Unlurker|Replay|About
Trump says he'll raise tariffs to 15 percent after Supreme Court ruling (apnews.com)
•
Trump is penalizing everyday citizens and taxpayers because SCOTUS said his clearly illegal tariffs were illegal? Am I understanding this correctly?
•
SCOTUS has a role in this too. They effectively decided that inconveniencing the powerful (Trump) was worse than we the people being illegally taxed for a year and didn't do anything until later. And now ... he's at it again. His actions are entirely predictable, he has said he would do it, and it means that it SCOTUS sticks to their game plan that lead us to their last decision ... SCOTUS is not relevant. In the meantime as individuals who were illegally taxed, I doubt we see a dime back.
•
The SCOTUS's largely hands off methods and "let the cases work it's way through the system" effectively means they're out of the game and Trump can do what he wants.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
zclaw: personal AI assistant in under 888 KB, running on an ESP32 (github.com/tnm)
•
"LLM backends: Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter." And here I was hoping that this was local inference :)
•
I don't really need any assistance...
•
Me neither. But I have 10-15 ESP32 just wanting for a useful project. Does HN have better suggestions?
•
Build a synthesizer
Parse, Don't Validate and Type-Driven Design in Rust (harudagondi.space)
•
The alternative is one type, with many functions that can operate on that type. Like how clojure basically uses maps everywhere and the whole standard library allows you to manipulate them in various ways. The main problem with the many type approach is several same it worse similar types, all incompatible.
•
I don't really get why this is getting flagged, I've found this to be true but more of a trade off than a straight benefit. It also is sort of besides the point: you always need to parse inputs from external, usually untrusted, sources.
•
This reminds me a bit of a recent publication by Stroustrup about using concepts... in C++ to validate integer conversions automatically where necessary. https://www.stroustrup.com/Concept-based-GP.pdf { Number<unsigned int> ii = 0; Number<char> cc = '0'; ii = 2; // OK ii = -2; // throws cc = i; // OK if i is within cc’s range cc = -17; // OK if char is signed; otherwise throws cc = 1234; // throws if a char is 8 bits }
•
Dividing a float by zero is usually perfectly valid. It has predictable outputs, and for some algorithms like collision detection this property is used to remove branches.
•
I think “has predictable outputs” is less valuable than “has expected outputs” for most workloads. Dividing by zero almost always reflects an unintended state, so proceeding with the operation means compounding the error state. (This isn’t to say it’s always wrong, but that having it be an error state by default seems very reasonable to me.)
•
You can go even further with this in other languages, with things like dependent typing - which can assert (among other interesting properties) that, for example, something like get_elem_at_index(array, index) cannot ever have index outside the bounds of the array, but checked statically at compilation time - and this is the key, without knowing a priori what the length of array is. "In Idris, a length-indexed vector is Vect n a (length n is in the type), and a valid index into length n is Fin n ('a natural number strictly less than n')." Similar tricks work with division that might result in inf/-inf, to prevent them from typechecking, and more subtle implications in e.g. higher order types and functions
•
How does that work? If the length of the array is read from stdin for example, it would be impossible to know it at compile time. Presumably this is limited somehow?
•
One option is dependent pairs, where one value of the pair (in this example) would be the length of the array and the other value is a type which depends on that same value (such as Vector n T instead of List T). Type-Driven Development with Idris[1] is a great introduction for dependently typed languages and covers methods such as these if you're interested (and Edwin Brady is a great teacher). [1] https://www.manning.com/books/type-driven-development-with-idris
•
It doesn’t have to be a compile time constant. An alternative is to prove that when you are calling the function the index is always less than the size of the vector (a dynamic constraint). You may be able to assert this by having a separate function on the vector that returns a constrained value (eg. n < v.len()).
•
If the length is read from outside the program it's an IO operation, not a static variable, but there are generally runtime checks in addition to the type system. Usually you solve this as in the article, with a constructor that checks it - so you'd have something like "Invalid option: length = 5 must be within 0-4" when you tried to create the Fin n from the passed in value
•
Recent and related: Parse, Don't Validate (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960392 - Feb 2026 (172 comments) also: Parse, Don’t Validate – Some C Safety Tips - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507405 - July 2025 (73 comments) Parse, Don't Validate (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41031585 - July 2024 (102 comments) Parse, don't validate (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35053118 - March 2023 (219 comments) Parse, Don't Validate (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27639890 - June 2021 (270 comments) Parsix: Parse Don't Validate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27166162 - May 2021 (107 comments) Parse, Don’t Validate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21476261 - Nov 2019 (230 comments) Parse, Don't Validate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21471753 - Nov 2019 (4 comments) (p.s. these links are just to satisfy extra-curious readers - no criticism is intended! I add this because people sometimes assume otherwise)
•
It's done with rust, so we have to keep posting it every year. /sarcasm.
