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anon_d

256 karma · joined June 28, 2010

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anon_d··on Functional programming is finally going mainstream
> writing imperative code in functional languages almost invariably sucks.

I don't agree at all!

Haskell is extremely pleasant for imperative programming. There's a learning curve for sure, but you get a lot in return. (STM is one small example). I would much rather write imperative Haskell than Python.

It does gets messy when you start writing really low level code (direct pointer manipulation, etc). And it sucks for small scripts (too much project boilerplate, small standard library). But those are the only real pain-points.

anon_d··on Functional programming is finally going mainstream
I don't think this is accurate at all.

Debugging in a strict FP language is pretty much exactly like debugging in an imperative language. Debugging in a lazy FP language requires somewhat different approaches, but still does not have the problems you are implying here.

> In the end, the result is wrong, good luck finding where.

This is not true. If this was true, nobody would be able to build significant things in FP languages.

> Optimization aside, what you code is what the computer runs.

> But then you end up with something that doesn't look at all like what your wrote.

No, you can trace code down through the compiler transformations and generally understand what is going on at each level of abstraction.

Compilers for imperative languages are just as "magical".

anon_d··on Functional programming is finally going mainstream
Functional programming doesn't actually compete with imperative programming.

In practice, functional programming is a way of organizing imperative programs. Kind of like how OO is a way of organizing imperative programs.

Almost all applications written in Haskell use the IO monad quite a bit, for example. Large Haskell projects generally use a lot of C libraries, and sometimes even directly include C code for performance sensitive bits.

anon_d··on Theranos former president found guilty on all fraud counts
Billions of people in this world would agree unreservedly with the sentiment in question. Only a very specific class of people would have a negative reaction to this.

If you don't want to "hang with that crowd" then there's nothing to worry about here w.r.t filter.

anon_d··on OCaml Programming: Correct and Efficient and Beautiful
I find this phrase "Automatic Currying" that people are using in this thread to be very strange.

It implies that `(add 3)` is being magically converted into `(\x -> (add 3 x))` by some fancy front-end feature.

But no, `add` is just a function that returns a function.

This pattern is core to the entire paradigm of functional programming, all the way down to the lambda calculus.

All functional programming languages are essentially just fancy syntax around lambda calculus. They have different implementation strategies (strict vs lazy), different type systems, and they have been extended with different primitives (floats, operations on floats, etc).

But at their core, they are all just lambda calculus.

In the lambda calculus, there is ONLY functions, and all functions take one argument. There are no tuples. So, multiple arguments are implemented with the pattern in question. For example:

mul = (λx. λy. λz. x(yz))

anon_d··on Surprising result while transpiling C to Go
Compiling functional languages to other high-level language s generally has pretty awful performance compared to simple native compilation. Even compiling to C has it's limitations.

The fact that Go has a nice compiler doesn't really help, because the code generated by the functional compiler will have usage patterns that are very different from what the Go compiler is designed around.

anon_d··on 3M’s PFAS Crisis Has Come to Europe
Smoking decreases appetite. A lot of people who quit smoking gain significant weight.
anon_d··on Ask HN: Why are people in real life so different?
You have been intensely socialized to behave like a robot in person. To wear a mask and not do anything that stands out.

People expect this, so doing anything "off script" around other people makes them EXTREMELY uncomfortable. If they are strangers, they usually "filter you out", pretend they don't notice, and create distance. If they are associated with you, they will immediately begin pressuring you to stop in increasingly less subtle ways.

Everything about our social interactions is completely scripted. We are choosing between pre-approved scripts that we learned movies and shows. In our public behavior, we are literally just executing software that has been uploaded to our brains.

You mostly don't notice this because that's all you've ever known. However, if you deliberately force yourself outside the script YOU WILL NOTICE, and you will notice very, very intensely.

As a consequence, most of the "interesting" people that you meet in real life are hiding, taking on the same exterior behaviors as everyone else.

anon_d··on Performance Evaluation of IPFS in Private Networks
I don't have a big-picture answer for you, but I'll point out that there are a lot of performance-relevant details that are different between the two protocols.

A torrent is basically a filesystem, dumped into a single large bytestring, broken into constant size chunks. Then there is a fairly small swarm of nodes trading those chunks. Most of those nodes are trying to download everything, and want to saturate inbound/outbound pipes.

- IPFS is a single massive DHT for advertising who has what for every single blob in the entire network. Most nodes have a tiny subset of that data.

- IPFS does not use a constant block size.

- IPFS uses a "multihash" instead of hard-coding a specific hash function. This adds parsing time to hashes, and means that hashes are not a consistent size, and they have sizes that don't fit cleanly into words.

