Hacker News: vlfig

New comment by vlfig in "Principles of Mechanical Sympathy"

vlfig — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:06:02 +0000

You are not alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei

New comment by vlfig in "Leanstral: Open-source agent for trustworthy coding and formal proof engineering"

vlfig — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:07:57 +0000

Don't "let it" generate tests. Be intentional. Define them in a way that's slightly oblique to how the production code approaches the problem, so the seams don't match. Heck, that's why it's good to write them before even thinking about the prod side.

New comment by vlfig in "Company as Code"

vlfig — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:34:39 +0000

Eminently doable, yes.

Two notes:

- I'm not convinced the graph is necessarily cyclic. Often two codependents are actually dependent on some common bits and otherwise independent.

- this is essentially deterministic propagation of configuration (think dhall, jsonnet, etc) plus reconciliation loops for external state, terraform style — not dissimilar to how the rest of CI/CD should operate, in fact my view is this is an extension of CI/CD practices up the value stream.

I'm definitely strive for something like this when possible.

New comment by vlfig in "Show HN: Subth.ink – write something and see how many others wrote the same"

vlfig — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 23:52:15 +0000

Next step: embeddings and similarity.

New comment by vlfig in "Liquibase continues to advertise itself as "open source" despite license switch"

vlfig — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 10:06:05 +0000

I sanction this comment.

New comment by vlfig in "Gloria funicular derailment initial findings report (EN) [pdf]"

vlfig — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:34:31 +0000

Although it isn't yet clear how much the brakes did actually brake, it is known they would never be enough.

So the cable was a critical component and initial findings suggest it wasn't being verified as rigourously, thoroughly and often as it perhaps should have.

New comment by vlfig in "A Brief Intro to Clean Architecture, Clean DDD, and CQRS"

vlfig — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 10:51:12 +0000

We shouldn't dismiss the theory of how to do things right just because it is common to do things poorly.

New comment by vlfig in "Why are we templating YAML? (2019)"

vlfig — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 11:59:56 +0000

a Dhall configuration file will never:

- throw an exception

- crash or segfault

- accept malformed input

- produce malformed output

- hang or time out

in https://docs.dhall-lang.org/discussions/Safety-guarantees.ht...

Still a fan of Python for configuration?

New comment by vlfig in "Why are we templating YAML? (2019)"

vlfig — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 11:48:33 +0000

Different requirements, different guarantees. Principle of least power. Have a look at https://docs.dhall-lang.org/discussions/Safety-guarantees.ht....

New comment by vlfig in "Ask HN: What tech utopia/horror ideas do you see materialising soon?"

vlfig — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 20:10:12 +0000

Ban on cash: impose negative interest rates. CBDCs: all manner of restrictions to fungibility.

ACM's "Research for Practice" Reboot

vlfig — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 19:34:57 +0000

Article URL: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3546931&doi=10.1145%2F3546931

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183827

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by vlfig in "Web3 doesn’t care about privacy"

vlfig — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 08:34:05 +0000

Sigh.

Generally what happens is that: - Everyone is able to prove a transaction's correctness; - There's no way for a third party to track the contents of a transaction adversarialy; - there are ways for first and second parties to prove them if they so wish.

New comment by vlfig in "Stop Brainstorming"

vlfig — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 21:53:49 +0000

Mostly yes. My advice on this topic is to read up on Liberating Structures, which I think are a level up.

https://liberatingstructures.com/

Solutions Story Tracker

vlfig — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 18:53:42 +0000

Article URL: https://storytracker.solutionsjournalism.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28633546

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by vlfig in "Ask HN: What things that tech recruiters do, annoy you the most as an engineer?"

vlfig — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 06:57:59 +0000

A request for a synchronous form of communication is a request for your time. People should earn it first.

A Primer for Decentralized Identifiers

vlfig — Sat, 01 May 2021 07:20:52 +0000

Article URL: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-primer/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004098

Points: 80

# Comments: 15

New comment by vlfig in "Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?"

vlfig — Sun, 25 Apr 2021 21:28:28 +0000

Obsidian + GitJournal + NeuraCache.

No-cloud (except for git, could be self hosted), local-first, plain data formats solution for note taking, knowledge organisation, text production and spaced repetition.

New comment by vlfig in "Starting a new digital identity"

vlfig — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 16:47:45 +0000

For a less romanticised, more practical resource on the topic, I recommend The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online Anonymity https://anonymousplanet.org/guide.html

(also, Monero > bitcoin)

New comment by vlfig in "Food waste responsible for 10% of global emissions?"

vlfig — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 11:51:29 +0000

Aside from the click-baity article, the actual report puts emphasis on the quality of the existing data about food waste. A bit of an "let's measure this first" attitude, which is a bit of a let down to me.

"Food waste means all of the environmental impacts of food production without any of the benefits of people being fed." — it reads, and I think it misses an important point: leaving food waste to rot with the rest of the rubbish is in itself environmentally damaging while using it for composting, feeding larvae or both, is immensely beneficial.

I'd like to see more practical recommendations for what we already know we can do about food waste. And not just about reducing it, which is more easily said than done, but also about giving it a proper goodbye.

New comment by vlfig in "Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You"

vlfig — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 20:20:24 +0000

The version of the API and the version of the artifact that implements it are distinct, not the least because the artifact can implement several (major) versions of the API.

Using tests across versions is a definitely a trick to consider but your coverage may vary. Probably better to do it in addition to other methods.