She Graduated with Honors but She Can't Read (garryslist.org)
I think this is a better explanation of the situation: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/27/us/connecticut-aleysha-ortiz-illiterate-lawsuit-cec It seems like she needed special ed assistance with reading that she unfortunately wasn't getting.
•
The OP website is a right wing blog slop
•
yeah the moment I saw > California governor’s office candidate Matt Mahan told me about the Third Grade Reading Gate when I first met him last year. It’s how I knew he was legit and focused on the right things. that put the rest of it in perspective for me
•
I haven't read enough of the site to ascertain their political persuasion, but I'm allergic to the writing style. I notice... Our Team Garry Tan · Founder President & CEO, Y Combinator. Founder, GarrysList.org Bah!
Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026 (blog.cloudflare.com)
•
This transparent report can earn my trust
•
> Because the client is passing pending_delete with no value, the result of Query().Get(“pending_delete”) here will be an empty string (“”), so the API server interprets this as a request for all BYOIP prefixes instead of just those prefixes that were supposed to be removed. Lmao, iirc long time ago Google's internal system had the same exact bug (treating empty as "all" in the delete call) that took down all their edges. Surprisingly there was little impact as traffic just routed through the next set of proxies.
•
Not sure why everyone is complaining, new MCP features are more important than uptime
•
Reliability was/is CF's label. It's alarming already. Too many outages in the past months. CF should fix it, or it becomes unacceptable and people will leave the platform. I really hope they will figure things out.
•
I have many things dependent on Cloudflare. That makes me root for Cloudflare and I think I'm not the only one. Instead of finding better options we're getting stuck on an already failing HA solution. I wonder what caused this.
•
again?
Is this trend of oversharing code snippets and TMI postmortems done purposely to distract their customers from raging over the outage and the next impending fuckup?
•
and if they didn’t we’d posting about lack of transparency. damned if you do, damned if you don’t
•
Well I still appreciate a good postmortem even if I have no doubt it'll happen again imminently
Sure vibe-coded slop that has not been properly peer reviewed or tested prior to deployment is leading to major outages, but the point is they are producing lots of code. More code is good, that means you are a good programmer. Reading code would just slow things down.
•
that’s my feeling also. We will get this more and more in future.
okay so the code which returned everything isn't there actual explanation: the API server by default returns everything. the client attempted to make a request to return "pending_deletes", but as the request was malformed, the API instead went down the default path, which returned everything. then the client deleted everything. makes sense now but is that explanation is even worse because that means the code path was never tested?
•
or they tested it, but not with a dataset that contained prefixes not pending deletion
I do not work in the space at all, but it seems like Cloudflare has been having more network disruptions lately than they used to. To anyone who deals with this sort of thing, is that just recency bias?
•
been at cf for 7 yrs but thinking of gtfo soon. the ceo is a manchild, new cto is an idiot, rest of leadership was replaced by yes-men, and the push for AI-first is being a disaster. c levels pretend they care about reliability but pressure teams to constantly ship, cto vibe codes terraform changes without warning anyone, and it's overall a bigger and bigger mess even the blog, that used to be a respected source of technical content, has morphed into a garbage fire of slop and vaporware announcements since jgc left.
•
amazing how my comment was flagged in 30 seconds... keep bootlicking
It is not. They went about 5 years without one of these, and had a handful over the last 6 months. They're really going to need to figure out what's going wrong and clean up shop.
•
Typo: "shop", should have been with an 'el'. (: phonetically, because 'l's are hard to read.
No joke. In my company we "sabotaged" the AI initiative led by the CTO. We used LLMs to deliver features as requested by the CTO, but we introduced a couple of bugs here and there (intentionally). As a result, the quarter ended up with more time allocated to fix bugs and tons of customer claims. The CTO is now undoing his initiative. We all have now some time more to keep our jobs.
•
Thats actively malicious. I understand not going out of your way to catch the LLMs' bugs so as to show the folly of the initiative, but actively sabotaging it is legitimately dangerous behavior. Its acting in bad faith. And i say this as someone who would mostly oppose such an initiative myself I would go so far as to say that you shouldnt be employed in the industry. Malicious actors like you will contribute to an erosion of trust thatll make everything worse
•
That's not "sabotaged", that's sabotaged, if you intentionally introduced the bugs. Be very careful admitting something like that publicly unless you're absolutely completely sure nobody could map your HN username to your real identity.
The featured blog post where one of their senior engineering PMs presented an allegedly "production grade" Matrix implementation, in which authentication was stubbed out as a TODO, says it all really. I'm glad a quarter of the internet is in such responsible hands.