Those are just some details that I happen to know off the top of my head, but you start to see the picture. In every architectural trade-off, IPFS goes for the more general thing, instead of the performant thing.

anon_d··on Web3 is centralized and inefficient
> just to make a few white crypto bros happy.

Causal racism

anon_d··on /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification
Of course there are a cultural leanings at every "place". What kind of people frequent that place?

HN is no different. Anyone can come here and make any argument.

anon_d··on Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life
My personal view on Transgenderism is that it should be seen in basically the same way as drug addiction.

Drugs also occur naturally and many people dabble in them without much harm. But drug addiction is truly destructive, and almost impossible to escape from.

We shouldn't be encouraging people that we care about to sterilize themselves, or treating the path to that lightly.

This view is quite unacceptable within the dogma.

anon_d··on Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life
> but it seems like a fairly trivial one to me.

I don't see the difference as trivial.

The reality is that, across many cultures, there are men that have a strong desire to abandon the masculine role and to live quasi-female lives. The Thai and native american understanding matches this reality.

Our culture-makers decided to apply a specific dogma to this phenomena, and to propagate that dogma by force. That dogma has effects on society and was implemented because of it's effects on society. (For example, reality does not imply that this phenomena should be tolerated or that efforts to minimize it are pointless, but the dogma does)

Now compare this to the original topic. It was claimed that belief in God is stupid, and for stupid people.

However, almost every culture has some sort of concept of god(s). When people interact with god(s), something consistent is happening inside their experience. It is a real phenomena (like the Third Gender stuff is a real phenomena).

Christianity takes this phenomena and captures it inside a specific set of beliefs. God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving. He sent his son to die for your sins. Blah, blah.

These beliefs form a dogma. However, the reality of the god-phenomena does not justify the god-dogma. And, when people argue against the belief in God, they argue against the specific dogmatic god-construct that exists in modern Christianity.

But Christian culture is built on the god-dogma. So, christians reject people that reject the dogma, and continue to accept the dogma in the face of critique.

This is a direct parallel to the Transgenderism dogma. That's what I'm arguing. Almost all smart people submit to dogmas.

The reason why smart people are suddenly rejecting the Christian dogma (after submitting to it for centuries) is that they are strongly incentivized to do so. And you can see that in how smart people are simply submitting to new dogmas, instead of now rejecting all dogmas.

The move away from Christiantity isn't a triumph over dogma, it's just a new religion taking hold.

anon_d··on Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life
The Thais have similar concept as well (third gender), but it isn't the same as the western Transgenderism construct.

> I find it all rather fascinating and hard to reduce down to silly dogma.

The phenomena itself isn't what I'm talking about. The specific belief that "Transgender women are women and they were born that way", and the enforcement of that belief, that is dogma.

Similarly, the belief that "some people are homosexual and some people are not, they are born one way or the other". This isn't consistent with reality, and isn't what other cultures believe. However, this is considered foundational, unquestionable truth in our culture.

anon_d··on Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life
Since there is no DM feature, I'm going to rail on this a bit more here.

You feel alone.

- What is your relationship like with your parents and siblings?

- What is your relationship like with your aunts, uncles, and cousins?

- What is your relationship like with your old friends from college and before?

- What is your relationship like with your parent's friends?

- What change do you want to see in the world? Are you engaged with other people that want that too? I'm talking active engagement, meetings, agendas, etc.

The join a church suggestion is basically correct. Even if you don't want to engage with Christianity, something of that general shape is what you want. An organized group of similar people with similar ideas, working towards common goals, and helping each other out.

If that doesn't exist in the form that you want, you can build it.

anon_d··on Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life
I have no interest in arguing against any of these points here.

All I am claiming is that they are a form of dogma. These beliefs look very silly to everyone outside of this culture.

They seem silly to everyone. To every other culture in the world, and to every culture of the past.

And yet, critiquing them within this culture is dangerous.

anon_d··on Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life
There are tons of things like this outside of religion. Almost every coherent group of people believes in some sort of nonsense for political reasons, and as a form of identity signaling.

- Many people in this community believe that a female soul can be mis-allocated to a male body, for example.

- Many people in this community believe that Trump was involved in a conspiracy with Putin to take over the USA.

- Many people in this community believe that democracy is a form of government that gives the population more power than other forms of government.

All of these beliefs are rather silly, but are accepted as dogma and critique is unwelcome.

----

I do agree, however, that the Christian church is predatory. It is matriarchal and is basically a system of domestication. However, the fact that they employ dogma is not the problem, all groups employ dogma.

anon_d··on Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life
People are telling you that you are too judgmental. People are telling you that you need to accept your situation. People are telling you to move to a huge city.

Instead, you need to be MORE judgmental. You need to reject your situation EVEN HARDER. Definitely DO NOT move to a huge city (unless you have people there).

