. the only way to make executives happy is to then tenuously link it to AI usage.

New comment by vitriol83 in "I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion"

vitriol83 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:59:05 +0000

In my field which involves large legacy codebases in C++ and complex numerical algorithms implemented by PhDs. LLMs have their place but improvements in productivity are not that great because current LLMs simply make too many mistakes in this context and mistakes are usually very costly.

Everyone `in the know' appreciates this, but equally in the current environment has to play along with the AI hype machine.

It is depressing, but the true value of the current wave of LLMs in coding will become more clear over time. I think it's going to take some serious advances in architecture to make the coding assistant reliable, rather than simply scaling what we have now.

New comment by vitriol83 in "Typst's Math Mode Problem"

vitriol83 — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 14:21:46 +0000

are there any tools to convert large latex documents to typst ? it looks a huge improvement, but the migration path is the only thing that's stopping me.

New comment by vitriol83 in "We invested 10% to pay back tech debt"

vitriol83 — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 11:14:05 +0000

In places where there is not much time for code refactoring, the following is helpful:

Imagine an idealised future state of the codebase, which everyone buys into, and make sure any new feature is going in that direction.

Refactoring existing code can be death by a thousand cuts- having a parallel new codebase which is incrementally adopted can be more efficient and quicker to market.

New comment by vitriol83 in "Grothendieck's Approach to Equality [pdf]"

vitriol83 — Mon, 30 May 2022 15:01:30 +0000

So many times it’s necessary to ‘identify’ two more objects which are isomorphic, and the ‘canonical’ is supposed to justify why this doesn’t cause a problem.

The reason it is necessary here is that the mapping D(f) -> A_f is a priori multi valued, and we need it to be single valued.

However it’s fairly easy to make a definition which is trivially single valued , so I don’t think it’s a very instructive example of the phenomenon.

Probably more pertinent is an n-fold tensor product with different bracket ordering

New comment by vitriol83 in "Grothendieck's Approach to Equality [pdf]"

vitriol83 — Mon, 30 May 2022 14:11:08 +0000

This is fairly obscure but the problem he highlights can be overcome easily by localising at the saturation of S_f, for D(f)=D(g) if and only if the saturations are equal, and localising at saturation is an isomorphism

New comment by vitriol83 in "The Stacks Project, a new model for organizing and visualizing mathematics"

vitriol83 — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 11:06:36 +0000

Stacks, like EGA before it, is a wonderful reference but a terrible textbook. I think even the authors would agree with this! Fortunately there are many other books from which to learn algebraic geometry, after which Stacks will start to make a lot more sense.

New comment by vitriol83 in "The Stacks Project, a new model for organizing and visualizing mathematics"

vitriol83 — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 11:03:33 +0000

Modern Algebraic Geometry is indeed highly abstract, but generally the conjuring of obscure objects is with a specific goal in mind, for example

- consolidation of many types of results into a `simple' theoretical framework, I suppose this originates with Noether, and reaches it apotheosis in Bourbaki's tracts.

- embedding of 'classical' objects (solutions to polynomial equations) inside a larger 'category' (schemes) where certain mysterious relations observed in the classical world (Weil Conjectures) have a more `natural' interpretation (fixed point theorem) and light the way to a proof which would have otherwise been beyond reach

New comment by vitriol83 in "XSM: State management for Angular, React, and Vue"

vitriol83 — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 09:43:29 +0000

They’re all very relevant, but I try not to expect the same from OSS projects as from a VC pitch deck. After all this is work given freely.

New comment by vitriol83 in "A Rust-based TLS library outperformed OpenSSL in almost every category"

vitriol83 — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 17:21:59 +0000

I’m generally positive on rewriting openssl in rust, but agree the comparisons aren’t completely scientific or necessarily more important than correctness. First you should compare performance using the same implementations of cryptographic primitives as these are relatively easily fungible. We also don’t know if for example OpenSSL optimised primitives were used. Secondly the rust language only excludes memory bugs, it doesn’t exclude errors in the implementation of the tls protocol or incorrect usage of cryptographic primitives which can be just as catastrophic for security. These have been prevalent in OpenSSL and are somewhat harder to prevent a priori. For all we know these issues are worse for rustls than OpenSSL. This is where formally verified implementations would be useful.