•
there was also a post here where an engineer was parading around a vibe-coded oauth library he'd made as a demonstration of how great LLMs were at which point the CVEs started to fly in
Insufficient mock data in the staging environment? Like no BYOIP prefixes at all? Since even one prefix should have shown that it would be deleted by that subtask... From all the recent outages, it sounds like Cloudflare is barely tested at all. Maybe they have lots of unit tests etc, but they do not seem to test their whole system... I get that their whole setup is vast, but even testing that subtask manually would have surfaced the bug
•
Just crazy. Why does a staging environment matter? They should be running some integration tests against eg an in memory database for these kinds of tasks surely?
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
How an inference provider can prove they're not serving a quantized model (tinfoil.sh)
•
I'm somehow more convinced by the method shown in the introduction of the article: run a number of evals across model providers, see how they compare. This also catches all other configuration changes an inference provider can make, like KV-cache quantization. And it's easy to understand, talk about, and the threat model is fairly clear (be wary of fixed answers to your benchmark if you're really distrustful) Of course conceptually attestation is neat and wastes less compute with repeated benchmarks. It definitely has its place
•
The title here seems very different from the post. All that verification happens locally only. There's no remote validation at any point. So I'm not sure what's the reason to even apply this check. If you're running the model yourself, you know what you're downloading and can check the hash once for transfer problems. Then you can do different things for preventing storage bitrot. But you're not proving anything to your users this way. You'd need to run a full, public system image with known attestation keys and return some kind of signed response with every request to do that. Which is not impossible, but the remote part seems to be completely missing from the description.
•
In my opinion this is very well written Two comments so far suggesting otherwise and I guess idk what their deal is Attestation is taking off
•
The idea is that you run a workload at a model provider, that might cheat on you by altering the model they offer, right? So how does this help? If the provider wants to cheat (they apparently do), wouldn't they be able to swap the modelwrap container, or maybe even do some shenanigans with the filesystem? I am ignorant about this ecosystem, so I might be missing something obvious.
•
Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but my faith in the quality of your reporting really fell through the floor when I saw that the first image showed Spongebob Squarepants swearing at the worst-performing numbers. EDUT: I read through the article, and it's a little over my head, but I'm intrigued. Does this actually work?
Toyota Mirai hydrogen car depreciation: 65% value loss in a year (carbuzz.com)
•
I still feel hydrogen fuel cells are the better choice. The convenience of refilling quickly is great. Maybe that’ll matter less if PHEVs are allowed to exist but with some places banning gas cars entirely, I don’t have hope.
Why was it made? I ask because GM’s EV-1 was discussed earlier and it basically existed due to California’s zero-emission requirement in the 90’s. Is this just Toyota doing some random R&D while fulfilling a state minimum requirement?
•
To trick people into thinking hydrogen cars are the future so they don’t buy an EV now. I’ve driven my own vehicles through 65 countries on 5 continents, and even the most remote villages in Africa and South America had electricity of some form. I’ve never seen a hydrogen filling station in my life. The idea we can build out that infrastructure faster than bolster the electric grid is laughably stupid. Downright deceptive.
I don't think hydrogen will ever be a thing for personal cars. Apart from the abysmal "well to wheel" efficiency it's also just such a hassle to create a fuel network for it. Gasoline is bad enough but a gas that will just leak away whatever you do seems like a stretch. It is just so much simpler with electricity. Pretty much every gas station already has it. No driving it around with trucks. Just maybe once install a bigger cable or a battery/capacitor.
•
I always figured it would make more sense for hydrogen to be an option for renewable infra if the problems with leaking and embrittlement could be solved. Currently, moving renewable power over very long distances and storing it at scale is a non-trivial issue which hydrogen could help solve. This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.
•
Only if we had a true oversupply of green energy. Converting electricity to H2 and then back is so incredible inefficient. It's less work to just create better electrical transmission systems. China did that with their high voltage DC lines.
•
Storage is the bigger problem, specifically very long duration or rarely used storage (to cover Dunkelflauten, for example) for which batteries are poorly suited. Hydrogen (or more generally e-fuels) is one way to do that, but another very attractive one is very low capex thermal storage. Personally, I feel the latter would beat hydrogen: the round trip efficiency is similar or better, the complexity is very low, power-related capex should be lower, and there's no need for possibly locally unavailable geology (salt formations) for hydrogen storage. With this sort of storage, Alaska in winter gets its energy from Alaska in summer.
•
> Pretty much every gas station already has [electricity]. Sure but they don't have electric vehicle recharging electricity. They have run the pumps and power the lights electricity.
•
True, but they already exist. Hydrogen stations don’t. If you have to build new ones, especially if you have to supply them with enough power to create their own hydrogen for water, what’s the difference from just building EV chargers? And if you’re going to add hydrogen to existing gasoline stations then same question. If hydrogen was somehow able to use existing gasoline infrastructure it would make a lot more sense. But it’s not.