Your problem is that, up until now, you have been following money and interests, and expecting that the belonging issue to sort itself out.

This is a foundational mistake, it's completely backwards. You need to belong FIRST. Your interests should stem from the needs of the people that you love, your tribe. Your work/employment should stem from the needs of those people, and your role in what they are working towards. The other way around does not work.

Basically, you are alone because you were misled into prioritizing the wrong things. Turning that around will involve a lot of pain and sacrifice.

Find the people that you actually love, love being around, and love being connected to. Find them online. Find them through extended family. Find them through old friends. Go travel, and reconnect with your own people.

These people exist! There is no reason to settle for less. Stop what you are doing now, and orient your whole life around this. Once you find it, go find more people like yourself and pull them into the group. So many people like you are trapped in this same situation, and they need your help.

anon_d··on How people reason their way through echo chambers and what might guide them out
The reason we are dealing with lots of little echo chambers is because we are in the middle of a war.

Our echo-chamber-keepers were replaced, and the new ones are leading us to our deaths.

Many different groups of people realize this and are trying to build replacements, but the current keepers are still dominant and there are many candidate replacements, all competing.

anon_d··on How people reason their way through echo chambers and what might guide them out
But you were born in an echo chamber.

There is no "exit from" echo chambers.

There is no outside.

Your echo chamber is the source all of the stories and symbols that you use to make sense of the world.

anon_d··on Jewish Problems (2011)
There is something implied by that dataset that we are not allowed to notice or talk about.

The text doesn't say it, but the commenter is suspect because they should know better than to imply the unspeakable.

anon_d··on Secret Recordings Reveal How Exxon Lobbyists Manipulate Politicians and Public
Feel like the solutions to so many problems is just tariffs. Tariffs on all imports and exports, tariffs on moving things between states too.

Significant tariffs would fuck these people so hard.

anon_d··on Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane
I do not think it is stupid nor self destructive to avoid enriching people who believe that Taiwan is a country, no. There is diversity of ideas and dissenting views, and he's free to blog about them, but I am also free to go work on other projects/communities that don't enrich landowners who I find morally repugnant.

Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich Taiwanese nationalists is very different from thinking that they should be silenced.

----

I do not think it is stupid nor self destructive to avoid enriching people who use God's name in vain, no. There is diversity of ideas and dissenting views, and he's free to blog about them, but I am also free to go work on other projects/communities that don't enrich landowners who I find morally repugnant.

Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich heretics is very different from thinking that they should be silenced.

----

I spent a years traveling and living in different cultures. "Racism" is basically ubiquitous everywhere in the world. Everywhere else, people (even liberal, educated people in big cities) are openly prejudiced. I found this shocking at first, and eventually came to terms with it. This huge stigma about talking about race literally only exists in one culture, and for this one tiny sliver of the history of that culture.

You are in a cult. This is a religion. You are condemning heresy.

anon_d··on Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane
We should encourage people to express dissenting views.

The idea that we should do anything in our power to avoid good outcomes for someone that expressed ideas that we don't agree with is worse than hateful and evil: it's stupid and self-destructive.

anon_d··on Why I Prefer Functional Programming
Writing functions that receive other functions as input can lead to over complicated code that's really hard to read.

I work in FP languages, and I find this type of code extremely intuitive and easy to understand.

I suspect that you are just not used to thinking this way, and that with more familiarity, you would not have this opinion.

anon_d··on Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
We can't fix this.

The whole HN narrative around this presumes that this is an unnatural outcome caused by the bad incentives of tech platforms. This is just wrong.

The polarization comes directly from people being able to communicate freely.

The polarization is real. It was there before, but it was controlled by censorship, basically. The polarization isn't caused by the web, it's unleashed by it. We can't stop it without neutering the web, and we don't want that.

anon_d··on European Union Calls for Five Year Strict Ban on Facial Recognition Technology
It doesn't matter. "White male" is a slur now.
anon_d··on Grindr and OKCupid Sell Your Data, but Twitter’s MoPub Is the Real Problem
This is an amazing idea.
anon_d··on Why I Procrastinate (2019)
ADHD is your mind violently rebelling against the useless bullshit that you trying to force it to do.
anon_d··on Why I Procrastinate (2019)
You have basically the right idea, but I think you are missing something important.

ADHD is a "disorder", but it's root cause is intrinsic, genetic.

Different people are different. ADHD isn't about "being human", it's about being a certain type of human. Everyone is somewhat maladapted to the inhumane world that has been created, but people with personalities at certain extremes adapt much worse.

I "have ADHD". Most of my relatives have ADHD. I view the modern world as an act of aggression, as an attack. If I want to survive, and I want my descendants to survive, then the modern world must be destroyed.

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