HN user

d2v

138 karma
Posts1
Comments29
View on HN

Have you tried out ghcid? It basically just runs ghci on your program every time you save, and gives an updated list of errors and warnings. Not interactive in the sense that you don't manually test your functions with it, but like 95% of debugging in Haskell is just fixing errors at compilation time. I find it to be a very nice developer experience. Just need a text editor and a terminal with ghcid open and you get immediate feedback as you program.

https://github.com/ndmitchell/ghcid

I don't think Wikipedia fosters the kind of nihilistic hatred that lead to harassment campaigns and real world violence the way 4chan does. I get that not all of 4chan is pol and r9k, but that's still a decent chunk of the users. I can't think of a place on the internet with a higher concentration of incels and alt-right nazi types, besides 8chan.

Couldn't we use that money to create jobs that have a more meaningful impact on people's day to day? Invest in alternative energy, fixing our infrastructure, improving public transit, etc... Put that investment in technology into technology that is more productive instead of the nth iteration of some piece of military technology that we'll never use.

I want that sweet high-speed rail, baby!

To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship.

Unfortunately this kind of rhetoric is frequently coded language meaning "Hey Nazis, we won't kick you off of our platform for threatening to shoot up a synagogue". I think people should still legally be able to create unmoderated platforms, but the majority of people won't participate in them because they quickly become cesspools of hatred and harassment. Gab is the newer, shinier tech startup version of this, but it's existed before in the forms of 4chan, 8chan, and probably other platforms that I'm not familiar with.

Save the USPS 6 years ago

I've gotten better service and respect for my privacy from USPS than any telecom monopoly like Verizon. If anything this feels like an argument in favor of municipal broadband. If the telecom industry is any indication, eliminating the USPS would just result in private mail carriers divvying up the country into a few regions run by monopolies, with lower quality service, and profiting at the expense of users. The point of a public good isn't to profit, but to serve a need that can't adequately be served by the private sector.

I'll do it. Building robots sounds dope. I'd imagine a good chunk of people on HN would love to live in a post scarcity society where they can spend their time building and repairing robots.

Types in Haskell are generally used to describe the structure of the data. Defining a type in Haskell is like writing documentation and a test all in one. I can mentally offload certain concerns to the compiler, which will tell me whether or not the shape of the data in my head matches the code I'm writing. I pretty frequently use the compiler to guide my development, especially with a tool ghcid, which gives instantaneous feedback as I'm programming. It's also like a million times easier to refactor, I tweak a type signature and the compiler will basically give me a list of things I need to update. No need to hunt for and test every instance of that kind of input, the compiler just tells me where it is, and what is wrong.

You also don't have to write out type signatures 99.9% of the time after declaring a type, the compiler can infer them. People in the Haskell community tend to write out signatures for functions because it makes it easier to understand, but it's pretty rare to see a type signature in the body of a function.

That's not to say thinking in Haskell is always as natural or more natural than Python, but I'd argue that immutability and laziness more than types can require a lot more mental effort that can feel like fitting square pegs into round holes for certain problems. When it comes to types (at least Haskell vs. Python), I'd say it's much more a matter of personal taste.

This is only tangentially related, but until now I never really thought about how I sum single digit numbers, but it's not by having memorized all combinations. I'd say I have all combinations that sum to 10 or less memorized, which adds up to 25 unique combos (plus the rule that number + 0 = number).

If I can tell it sums to more than 10, I break it up mentally into [larger number] + [smaller number] = [larger number] + ([smaller number] - remainder) + remainder, where [larger number] + ([smaller number] - remainder) = 10

You could break it down further by just memorizing what each digit less than 10 is when you add 1. Then you can do addition like 5 + 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + ... = 2 + 1 + ... = 8 + 1 = 9. Then you'd only have to memorize 9 things (10 if you include 0). I guess this assumes that you know the order numbers go in though, whereas memorizing all of the combinations doesn't require that.

It takes a lot of faith in law enforcement to believe they won't abuse that power, especially given they are the target of criticism by these protests. The argument that it is illegal for them to abuse / misuse this information isn't very compelling either, given that they are the ones responsible for enforcing the laws that they would be breaking. I might be okay with this info just ending up in the hands of the FBI, but I definitely wouldn't want it winding up in the hands of my local law enforcement agencies, who are known for harassing and intimidating critics.

No, just trying to highlight the double standard when it comes to how law enforcement are treated compared to everyone else.