•
Still seems like a smaller investment to get a bigger cable than H2 infrastructure (Tanks, Pumps, maybe even electrolysis system).
•
My understanding is most hydrogen fueling stations produce the hydrogen onsite via electrolysis of water.
•
Your understanding is entirely wrong. Most hydrogen fueling stations receive it from the next steam reformer, which will make it from fossil gas.
•
Okay not driving it around then. But somehow it's worse. You still have to build the special tank and the special pump and also get an electrolysis device that is big enough to create enough hydrogen and also you have to get heaps of power somewhere that could instead be just straight put into a battery in a car. Make it make sense. What's the point? Who is willing to do that?
•
Don’t forget keeping everything cold enough. On the vehicle side, you can make a gasoline tank in pretty much any shape you want. We have lots of experience making batteries in different shapes thanks to cell phones. High-pressure tanks only want to be in one shape. And it’s not especially convenient.
•
Is the shape round? I bet it's round.
•
this is the case while they're in the hype building phase, when people are paying attention if hydrogen even gained widespread adoption, it would be mass produced via steam reforming of natural gas (which is why the oil majors are the ones desperately pushing it)
•
Natural gas vehicles make way more sense than hydrogen. But they didn't survive in the (US) market outside specific fleet applications. Turns out compressed gas fuel is a big PITA.
•
That makes no sense. If the oil companies were pushing H2, every car would be H2 by now. H2 can be generated anywhere there is power. Any power that can be used to charge a car's battery, can be used to make H2. Yes, I'm sure you have 1000 reasons, but I don't really care, it's just not reasonable to discredit h2 because of made up paranoia. We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.
•
say you're Shell you are vertically integrated, you have billions invested in oilfields, refineries, distribution, and the retail channel ("gas stations") if transport switches to electric, what's your role? answer: there isn't one, you are completely redundant but what if hydrogen took off instead? if you produce via electrolysis, you only keep the retail channel but if you can get H2 established, then you can do a switcheroo and feed in H2 produced from your existing natural gas infrastructure, and massively undercut everyone's electrolysis business at which point you're back to the old days, just instead of selling gasoline from your oilfields, you're supplying hydrogen produced from their gas ... and that's exactly what they're trying to do
•
H2 from electrolysis is wildly expensive. H2 from natural gas is more affordable. Both are alternatives to BEVs, which are the better approach to electrifying transport. If Toyota had gone all in on BEVs when it began its H2 strategy, it would be selling more EVs than Tesla. Instead it entirely ceded the field to others, first Tesla and BYD.
•
There's no point. EVs go 50% further on the same amount of energy, are easier to charge and are, of course, cheaper.
•
But isn't that a counter point? Just putting the electricity directly into a car seems sensible instead of converting it to H2 and then back to electricity. Especially now that wo don't usually have a huge oversupply of green energy. We can think of ways to use the oversupply when it really becomes a problem. But I'd assume then BEV will be so dominant the no one will go through the hassle of supporting H2.
•
If you can do that at a meaningful rate you might as well install ev charging and just not electrolyse when cars are charging
•
He didn't say it doesn't have local tanks. Only that it makes h2 local. You can still make h2 to replenish, and have storage. This is akin to how almost all power used to charge cars, is not-green. For example, there are still Ng, coal, and other types of power plants. If cars switched to gas, instead of electric charging, then some of those could be shut down. But the true point, is as we convert to more and more solar, we'll eventually shut down the last of the fossil fuel burner plants, and eventually the cars will all be green power sourced. Same with h2. Getting non-polling cars out the door and into people's hands, is key. Eventually, where the power comes from will be clean. And really, we're already having issues with power infra, even before AI, so re-purposing Ng pipelines for H2 would be a great thing.
Toyota restricted the sale of its hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to specific, qualified customers who lived or worked near existing, functional hydrogen refueling stations. I remember looking into them when first released but realized I wasn’t eligible and the fact that Toyota restricted the sale meant there was a huge risk in buying them. With all the resent outrage and lawsuits, I wonder how many buyers actually did their due diligence and weighed the risk before committing to them? Or maybe the huge fuel subsidy was seen as a win even if this event played out? Idk but I commend Toyota for taking the risk and going for it.
•
Approximately zero regular consumers purchased hydrogen cars. They were all fleet purchases designed primarily to publish burnish eco-friendly credentials, like this: "This new initiative reinforces Air Liquide's commitment to decarbonizing transportation and accelerating the shift toward sustainable and low-carbon mobility solutions." https://www.airliquide.com/group/press-releases-news/2025-11-17/air-liquide-integrates-first-hydrogen-powered-trucks-its-logistics-netherlands Of course, Air Liquide would also profit massively from building hydrogen infra if it did become commonplace.
