munchler

It’s more likely that most of them are competent professionals doing their best in an impersonal corporate environment, just like the rest of us.

Calling the people who work on GitHub “losers” is not cool.

In this moral framework, would it be acceptable for the lecturer to take attendance orally, or is that also insulting?

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OK, but it wasn't until functional programming came along that tagged unions were recognized as a natural way to implement sum types, which is how they are used in modern programming. The old idea of a "variant" has pretty much faded away.

`Result<T, E>` comes from Haskell's `Either a b` type. F# also has a `Result<'T, 'E>` type.

It's funny how often functional programming languages lead the way, but imperative languages end up with the credit.

Thank you for explaining this. I didn't even realize this was an Avalonia project until you pointed it out. I like Avalonia (and love .NET in general), but I think the messaging on this needs a lot of work. Avalonia is creating unnecessary cognitive dissonance by emphasizing MAUI, which is a competing project after all.

This is what mystifies me about this announcement. Avalonia already works fine on Linux, allowing anyone to build a cross-platform .NET GUI application.

MAUI is supposed to be a wrapper around native widgets. The fact that they had to use Avalonia under the covers to get it to work on Linux seems to defeat the point. (Avalonia is a complete UI toolkit, like Qt or Flutter, that owns the entire stack from XAML to pixels.)

https://avaloniaui.net/maui-compare

User: Please suggest the most absurd, over-the-top blog post title that will nonetheless get me to the top of Hacker News.

System: "Contributing to Open-Source Should be Required, Like Jury Duty"

Thank you for the explanation. This reminds me somewhat of an F# type provider, which can execute arbitrary code at compile time.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/tutorials/ty...

> Instead of writing the type directly, we're calling pickType and using the type returned. The typechecker evaluates pickType True at compile time, sees it equals Nat, and then it knows you're saying myNat has type Nat.

But how does the compiler evaluate `pickType True` at compile time? Does the typechecker contain an interpreter for (some subset of) the language? It seems potentially circular for a compiler to invoke functions defined in the code that it's compiling.

I assume you’re being facetious, but just to be clear: WWE is scripted, while the Jets have a fair chance to win any given game.

Both the NFL (football) and MLB (baseball) formed from competing leagues in the US.

Can we please stop pretending that WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) is a sport? Clue: It’s got “entertainment” right there in the name.

Your point about the caret is interesting, but I'm a bit dubious about using them for vertical arrows. I don't think it would be practical to type this combination in one go, since the two symbols would be on two separate lines. For the upward arrow, are you suggesting caret-return-space-space-space-...-vertical bar?

Are there any programming languages that use vertical arrows? Do they appear on one line or two?

“the scientists estimate that the supermassive black hole gobbled a star with a mass at least 30 times greater than that of our Sun.”

So if only 1/30 of the star’s mass was converted to energy, the quote would be correct (and possibly even an understatement).

The author admits at the bottom of the article that he actually drove people to quit by pushing his opinions. So, yeah, be careful following this example.

The person who wrote this code might be a genius, but learning to read it isn’t going to make anyone smart. It’s basically obfuscated assembly code.

> Making almost every variable const at initialization is good practice. I wish it was the default, and mutable was a keyword.

It's funny how functional programming is slowly becoming the best practice for modern code (pure functions, no side-effects), yet functional programming languages are still considered fringe tech for some reason.

If you want a language where const is the default and mutable is a keyword, try F# for starters. I switched and never looked back.

> The Smith chart from electrical engineering is the image of a Cartesian grid under the function f(z) = (z − 1)/(z + 1). More specifically, it’s the image of a grid in the right half-plane.

Well, I'm already confused. The domain is complex numbers where the real part is >= 0? I think it would be helpful to make that clear from the get-go. When I see "Cartesian grid", I think R^2, not C.

That's great! Your experience with the 2025-09-15 and 2025-10-14 puzzles was very similar to mine, I think. I'm impressed that you were able to get AI models to solve this game effectively. I coded it the old-fashioned way myself, mostly, with occasional help from Gemini Pro.

I agree with this description, but I'm not sure we really want our AI agents evolving in real time as they gain experience. Having a static model that is thoroughly tested before deployment seems much safer.

I love me some functional programming, and spend most of days happily immersed in F#, but when I see Haskell programmers casually discussing the lengths they’ll go to to avoid side-effects, I am always in awe. It’s like overhearing monks in the Middle Ages talking about their favorite techniques for copying the Bible by hand.

I understand that the author doesn’t want to get caught up in the details of any particular online drama, but without more concrete information (about either Bluesky or their own project), I find this too abstract to be insightful. YMMV, of course.

OK, I think I see what you mean. I certainly agree that named arguments with default values can be useful, but are not supported by curried functions.

G&T programs are potentially disproportionate in terms of attention from the best teachers/classes, access to high-end resources, pipelines to the best colleges, etc. If those were available to everyone who could benefit from them, then there wouldn't be such competition for them.

Source: Am a parent of a G&T student and I see the intensity with which parents push their kids into the program.

No one seriously disagrees with that. The question is whether the State Department should be run by people who showed diplomatic aptitude in kindergarten due to nature/nurture advantages and were thus subsequently groomed for those roles to the exclusion of others.

Can you give me an example where lack of support for named arguments to curried functions makes refactoring difficult? I'm having trouble understanding how that would happen.

The question isn't whether "it's bad to let smart people excel". Obviously, we never want to actively stop anyone from exceling.

The actual question is whether smart people should receive a disproportionate amount of a finite resource, like education. This imbalance creates a potential runaway effect in which one group grows ever more successful at the expense of other groups.

> the G&T system selects, however imperfectly, for merit and effort.

This is true but doesn't answer the fundamental question of whether meritocracy results in a fair, healthy society. I think this is a nuanced issue with reasonable arguments on both sides, but the author simply assumes the answer is yes without actually addressing the question.