Recent submissions

Comment · 3 days ago
Seems like what you would get if you were customer-centric and building a cloud platform for enterprise and govt to trust which was all set up pre-AI
Comment · 5 days ago
Sudden lightbulb moment:

What about if I just handed my kid a linux machine and put a 30 min cap on YouTube time via the router. (tiktok etc all just banned)

That might go some way to reproducing the kind of friction we experienced growing up with PCs...

Edit could even start with some on-device parenting apps. What about a local LLM powered to classify videos as slop/educational. More power to them if they figure out how to disable it (I'll add more restrictions after a brief honeymoon period)

Comment · 7 days ago
My history is a little hazy but IIRC lisp families were inspired by the lambda calculus and Scheme was a champion of lexical scoping at a time where people thought dynamic scoping was the only practical way to express programming languages. So it's amusing that the lisp families are now not considered functional
Comment · 10 days ago
We like to talk about startups here cos it's HN but when I watch the news it's clear that world leaders clearly don't work 40 hour weeks.

Like whatever else you say about the POTUS it's shocking how many hours he must be working at 80 years of age with or without "help"

Comment · 10 days ago
If you look at the two extremes: "follow exactly the plan I've laid out for you to the letter" and "be whoever you want to be and do whatever you want to do" in a vacuum both of those come with understandable tradeoffs and risks.

So really the meat of the problem is treading that balance. Though I am of the belief that the mind, just like the body, needs cultivating through training and studying helps cultivate the mind. Also, breadth can really unlock different things in perspective and learning so in that respect I have faith in traditional curriculums - it's hard to predict what and how things will stick for a kid so just let them learn a bit of everything because it's possible something they learn in A might lead to an aha in "unrelated" B.

Probably the one invariant for our kid will be "you must work hard"

Comment · 13 days ago
OCaml isn't pure and neither is F# iirc do you see a bit less monad heavy code in large codebases there?

What sort of situations would you want to give up a little purity or error handling at the type level? Maybe at a boundary where you can just write a very ugly imperative but quarantined section to give it a simpler type?

Comment · 13 days ago
Last I looked into this the reef was showing signs of recovery and when I was in Okinawa I saw that a man there has been breeding corals that are more resilient to warmer waters
Comment · 15 days ago
I'm so glad someone else remembers and values their contributions here.

That full package of capacitive touch, a UI and UX optimised for touch, inertial scrolling with pinch and zoom came together to form something much greater than the sum of the individual parts: an experience that could convince you to part with physical buttons

Also I think it took me almost a decade to find a touch keyboard (fleksy) I liked as much as the iOS keyboard. I think people also take for granted how far ahead their quiet innovations in the touch keyboard were without fanfare.

The ones in 2007 were unusable, the original android ones were terrible and I didn't much like swiftkey. Google Keyboard came much later but lacked some of the smoothing and tappiness of the Apple one

Comment · 15 days ago
I'm not an apple fanboy but they were the first to really understand and solve touch screen phones - they went with capacitive tech when everyone was doing resistive and they went all-in on the UX and studied how touch should feel and how the UI should reflect it.

They were by no means the first smartphone nor were they the first touch phone but the "iphone moment" was coined because they figured out how to make frontier tech mainstream.

They also weren't the first to make an MP3 player but it sure felt that way with the ipod. I don't know how people have rewritten this history in their minds

Comment · 16 days ago
Reality eclipsed satire and the Onion was no longer able to keep up it seems
Comment · 19 days ago
Even easier - don't buy them.

My diet would verge on the definition of extreme by most people given the lengths I go to avoid UPFs, additives and microplastics but that doesn't mean I don't like eating. If I have a bag of chips I'll easily gorge the whole thing before even making it back to the couch so keep them out of the house, out of sight and out of mind.

Snacks are truly a sin - they're just seasoning sprinkled on empty calories, engineered to deliberately leave you not satiated. Such a waste to blow your calorie budget on them while also eating a laundry list of chemicals - I'd rather hold off and eat more pasta or steak at dinner.

And if I really can't hold off, there are plenty of easy snacks you can prepare at home like eggs or toast. "a slice of buttered toast" is rated pretty high as a final meal...

An apple, banana or nuts also does pretty well if you can deprogram yourself from the conditioning of the snack industry.

Comment · 19 days ago
Comment · 20 days ago
I recently had an idea for procedural music that would be a fusion of classical ideas of Process ala Glass/Reich/Hisaishi with music making techniques and possibly the interactivity of video games. No idea if it'll work it was more a shower thought than a deep creative endeavour that I'm attached to but my point is that art is art and AI will just be a tool in the end for true artists.
Comment · 20 days ago
> I have certainly found restarting the dining table tradition to have incalculable benefits for my family.

I would love to hear more of your experiences here if you would care to share? It is something I have been thinking about a lot recently (the slow erosion of this practice and its benefits that we're giving up)

Comment · 25 days ago
Writing code is fun for me in a mechanical way - it is very satisfying to edit my lisp expressions in Vim (gasp not emacs)

I'm sure some people thought that it was the same for type writers. Indeed even today some writers prefer a type writer or even pen and paper (quill perhaps?)

But for many cases the quality of life that successive innovation brought outweigh the mechanical joy involved in the creative process. And when the endeavour is a commercial one the argument gets a little harder to justify...

I'm sure people can see how producing text without delete or copy and paste or easy versioning/duplicating makes life harder...

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