New comment by vitriol83 in "Object-Oriented Programming is Bad (2016) [video]"

vitriol83 — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 20:38:41 +0000

one issue with OOP in practice that I've seen is the entanglement of the domain representation (member variables of a class) and the varied operations on that data (methods). Classic OOP encourages you to manipulate objects by methods rather than free functions, which combines potentially unrelated functionality in the same object.

my rule of thumb with objects is to keep the methods to a minimum, to the extent all classes are either interfaces, implementations of interfaces or pure data classes. obviously this approach will be natural to ML programmers.

New comment by vitriol83 in "How I Learned to Love Algebraic Geometry"

vitriol83 — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 17:59:35 +0000

The difficulty with learning 'modern' algebraic geometry is not only is it very dense and general, but that means the original motivation can become lost.

So I think understanding Weil conjectures are key for modern algebraic geometry. And it's always easier to understand algebraic curves (algebraic geometry with dimension 1) and their connection to Riemann surfaces (algebraic curves over the complex numbers with analytic rather then algebraic structure), as they provide motivation for many of the results and constructions.

A good introduction to Algebraic Curves and the Weil conjectures I've found is following

https://math.mit.edu/~poonen/papers/curves.pdf

For general algebraic geometry, JS Milne's notes are rather good

https://www.jmilne.org/math/CourseNotes/ag.html

and for an introduction to commutative algebra Atiyah-Macdonald's book is great.

New comment by vitriol83 in "Gravity – An embeddable programming language"

vitriol83 — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 17:57:22 +0000

Writing a type checker is conceptually much more specialised than just a scripting language. Certainly I have no idea how to write one!

New comment by vitriol83 in "Gravity – An embeddable programming language"

vitriol83 — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 15:00:07 +0000

Can anyone suggest a good embedded language with static or at least optional typing ? I feel this is a gap in the market for embedded languages.

New comment by vitriol83 in "U.S. Will Track Secret Buyers of Luxury Real Estate"

vitriol83 — Sun, 17 Jan 2016 10:05:16 +0000

couldn't agree more, see e.g. similar restrictions in well-known bastions of socialism singapore, denmark and australia. non-resident investment in manhattan is literally rent-seeking. perhaps if the foreign investment was redirected to regenerating post-industrial cities, or even actual job creation society as a whole would be better off

New comment by vitriol83 in "36TB FreeNAS Home Server Build"

vitriol83 — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 06:24:41 +0000

interesting article. a few more points which may be of interest

- in addition to raid it's worth having automated off-site backup. the best solution i could find is duplicity as its encrypted and supports a bunch of backends.

- freebsd supports full disk encryption using geli. with some work its possible to make it boot (only) from a usb key, so some protection if the server is stolen. I believe newer versions of Intel Atom support hardware AES acceleration, so this isn't a large overhead.

- if the memory requirements of ZFS are too large (which to be honest for a soho application they are!), then you can use UFS together with freebsd software raid1 (gmirror)

New comment by vitriol83 in "Two Weeks of Rust"

vitriol83 — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 18:26:18 +0000

Citation needed. Plenty of people regard high-level languages as nonetheless suitable 'systems programming'. This is the first FAQ on golang.org! See also

https://ocaml.github.io/ocamlunix/

New comment by vitriol83 in "Two Weeks of Rust"

vitriol83 — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:47:29 +0000

I don't think that one can necessarily equate systems programming with manual memory management (see e.g. Go). It's true that manual memory management will (probably) be more efficient and more predictable, but ultimately depends on how important that is in your application.