jkhdigital

Never change HN, never change

I was really impressed by the scale of the lacuna tool you created, but then I dug into the niche topics (steganography, covert communication) that constitute my PhD research area and my expectations were tempered.

There’s a lot of noise in the research literature. Lots of papers get published that really don’t contribute much of anything to the field, but the existence of a bunch of papers often sends a signal that some concept is important and needs to be studied.

I find that often a big cluster of papers around a particular topic, none of which seems to move the needle much, is actually an indication that we need a new approach and writing more and more incremental papers just digs deeper into a local minimum.

No, lookup tables aren’t magic. The lookup table is part of the program and the execution time includes reading the program itself. A table of size 2^n takes O(2^n) to read into memory.

How about fast software that works for 10 years?

The difference between an academic and an engineer is that the engineer understands that time spent in research and design does not magically justify itself. Quality and time-to-market are both important and to be an engineer is to figure out how to deliver along the optimal frontier.

But if you want a cathedral…?

Keep up the good work. Your contrarian comments on this thread are saving me from wasting time being the contrarian myself.

Is Zotero good software? Yeah, it seems pretty good. I myself don’t use it, despite trying, because it didn’t solve my problems. It is free, has always been free, and its users are primarily academics who do not face market economics for their work output.

Speed is not the enemy. A good engineer knows that time is a precious resource, just like any other, and should be valued appropriately. And engineers are not academics.

This post smells a lot like academia. I say that as someone who has spent quite a bit of time there myself, so I understand where the author is coming from, but “ivory tower” is still an apt metaphor.

Treat it like any other software system: rules that must not be violated are enforced by static type-checking or a trusted runtime monitor. There’s no other option.

Bitter Lesson showing up yet again, this time in context management?

Yes, I have a few CS papers on arxiv myself.

> resulting in the production of an abundance of PDFs. The contents of some of those PDFs may even have important applications.

I hope, from the depths of my soul, that the static typeset report format for transmitting knowledge and understanding will finally die and be laid to rest.

Java doesn’t permit that. You must specify covariant or contravariant type parameters with <? extends T> or <? super T>.

We don’t need new ideas, we need languages that take the best ideas developed over the past decade of PL research and operationalize them in a language with modern tooling and build support.

Most of my research conversations with Claude nowadays are basically about this—what it would take to make every latent bit of program semantics visible and expressible in the language itself. As you put it, first-class everything.

At this point I think we have good solutions for expressing pretty much all the most common program semantics, but there’s no language that brings them all together under a unified syntax, tooling, etc.

I think Pony’s reference capabilities are a better solution for linear types. It’s just part of the language so a violation is simply a type error, not something flagged later during static analysis.