•
Well… I did/do see many around the Bay Area. Especially during the morning commute. But I agree, overall it was a low volume car.
•
Funny thing, Air Liquide. They were going to build a massive green hydrogen plant in upstate NY and backed out when the tax credits disappeared... https://www.airproducts.com/company/news-center/2025/02/0224-air-products-to-exit-three-us-based-projects
In the US. How does their value fare in Japan?
•
Given the complete collapse in sales last year (-83% to 432 units, in a market of over 4M cars sold), I'd venture to guess they're faring pretty badly. https://www.automotiveworld.com/news/fcev-sales-in-japan-fall-83-as-refuelling-stations-close/
I've seen exactly one of these in person while in San Diego for a month or so. I never did see a fueling station for it though.
•
There's only... well, 51 of them. If you're lucky, you're near one of the 42 that are actually online and available for fueling (as of this comment). Stations running out of fuel and stations going offline for hardware failures runs rampant. Oh, and some stations might not be able to provide the highest pressure H2, so you might be stuck taking an 85% tank fill... and at nearly $30/kg and a 5.6kg (full) tank, that's an expensive fill. https://h2-ca.com/
It's very easy to create hydrogen from fossil natural gas. Which is the real motivation behind 99% of H2 projects; continue to emit CO2, just hidden from the end user. Battery electric is now pretty much inevitable.
•
In fairness, hydrogen from gas would enable the CO2 to be sequestered. If the vehicle itself burned the natural gas that would require recapturing the CO2 from the atmosphere itself, which is much more challenging. None of this is to detract from the attractiveness of battery vehicles.
Personal Statement of a CIA Analyst (antipolygraph.org)
•
The guy trying to work for the psychological torture club got psychologically tortured a little? My heart bleeds for him
•
> countermeasures such as butt-clenching Ehm ... I am actually not that convinced of that, largely because e. g. the KGB operated quite differently. And it seems very strange to me that the CIA would train an army of wanna-be's as ... butt-clenching recruits. The more sensible option is to have a poker face; and totally believe in any lie no matter how and what. That's kind of what Sergey Lavrov does. He babbles about how Ukraine invaded Russia. Kind of similar to a certain guy with a moustache claiming Poland invaded Germany ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident ).
•
Comments by stego-tech and zenon_paradox are AI bot slop. This site is being absolutely swarmed by them lately.
•
(Offtopic but since we're already there, and a standalone post for this seems inappropriate..) @dang/tomhow, could we consider amending the "no accusations of astroturfing" rule to cover "accusing people of being bots (or using LLMs)"? > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. For the same reasons as the former, the latter are virtually never adding to the conversation. I agree it's (increasingly) a threat to the quality of discourse here, but adding to the noise does not solve it.
•
(It would be better to report this sort of thing by email. It's off-topic to the actual submission.)
•
where'd ya learn to spot AI slop m8 that just looks lIke grmticly crrct writing to meeee
•
Comments by nubg are AI bot slop. This site is being absolutely swarmed by them lately.
I don't get it, I thought it's settled science that polygraphs don't work. Why are these agencies still using them?
•
>I thought it's settled science that polygraphs don't work Of course they do. And if you read the article in the OP you also realize why. Polygraphs are an interrogation tactic, you can force a subject into a somewhat ridiculous procedure and ask them threatening questions, creating an disorientating situation. Afterwards you can accuse them of having "proven" that they are a liar. Polygraphs work, it just does not matter whether the machine is on or off.
•
They do work. Their purpose is intimidation. They’re not truth machines, they’re pressure cookers.
I've no idea why I read to the end of that, seems like a long ramble, I kept expecting something to happen and it never did.
•
tl;dr: polygraphs aren't reliable and can be misused?
•
This was how I felt about reading War and Peace
Adding my POV from a former National Security perspective: Author is 100% on point. The point of a polygraph is three-fold: weeding out the dipshits; exerting power over the powerless; and identifying the valuable assets (typically sociopaths). It does not - cannot - identify liars, deceit, or bad actors on its face (that comes from the manual the author linked). It's not scientific assessment, it's psychological torture. Would I take a polygraph to reactivate my clearance? Yeah, if I had to. Would I pass? That's up to the examiner, because much like the author I won't tolerate being called a liar, nor will I capitulate to power games. I'll be honest, forthcoming, and cooperative - and if that's not enough to pass, then I don't want to work for you.
•
There's two kinds of sociopaths, the uncontrollable ones and the controllable ones. The CIA only wants the latter.
•
This was all so weird to read about. I guess I just assumed the polygraph was of marginal utility, and you either passed, or you didn't. I didn't realize it was part of a combative interrogation process, even for regular employees.
