patrec

Joined 10 years ago

Karma
2,753
Submissions
1,132
Member since
Jun 12
email: replace_vowels_with_leetspeak_version("patrec") + "@gmail.com"
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
Ultra-endurance definitely seems to have one of the thinnest sex differentials in sports.

Still, when I ask Google to provide a list of top 10 ultra endurance runners in terms of absolute performance across sexes, it lists not a single woman and elaborates: "While female athletes like Courtney Dauwalter have occasionally won mid-tier ultramarathons outright over the entire field, in highly competitive, top-tier international events, the absolute raw times and physical performance indexes lean heavily toward the elite male field."

Comment · 1 month ago
Can you name any fields from the top of your head that have a) objective scoring b) no gender split rankings b) women in the top 10, consistently?
Comment · 3 months ago
> Dependencies on the body of a runtime function are impossible (at least in the simplified view I’m presenting here)

How does this work given that e.g. a constant can be computed by a comptime function?

Comment · 3 months ago
Sounds interesting, have you put it online somewhere?
Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
The policies I mentioned (just as nepo-baby Mamdani's programs to abolish programs for gifted children) have, of course, precisely and deliberately the effect of cementing an existing parasitic elite and screwing over talented and hardworking people from a non-privileged background.

Which part of this do you fail to understand? Who do you think will be more inconvenienced by the removal of gifted programs, some intellectual mediocrity who goes to a $70'000/year private school anyway, or a smart child from a family with a yearly total income that's a fraction of that schooling cost? Who do you think is going to be more likely to find themselves financially ruined by being hit with enormous taxes on illiquid assets (such as equity in a pre-IPO startup they founded or where an early employee in) -- someone entirely self-made or your "oligarch"?

Comment · 5 months ago
And of course the reason that there is a lot VC capital in Europe has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you'd be crazy to do a startup in e.g. Denmark (because doing so will likely be personally ruinous even in the unlikely case that you get some traction, due to unrealized gains tax) or to directly invest in one in e.g. Germany (where you'd be expected to physically sit through, on location, a few hours of a notary reading stuff out to you)? Do you actually have any idea how much additional legal risks, costs and time wasting bureaucracy are associated with even just forming a company in a typical EU country?

Miami, and Florida in general, have basically zero universities anyone has ever heard off, and still boast a higher number of unicorns per capita than Germany, despite the latter having at least one world-class technical university.

Comment · 7 months ago
What do you mean by this?
Comment · 7 months ago
Is there some more concise and ideally written summary of Thiel's lectures? One that doesn't require sitting through 3h of video?

I've only got some superficial acquaintance with Thiel's ideas, but he's been objectively correct on enough contrarian stuff (Thiel fellowships) that I'd like to at least have some rough, non-distorted understanding of what the anti-christ stuff is about even if it sounds a bit crazy.

Comment · 1 year ago
And using Google Firefox instead of Google Chrome is more than a temporary bag aid?
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Thanks!

> they are better for most use cases of string templating where what you really want, is just a string.

I think use cases where you want to unconditionally bash a string together are rare. I'd bet that in > 80% of cases the "just a string" really is just a terrible representation for what really is either some tree (html, sql, python, ...) structure or at least requires lazy processing (logging, where you only want to pay for the expensive string formatting and generation if you run at the log level or higher that the relevant logging line is meant to operate).

Comment · 1 year ago
The problem with f-strings is that they make an extremely limited use case convenient (bashing unstructured text) and thus people people invariably use them for the less limited use case for which no such covenient mechanism exists. Constructing ASTs (including html and SQL). Or logging (where you want to avoid unconditionally computing some expensive string represenation).

I do this myself. I basically always use the subtl wrong log.warning(f"Unexpected {response=} encountered") and not the correct, and depending on the loglevel cheaper log.warning("Unexpected respone=%s encountered", repsonse). The extra visual noise is typically not worth the extra correctness and performance (I'd obviously not do this in some publically exposed service receiving untrusted inputs).

I'd argue these use cases are in fact more prevalent then the bashing unstructured text use case.

Encouraging people to write injection vulnerabilities or performance and correcness bugs isn't great language design.

Comment · 1 year ago
My memory is that ES6's template strings preceded f-strings. If that is correct, do you happen to know why python was saddled with f-strings, which seem like an obviously inferior design, in the first place? We are now at five largely redundant string interpolation systems (%, .format, string.Template, f-string, t-string).
Comment · 1 year ago
Great point – I should definitely have mentioned Julia as your best bet for playing around with multi-methods. I think it's basically the only language with any eco-system to speak of that has them. Julia also happens to be the only extant language I'm aware of that has a well designed shell interpolation syntax. For resumable exceptions, however, playing around with Dylan or CL remains your best bet, as far as I'm aware of (and Common Lisp at least also integrates them into the interactive development experience).

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton