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mighmi

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I work as a cloud engineer using Go. I am learning Racket to really explore computer science.

Some decades ago, I lurked on oldschool anarchist and blackhat websites, was a script kiddie etc. but long since forgot that world. I'm trying to rediscover it and really appreciate the freedom of the web, the sublime elegance of pre-C/Linux paradigms (SmallTalk, Ada, Lisp, Forth, J/K) and soar the verdant climbs of true power.

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It's a real cool idea to compile everything down to lambda calculus and then you solve all semantics issues. (If something fits) you can convert 1:1, use general libraries in one language in others without loss etc. Ah, what a beautiful world it could be!

The etymology is:

A deliberate misspelling of lead, originally used in instructions given to printers to indicate which paragraphs constitute the lede, intended to avoid confusion with the word lead which may actually appear in the text of an article. Compare dek (“subhead”) (modified from deck) and hed (“headline”) (from head).

Further:

In 1990, the American author and journalist William Safire (1929–2009) was still able to say: “You will not find this spelling in dictionaries; it is still an insiders' variant, steadily growing in frequency of use. […] Will lede break out of its insider status and find its way into general use? […] To suggest this is becoming standard would be misledeing […] But it has earned its place as a variant spelling, soon to overtake the original spelling for the beginning of a news article."

I guess the ussr originally were vibrant and full of innovation but especially the 30s purges killed it off.

Thank you! Do you have visibility into the certifications or business structure here? Like how does a company enter this space with random subpar software? Do the certifications automatically preclude open source software at the moment?

The introduction is really well done. It's not all bells and whistles like roc, but goes through everything cleanly and succinctly.

Things I found interesting

- indent with 8 space tabs

- ! error assertion operator and error matching

- ownership model of memory management

- { } denote compound expressions and yield instead of using "return" - for for all loops, like go

- hosted on source hut

- even a nice intro to how the standard library works

- already using rfcs to some extent (whereas roc e.g. uses the benevolent dictator model at the moment)

- page on how to evangelize: https://harelang.org/evangelism/

I really like it and intend to at least play with it.

Edit: It seems like Go with memory management and some extra fancier features, which is nice.

- toolchain one person can understand (I do feel go succeeds here too)

- dedicated to Unix API, but inspired by Go's approach

- comprehensible QBE compiler (Go also has a more minimal than optimized compiler)

The Thompson attack's where code is able to secretly modify/exploit the compiler to propagate through future compiled programs or itself when compiled. Preventing the execution of foreign code thus reduces the attack surface even further.

Both products, both vendors, are absolute garbage.

Could you concretely explain how? I've never worked in this field and have just seen the typical rhetoric, which makes sense to me (e.g. when considering Ada's safety's higher than rust).

Don't be confused. He just needs a better copywriter.

Realize that in aerospace etc. this is possible where 9-12 9s of reliability are the common minimum accepted. Communicating this to a field which strives towards 5 9s and is used to charlatans is difficult, and he isn't succeeding. His chosen expressions sound bombastic and conversation ("can't be hacked") compared to the technical equivalents, but developers and engineers outside of this subfield wouldn't fully understand them.

I can make any program run much faster, often 4x

does sound baffling but when backed up by his laurels, we can charitably imagine what he really means - and it's not so difficult either. From the bottom of the barrel, using slightly better algos in python to rewriting it in rust, we can all do this. His company presumably goes further with Ada, formal methods and exotic tooling to get extra performance out of microcontrolers.

Can someone help me understand what Sam's actual value is? He doesn't seem to be a particularly important practitioner/researcher re: AI and is "just" a CEO/salesman-evangelist to get funding, which Microsoft doesn't need?

Is he particularly apt at leading/managing research teams? OpenAI's slow productization doesn't imply he's a product/idea guy a la Jobs.