Not a bad person, just lacking in wisdom.
•
Not really
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects (loonlang.com)
Perhaps relevant: https://campedersen.com/loon This looks like a really neat project/idea; seeing the road map is exciting too, nearly everything I'd want. I don't love the brackets syntax, or the [op val1 val2] ([* x x]) style, but I appreciate the attempt at clarity and consistency and none of these things are dealbreakers. I do wonder why they've leaned so hard into talking about the type system being out of sight. Again, not a dealbreaker, but I feel strongly that explicit typing has a place in codebases beyond "describe something because you have to". Strongly typed languages strike me as providing detailed hints throughout the codebase about what "shape" I need my data in or what shape of data I'm dealing with (without needing to lean on an LSP). I find it makes things very readable, almost self-documenting when done right. From their docs about their choices: "The reasoning is simple: types exist to help the compiler catch your mistakes. They do not exist to help you express intent, at least not primarily." This strikes me as unnecessarily pedantic; as someone reading more code than I write (even my own), seeing a type distinctly—particular as part of a function signature—helps me understand (or add strong context) to the original author's goal before I even get to reading the implementation. I find this doubly so when working through monadic types where I may get a typed error, a value, and have it all wrapped in an async promise of some kind (or perhaps an effect or two). By the same token many languages allow you to leave out type annotations where they may be simple or clearly implied (and/or inferred by the compiler), so again, I'm not understanding the PoV (or need) for these claims. Perhaps Loon simply does it better? Am I missing something? Can I write return types to stub functions? From the above blog post: "That's how good type inference feels! You write code. The types are just there. Because the language can see where it's going." Again, it feels strongly geared towards a world where we value writing code over reading/maintaining/understanding code, but maybe that's just my own bias/limitations. Will follow it closely.
•
Good news, there's a line in the "Coming from Rust"[1] page that says > You never annotate a function signature unless you want to for documentation purposes. so it sounds like function annotation is still an option for the purposes of communication, just no longer required in all cases. [1] https://loonlang.com/concepts/from-rust
•
Yeah, the idea that types exist just to help the compiler catch your mistakes shows a depressingly superficial understanding of the benefits of static typing. Types exist so that the compiler can reason about your code better - but not incidentally, they also help you reason about your code better! To wit: even when working in dynamic languages, it's often considered a good practice to write down in docstrings the types of objects a function can operate on, even without static enforcement. Thinking about types is helpful for humans, too. And it's not even just a thing to help you read code in the future - types help me write code, because as I sit down to write a function I know the possible values and states and capabilities of the object I'm working with. In the best of cases I can analytically handle all the possible cases of the object, almost automatically - the code flows out of the structure of the type.
I think I am in love. Clojure + Rust, everything is typed, but I don't need to annotate. And algebraic effects that I really wanted to explore in Ocaml, but now can do it in language with way easier syntax. I might be missing bit of Clojure dynamic nature, but it looks like a bunch of really interesting ideas in one language.
•
Coming from Clojure, I like types being invisible. Square brackets feels like a needless change. If you want sexprs, just use sexprs. Interesting ideas, as you say.
•
Yeah. Clojure is by far my favorite dynamic language. But, I love static types. At a glance, a quick glance at Loon- looks like it could just flat out become my favorite language. Loon with a standard library that approaches Go’s would be :chefskiss:
DialUp95 – A 90s inspired nostalgia hit (dialup95.com)
•
The change to authentication happened before the modem negotiation ended, this should be fixed, all it need it's a short delay until the audio ends, and THEN start auth.
•
I don't know if this was an indian thing but we'd get a dopamine hit type tone at the end and that's not present in this audio.
So good. But 31kbps? Wow. You guys were spoilt. 28.8 is the best we got and on a very good day when the lines were nice and dry. I think he even nailed the link upgrade sound on the modem.
•
My first interaction with the internet was an old Windows 3.1 machine with 14.4kbps modem, then we upgraded to a Windows 95 machine with 28.8kbps and later we swapped out the ISA modem for a PCI 56kbps modem. Then ADSL came along and the rest is history. Presumably the modem in this example is a 33.6kbps V.34 modem which had a slightly lower sync negotiated due to a poor line.
it 100% does already
•
Somebody else must've already read mine.
What not to write on your security clearance form (1988) (milk.com)
•
So something uncomfortable about clearance processes: they're not purely about truth, they're about interpretable truth
•
"the most frequently occurring letters in typical English text are e-t-a-o-n-r-i." But "Wheel of Fortune" told me to guess R-N-S-T-L-E!
•
I admire people who don't lie about past drug use on their clearance forms. Sure, it might delay their clearance, but I still admire them. The core social problem with drug addiction and alcoholicism is this concept of telling people what you think they want to hear from you, not telling them the truth.
