Hacker News: ycitm

New comment by ycitm in "Magnifica Humanitas"

ycitm — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:17:43 +0000

The next sentence in the quote hasn't aged so well - "What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."

New comment by ycitm in "TypeScript Native Previews"

ycitm — Fri, 23 May 2025 16:26:17 +0000

Most importantly, this means my type system N-queens solution now works for an 8x8 chessboard (actually up to 10x10) instead of complaining about recursion depth:

https://www.richard-towers.com/2023/03/11/typescripting-the-...

New comment by ycitm in "AI Avatars Escape the Uncanny Valley"

ycitm — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 14:21:36 +0000

Doesn't seem to be any discernable improvement on the Zoom Cat Lawyer.

New comment by ycitm in "TypeScripting the technical interview"

ycitm — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 18:07:40 +0000

You can also play around with the code in the TypeScript playground:

https://www.typescriptlang.org/play?#code/PTAEEkDsAsEMBsCmAa...

New comment by ycitm in "TypeScripting the technical interview"

ycitm — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 18:05:35 +0000

Ah, thank you so much! Great spot.

I've corrected this, and credited you in the errata - https://www.richard-towers.com/2023/03/11/typescripting-the-...

New comment by ycitm in "TypeScripting the technical interview"

ycitm — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 22:11:39 +0000

I don't think there's any way to do iteration in the type system (other than recursion), so there's no way around it.

I considered forking the compiler to set a deeper limit, but at some point Typescript itself is going to stack overflow. Also that probably goes a bit beyond what Criss is expecting in an interview...

New comment by ycitm in "TypeScripting the technical interview"

ycitm — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 19:18:56 +0000

I wondered if anyone would spot this :)

There's a recursion depth limit of 500 on the TypeScript compiler, which prevents this solution working for N > 7

Even Aphyr's original Haskell solution only demonstrates N = 6, so in some sense this is an improvement on the state of the art for type-level N Queens solutions /s

New comment by ycitm in "TypeScripting the technical interview"

ycitm — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 16:57:56 +0000

The series is actually by Aphyr: https://aphyr.com/tags/interviews

This post is a pastiche of https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

New comment by ycitm in "TypeScripting the technical interview"

ycitm — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 16:49:15 +0000

The runes are mostly "just because", but there is a reason.

Ideally, I would have written:

  type Nil = unique symbol

Which would ensure the Nil type wouldn't match with anything but itself. Unfortunately, the compiler doesn't allow unique symbol other than on const variables initialised with Symbol(). So I needed some meaningless symbols.

I could also have done

  type Nil = "nil"

But then it would have looked like the string meant something.

TypeScripting the technical interview

ycitm — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 13:58:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.richard-towers.com/2023/03/11/typescripting-the-technical-interview.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35120084

Points: 727

# Comments: 159

The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

ycitm — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 09:18:20 +0000

Article URL: https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/15/the-impact-of-removing-jquery-on-our-web-performance/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32467483

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

How and why we removed jQuery from Gov.uk

ycitm — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 09:39:01 +0000

Article URL: https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/11/how-and-why-we-removed-jquery-from-gov-uk/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32423422

Points: 49

# Comments: 43

New comment by ycitm in "Deliveroo raises $385M in new funding"

ycitm — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 21:06:24 +0000

If you've got any experience or interest in programming, I'd recommend having a stab at Google Summer of Code[0].

[0] - https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/

Lessons from last week’s cyberattack

ycitm — Sun, 14 May 2017 21:04:32 +0000

Article URL: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/05/14/need-urgent-collective-action-keep-people-safe-online-lessons-last-weeks-cyberattack/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337569

Points: 377

# Comments: 282

New comment by ycitm in "A Starter's Guide to Writing Effective Meeting Notes"

ycitm — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 16:28:19 +0000

One of my new years resolutions was to learn to type faster. To get some practice I started taking notes in all the meetings I attend. This wasn't common practice in my team before, but I've found it to be really useful. I've lost track of the number of times someone's said "didn't we talk about this in that meeting a couple of weeks back" and I've been able to point them at my notes.

I've found a really simple way of authoring and sharing notes is to write them in Org mode and then push them to a wiki on github. Github understands how to render Org markup nicely, so you get a nicely formatted wiki pretty much for free.

As an added benefit I can now touch type :)

New comment by ycitm in "Chrome 56 will mark HTTP pages with password fields as non-secure"

ycitm — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 22:18:48 +0000

If you have control of your nameservers you can use cloudflare's free TLS offering and keep your current webhost.

New comment by ycitm in "Vim 8.0 released"

ycitm — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 20:03:34 +0000

Surround support was just added in IdeaVim 0.46. From the release notes:

Support for vim-surround commands ys, cs, ds, S, enable it with set surround in your ~/.ideavimrc

New comment by ycitm in "Announcing BuckleScript 1.0"

ycitm — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 22:19:31 +0000

Looks like it's just an optimization. If you change to

  let test_curry x  y =  x + y + x

You get the expected output

  function f(param) {
    return test_curry(32, param);
  }

New comment by ycitm in "Love for TypeScript"

ycitm — Sat, 30 Jul 2016 08:25:10 +0000

You could call your js function with a string, and rather than a compile time error you'd get broken behaviour at runtime.

New comment by ycitm in "Weaintfoundshit.js"

ycitm — Sat, 23 Jul 2016 18:43:32 +0000

At least in new versions of Chrome, NodeList is iterable, so you can use forEach and map on it.

https://medium.com/@devlucky/nodelist-object-is-finally-an-i...