Hacker News: vrotaru

New comment by vrotaru in "OpenIDEA: The IDE you know, rebuilt in Rust"

vrotaru — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 10:45:26 +0000

There is a (Bertrand Russell?) quote about axiomatic approach having the same advantages as theft compared to honest work.

I'm not sure exactly why this came to mind. Vibes?

New comment by vrotaru in "Tell HN: Scribd Breached"

vrotaru — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 06:48:42 +0000

It looks like we all enjoyed "Security through obscurity", where obscurity was referring to existing vulnerabilities.

And also, that this is over.

New comment by vrotaru in "The Goose Programming Language"

vrotaru — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 11:30:13 +0000

Since Goose, compile to C, I guess the answer is yes, but..

With the but part being the really interesting one.

New comment by vrotaru in "Quantitative Finance with OCaml"

vrotaru — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 03:54:02 +0000

Good observation. Also there is some funny stuff with what the book say referenced appendices do and what those actually explain

At the end of chapter 30 we have:

   Next: Appendix A — OCaml Setup and Tooling

But the after the chapter 30, follows the chapter 31, and Appendix A is called

    Appendix A: Ocaml Quick Reference

And the link is a dead link.

New comment by vrotaru in "Exercise intensity is associated with cardiometabolic health"

vrotaru — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 05:56:45 +0000

This has strong vibes of "Do this and you will get rid of back pain" followed by the video of some crazy acrobatic stunt.

Congrats, BTW.

New comment by vrotaru in "Typst 0.14"

vrotaru — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 04:41:51 +0000

Here is my experience.

Claude did generated a rather good template for what I needed. It did not compile at first but I copy-pasted the errors and it fixed them.

Not all was good, though. It used literal bullets instead of `-` required for lists, but on whole the experience was positive.

It had taken me less time to fix the template than it would been taken to write it from scratch.

Something which Claude was good at. I throw him a crude ASCII "art" representation of what I want and get the right Typst code back.

New comment by vrotaru in "Knowledge and memory"

vrotaru — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 17:28:57 +0000

Sorry for harping on it, but I think this clearly reflects the difference between 2 approaches to storing knowledge, lossy but humongous, and lossless but limited.

LLMs - Lossy highly compressed knowledge which when prompted "hallucinates" facts. LLMs hallucinations are simply how the stored information is retrieved.

Memory (human in this case) - Extremely limited, but almost always correct.

Just an observation. No morals.

New comment by vrotaru in "I ditched Docker for Podman"

vrotaru — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 07:22:22 +0000

There is a podman-compose which works almost as drop-in replacement.

Almost because most common commands work, but I have not check all.

And almost, because for some docker-compose.yaml which you downloaded/LLM generated you may need to prepend `docker.io/` to the image name

New comment by vrotaru in "Persona vectors: Monitoring and controlling character traits in language models"

vrotaru — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 05:16:17 +0000

That is a good questions and I guess we have good progress since Plato whose definition was - A man is a featherless biped.

But I think we still do not know.

New comment by vrotaru in "Persona vectors: Monitoring and controlling character traits in language models"

vrotaru — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 18:55:44 +0000

To some degree *all* LLM's answers are made up facts. For stuff that is abundantly present in training data those are almost always correct. For topics which are not common knowledge (allow for a great variability) you should always check.

I've started to think of LLM's as a form lossy compression of available knowledge which when prompted produces "facts".

New comment by vrotaru in "Study mode"

vrotaru — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 18:59:24 +0000

Well, not exactly convince. I was curious what will happen.

If you are curious it was a question about the behavior of Kafka producer interceptors when an exception is thrown.

But I agree that it is hard to resist the temptation to treat LLM's as a pear.

New comment by vrotaru in "Study mode"

vrotaru — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 17:57:57 +0000

You should always check. I've seen LLM's being wrong (and obstinate) on topics which are one step separated from common knowledge.

I had to post the source code to win the dispute, so to speak.

New comment by vrotaru in "Two narratives about AI"

vrotaru — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 16:58:32 +0000

So what is your pick?

* AI is the next electric screwdriver * AI is THE steam engine.

My pick is that the AI is not THE steam engine.

New comment by vrotaru in "Oberon Pi"

vrotaru — Sun, 04 May 2025 18:15:12 +0000

> Oberon also doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore

That's pretty much it, for maybe 10+ years now. There was a successor project BlueBottle with some promise, but it did not deliver. Later it was renamed to A2. Surprisingly, it did not help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A2_(operating_system)

IMO the authors of BB/A2 bet heavily on XML/Java hype, and were trying to make Oberon more like Java. The result was something without much internal consistency and not very usable.

Not being able to use a major browser and not having the resources to write one from scratch did not help either.

Then some of the major figures of this project left. And that was it.

There are some hobbyists and some small businesses which use it for niche projects and that is all

New comment by vrotaru in "WhiteSur: macOS-like theme for GTK desktops"

vrotaru — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 06:59:13 +0000

It happens. It shows you the right suggestion, and if you keep typing it assumes that you meant something else and displays other suggestion.

Good for slow typers, not so much for quick ones.

New comment by vrotaru in "Skype Credit is no longer available"

vrotaru — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:51:22 +0000

Maybe web.skype.com will be better? Just a guess.

Anyway, that's how I use Skype when I still have to use it. Which is about once a month.

New comment by vrotaru in "8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production (2023)"

vrotaru — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 12:18:11 +0000

The are LLVM Caleidoscope (toy compiler) in both Haskell and OCaml

https://github.com/sdiehl/kaleidoscope https://github.com/arbipher/llvm-ocaml-tutorial

The Haskell one is a nice one. Can say nothing about the OCaml one since I found it using a google search.

I've had a try at implementing an Caleidoscope compiler in OCaml but did not finish it. But it was fun to write.

New comment by vrotaru in "Nominal for Storing, Structural for Manipulating"

vrotaru — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 05:23:59 +0000

I guess Modula-3 was doing it as well.

Records were structurally typed. But you can "braid"(?) a record and that will make it nominal type.

New comment by vrotaru in "Jailbroke my Kindle to use it as an e-ink monitor"

vrotaru — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 05:13:53 +0000

You know what else is self-cleaning?

   /dev/shm

The advantage being that it does not even touch the disk.

New comment by vrotaru in "Every company should be owned by its employees"

vrotaru — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 12:16:35 +0000

Just an example.

Should teachers be judged on how a pleasant life they live, or how good they teach?