> When I handed the form in to the security officer, he scanned it quickly, looked me over slowly, then said, ``Explain this''--pointing at the FBI question. I described what had happened. He got very agitated, picked up my form, tore it in pieces, and threw it in the waste basket. > He then got out a blank form and handed it to me, saying ``Here, fill it out again and don't mention that. If you do, I'll make sure that you never get a security clearance.'' It's important to "see like the government" when dealing with the government (pun on "seeing like a bank" by https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/ if anyone didn't catch the reference). Everything fits into bins and categories with checkmarks and such. As an entity it has no "bin" for "investigated as Japanese spy as a joke when was a child". So you have to pick the closest bin that matches. However, that doesn't mean the same government later won't turn around also punish you for not picking the right "bin". Not "realizing" that it's its own fault for not having enough categories i.e. bins for you to pick. And, some may argue, that's a feature not a bug...
•
the challenge is always determining what the "bins" are. maybe, the government has no bin for "investegated by the FBI for a silly and innocuous reason", but maybe they do, and lying about it slots you into the bin for "lied on their security clearance form".
•
In the security space you’re encouraged to be as transparent as possible. Most modern forms have ample space to write in detailed explanations. I have some silly not nearly as interesting infractions and I wrote them out in detail explaining, without any issue in processing background checks. It usually is something that’s asked about in an in person interview at that point.
Security clearances are probably a really good example of Goodhart's Law. One reason for all these questions is really to determine if someone can be blackmailed, and thus a security risk. (Big reason they look at your financials and why debt can cause you to lose clearance) But the letter of the law trumps the spirit. A common lie these days is about weed usage. You may get or entirely rejected for having smoked in the past even if you don't today (e.g. you tried it once in college but didn't like it). So everyone lies and it creates a system where people are even told to and encouraged to lie, like in TFA. The irony being that this is exactly what creates the situation for blackmail! Now you can get blackmailed for having that past thing cause you to lose your job as well as lying on your clearance form. Honestly it seems smarter to let the skeletons out of the closet. Spill your secrets to the gov. Sure, maybe the gov can blackmail you but a foreign government can't blackmail you for something that the gov already knows. You can still have filters but the dynamic really needs to change. Bureaucracy creates its own downfall. To reference another comment, I'd rather a functional alcoholic have a clearance and the gov know about it than a functional alcoholic have a security clearance and the gov not know about it (or pretend to not know). We've somehow turned clearance checks into security risks. What an idiotic thing to do
•
This information is highly outdated. You can say any number of things on your SF86 and still get cleared. This is indeed the point.
In case you want to read about the proactive information speeding up your security clearance: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/6/50
•
Thanks for posting. That's actually a much more interesting story.
You know exactly what I mean. Chased after, investigated?
•
Who are you replying to? When I click 'parent' on your post, the poster said nothing about his opinion on what should be done, only what he's seen.
I have a somewhat similar story involving the death of an extremely elderly neighbor by an accident on his farm, and the suspicion by the state police that I at 12 years old had murdered him, based solely on someone saying they thought they saw me messing with his mailbox from a car that was similar to the one parked in our driveway. The mailbox which stood directly next to ours at the end of an easily walkable driveway. So yes, Mr. SF-86, I had once been investigated for a felony. Oh, you're only supposed to tell the truth if the truth will help the government catch to a bad guy? Very impressive system, sir. Top notch.
•
The modern SF-86 only asks about charged, not investigated (and AFAIR, that was the case also 20 years ago). (And arrested, but presumably you were not).
Investigating a cryptographic key found near a major military installation during war time doesn’t strike me as a waste of money. We have the full information about the outcome, but the San Diego FBI field office did not. I think that’s what makes this story so funny- the FBI was acting appropriately and rationally, but ended up with a relatively absurd result.
•
If a Japanese spy knew this would happen, they could waste enormous amounts of time by spreading unused keys around San Diego.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
How far back in time can you understand English? (deadlanguagesociety.com)
•
I've been living in a non-English speaking country for 35 years or so. Although I read a lot, my English is still somewhat "frozen". I would still ask you if you have "mown" the lawn - a tense that is now almost lost. Many irregular verbs are becoming regular, I expect due to the large number of ESL speakers. Language changes. It's weird to see it happening in front of you...
•
This is something I struggle with on a semi-regular basis since I'm fairly interested in our constitutional history, so documents like the Bill of Rights 1688/9[1], the Petition of Right 1627[2], etc, are not old or illegible enough to have been given modern translations (like the Magna Carta 1297[3]). As such, they can be difficult reads, particularly with their endless run-on sentences. Punctuation seems to have not been invented yet either. - [1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/WillandMarSess2/1/2/enacted - [2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Cha1/3/1/enacted - [3] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9
•
I can read until the 1300s, which is about what I expected. I encourage people to go search up historical newspaper archives from the 1700s though, because it becomes significantly harder to parse when you have little to no knowledge of the events, people or even culture of the time.