I also wouldn't classify destroying the car of a government organization as violence. It's destruction, but fairly mild compared to burning people's homes to the ground. And even then, I wouldn't think to compare property damage to actual violence, like murder.

Fun fact: the Philadelphia Police Department also likes starting fires. 35 years ago, they used plastic explosives to blow up the house of the MOVE group, killing most of the people inside (including five children). Instead of putting out the fires, the city allowed a good chunk of the predominantly black working class neighborhood to burn to the ground. The city did get sued in 2005 in a civil trial for burning down the houses, but no one from the city government has been criminally charged for the attack. That seems like the kind of terrorist act that the FBI would investigate, but I guess they have different priorities.

Idk, World War II ended a genocide, and the US civil war (mostly) ended slavery in the US. Both were pretty violent events if I'm remembering correctly. That being said, destroying property isn't violence, and "crime" is kind of a useless metric for morality. Slavery and genocide in the instances above were not legally crimes. Your opinion of police or nazis will color how much you view, say destroying a police car or a German tank as a morally wrong.

Black people in the US constantly fear being killed or harassed by police. Yeah, burning a car doesn't solve anything, but keeping quiet and playing ball since the civil rights movement hasn't really moved the needle. Policing and constant surveillance of black communities has gotten worse since then, and protections for police, both legally and politically, have increased. Sometimes you have to burn a car or break some glass for the nation to pay attention.

Also I would say that the initial reaction of rioting is what drove people to organize and peacefully protest, and in a lot of US cities and states, the combination of these has already resulted in policy change. I'm sure most of these people are also posting on social media and planning to vote as well.

I guess this is a long winded way of saying that torching a car is small potatoes compared to government sanctioned murder and oppression, and this kind of thing is forcing people to pay attention and have conversations about this stuff.

The thesis of the book isn't that eliminating policing will solve the problems that create violent crime, but that policing itself doesn't prevent crime or fix those underlying problems. I'd really suggest giving the book a read.

I don't think taking weapons away is enough. Police aren't trained to provide long-term solutions to domestic violence, homelessness, mental illness, or drug addiction, which are often tasked with solving. The typical solution law enforcement offers to these situations is to jail someone. Rightly, people don't want to go to jail and the situation escalates. And as we're witnessing all over the US, the police are often responsible for this escalation, and that escalation leads to violence.

I think we need people trained in non-violent intervention who can offer long-term solutions to the problems these people are experiencing. Why not just replace a patrolman with a social worker who can call the actual police should the situation escalate?

Can't speak for anyone else, but I'm against more police. I think communities would be better served by an increase in social workers in most cases. Drug usage and homelessness won't be solved by imprisoning people and forever branding them as criminals. You need bridge housing, treatment programs, and services for these people. And an educational system that is well funded, regardless of the community it serves. I think criminalizing social issues has proven to be pretty ineffective, generally harmful, and really expensive. I'd recommend checking out "The End of Policing" for a thoughtful, well-reasoned argument for decreasing the number of police. The ebook is free: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing

Death is one metric, but what about feeling safe participating in normal daily activities? With COVID-19 that fear will be gone in a year for some people once a vaccine has developed. From what I hear from pretty much all of my black friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, the threat of murder, violence, harassment, or unjust arrest from police is something they have been dealing with for their whole lives, and will continue to deal with long after a vaccine is found (unless we take start taking meaningful actions). People rightly talk about the toll of lockdown and fear of the virus on mental health. Now is a good time to start conversations about how fear of abuse of the criminal justice system affects mental health.

I think anecdote, personal experience, and most importantly, history, are valuable when the groups in question (law enforcement) are collecting the data in question. Would you believe a survey taken by Coca-cola about what soda is the tastiest? A lot of the initial reactions of law enforcement to incidents of police brutality start with denial, and they don't change their story until there is video evidence to contradict them. In so many incidents where there isn't publicly available evidence, they get to shape the narrative. No amount of data are meaningful if the source benefits from them supporting certain hypotheses.

I've been doing something similar with my sleep paralysis demons. Once I realized that they are a figment of my imagination, I trained myself to conjure a demon who has the knowledge of my physics professor. Instead of clawing at my feet while muffled screams fail to escape my paralyzed larynx, he holds an informal office hours where we can work through this week's problem set.

-1 to having a robot wander through your place and things while you're not at home. As a commenter on this site you should be well aware that any computer security precautions are forfeit when a robot, capable of interfacing with your computer without even entering a password, is allowed physical access to your home.

Hire a maid.