•
> Somewhere in this section — and if you’re like most readers, it happened around 1300 or 1200 — the language crossed a boundary. Up to this point, comprehension felt like it was dropping gradually, but now it’s fallen off a cliff. This is generous to his readers. Most American college students majoring in English can't read Dickens , according to a study discussed here last year [0]. People reading a post on a blog about dead languages are self-selected to be better at this task. But so are people who've decided to spend four years of their life studying English literature. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44070716
•
Now now slow down - still struggling with modern English here ...
1400 seems fine except for the one big hurdle being "Þ", which I feel like I'd seen at some point but did not recall. ("ȝ" is useful but that's somewhat easier to guess and not too critical. "ſ" is also easy to guess and I'd seen it before.) 1300 is noticeably harder and needs some iterative refinement, but once you rewrite it, it's surprisingly not too bad: > Then after much time spoke the master, his words were cold as winter is. His voice was the crying of rauenes(?), sharp and chill, and all that heard him were adrade(?) and dared not speak. > "I deem thee(?) to the(?) death, stranger. Here shall you die, far from thy kin and far from thine own land, and none shall known thy name, nor non shall thy biwepe(?)." > And I said to him [...] 1200 is where I can't understand much... it feels like where the vocabulary becomes a significant hurdle, not just the script: > Hit(?) is much to saying all that pinunge(?) hie(?) on me(?) uroyten(?), all that sore(?) and all that sorry. No scar(?) is never hit(?) forgotten, not uuhiles(?) is libbe(?). It gets exhausting to keep going after these :-) but this was very fun.
•
> rauenes Ravens
•
Amazing. Thanks!
•
> adrade(?) "adread", meaning afraid Still a recognizable archaic word, constructed from a still-in-use root. Just the spelling is different.
•
Ahh of course! Yeah I guess if I'd read the sentence a few more times it might have been possible to guess that too. Thanks!
oh my god, you're right, they just used an f, no wonder I found it so bad! That is really annoying. Enraging even.
•
The text doesn't use an `f`. If you copy from e.g. the 1700 passage you get `ſ` not `f`.
•
Probably people are confused by ligatures. Indeed it is a long S.
> The blog ends there. No sign-off, no “thanks for reading.” Just a few sentences in a language that most of us lost the ability to follow somewhere around the thirteenth century. Fucking AI slop, even this
•
My slopometer tells me an LLM would not by itself write something so concise, especially beginning with "the blog ends there".
I really think that the onset of mobile device communication will be a major pillar in the history of the English language. lol / crash out / unalive / seggs / aura
•
lowkey gives cultural collapse type vibes
When they seamlessly switch from English to Dutch I feel like I’m having a stroke: all the same intonation, the same accent, but nothing makes sense any more
•
That doesn't jive with my experience at all. I'm half-dutch, raised in England. Dutch doesn't have the same intonation, has harsher pronunciations, and has a whole extra sound most English people struggle with (a rolled r). The older generations also can't pronounce -thew very well as it's not a thing in Dutch, so struggle to pronounce my name, calling me Matchoo instead of Matthew. It still boggles my mind that my Mum would pick a name the Dutch can't pronounce. The Dutch accent is also extremely noticeable to a native English speaker.
People read Shahname[1] regularly in Iran, and it was written at around 1000 CE, but there isn't much before 900 CE that is comprehensible to a modern day Persian speaker. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh The Shahnameh is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Shahnameh is one of the world's longest epic poems, and the longest epic poem created by a single author.
•
Most European people know about Odysseus, but few have read Homer, even in translation. I one met a visiting Iranian academic just after I'd learned about the Shahnameh. I'd also read the opinion of a French scholar who thought its language was, for a modern Iranian, like Montaigne for a modern French. The Iranian woman told me that very few people in Iran actually read the book. It's very long, and hard to grasp for untrained readers. But most people know some of its stories and characters, because they are often mentioned in everyday life, and because the abridged prose books are widespread. BTW, I don't know which editions are the most popular in Iran. Wikipedia says the Shahnameh was heavily modified and modernized up to the 14th century, when its most famous illustrated edition was created. The book most read today is probably not a scholar edition.
I’m a native English speaker and I think this is an easier jump if you know other Romance languages. In Spanish and Portuguese “woman” and “wife” are often the same word, “mujer” and “mulher” respectively.
•
Also French femme. It isn't limited to Italic languages either. There's also German Frau, Dutch vrouw, Irish bean.
 Top