HN user

phillmv

5,425 karma

Perfect and upright, eschews evil.

phillmv [at] okayfail.com https://hachyderm.io/@phillmv

formerly appcanary (S15)

Posts9
Comments930
View on HN

i feel like ppl have magical beliefs about type systems. just because it's _probably_ (did it use unsafe?) memory-safe doesn't mean it does what you want it to do

javascript is like… unusually messy and weird, so maybe that colours most people's perspective. you don't have to worry about type coercion and weird kinds of equality and so on in python and ruby to anywhere near the same extent.

Type systems restrict which programs can be expressed and increasing expressiveness often requires increasing type-system complexity (which, speaking from experience, both humans and agents will struggle with). Plus they are not the only mechanism to assert correctness (they only validate a subset of your program correctness and do not replace tests)

This articulates a lot of my own thinking wrt type systems, speaking as a downstream user without a lot of exposure to prog language theory, and I wish this debate were more often framed in these terms.

Another reply to this comment hinted that it might be more about giving LLMs feedback loops and that to me also seems like a more likely mechanism.

I'm not an elixir user but I've watched it from a distance over the years – thank you for your efforts and your experimentation.

Magnifica Humanitas 2 months ago

not going to debate bad faith right wing cause celebres arguing the inverse.

i see it with my own two eyes when i have to yell at recruiters to stop bringing me all-male candidate slates, i see it from studies in social sciences, and i know it from having seen the progression over my own career and listening to my female colleagues. at the end of the day a lot of men don't see women and minorities as people with full agency.

Magnifica Humanitas 2 months ago

there's loads of evidence, y'all just don't like engaging with it cos you don't like the answer because fixing it is work and fundamentally women and minorities are not seen as people with full agency.

i'm old enough to remember when software engineering conferences were _2%_ female. it's exhausting to be having this same conversation decades later.

Magnifica Humanitas 2 months ago

The fact that a company does not have representation that is exactly equitable with the general population

i didn't say exactly equitable, i said 80%. it's not possible to have 80% white guys and not be discriminatory.

you're making a bad faith apples to oranges comparison, to say nothing of the merit of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. your viewpoint and disinterest is very clear, i don't know why you even bother arguing about it.

Magnifica Humanitas 2 months ago

the discrimination already happened! it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating. it's curious that the status quo isn't nearly as concerning.

Magnifica Humanitas 2 months ago

i like how when a company obviously discriminates against women and minorities by hiring almost entirely white guys that's fine that's to be expected but if you try to fix that discrimination it's an evil conspiracy

Are Go backend building custom auth, admin, DB ORM/migrations/auto migrations, templates, email, dev server etc for each project?

lmao, basically, yes. except when you bring this up ppl think it's not a big deal / a means for self-expression. having to sort through which libraries you prefer to glue together is a kind of freedom, if you squint hard enough.

does not mean you have to be a post-marxist anarchist

if you oppose a far-right project, what are they going to call you? lol. here is your membership card for the cultural marxist party, welcome aboard comrade!

i just think it's folly for people to complain that "not destroying the environment" is a partisan issue in 2026. being a nice person is a partisan issue in 2026.

You can advocate for sustainability … while being strongly capitalist just fine. […] excluding a large intersection of people otherwise interested in the non-political parts

the far-right is literally trying to make it illegal for companies to say they're taking environmental concerns seriously (i.e. ESG bans in tx, fl, etc). in 2026, sustainability is not apolitical.

(it's _never_ been apolitical but i will spare you that lecture.)

it helps that there's a regulatory agency that verifies the cleanup happened! if the 4th of july might get canceled the following year ppl might be more aggressive around cleaning up.

i have wanted to be able to compile ruby to a binary for some time – and have dreamed of poking at this problem with claude – so this is pretty cool.

if you can get a Rack compatible web server to build… i'd waste some serious time playing with this.

giving these things control over your actual computer is a nightmare waiting to happen – i think its irresponsible to encourage it. there ought to be a good real sandbox sitting between this thing and your data.

i can think of some tasks (classification, structured info extraction) that i _imagine_ even small meh models could do quite well at

on data i would never ever want to upload to any vendor if i can avoid it

Hi, thanks!

My unsolicited advice is: whether they realize it or not, _everyone transitions_ ;) http://okayfail.com/garden/everyone-transitions.html

I came out socially for most of a year before I committed to hormones, and it took me another year and a half to commit to removing my facial hair. At some point it really is a leap of faith. But you can do a lot of exploring and trying things out until you feel comfortable – or decide it's not really what you want.

Either way, good luck!

If it's any comfort, I'm also an immigrant who was raised in a single parent household. When we last (it's a long story) moved to Canada, I had to share a bed with my dad for a while.

We were never actually poor, poor, at risk. I never skipped meals, or lacked for clothing, though certainly that was a living memory my grandparents had. It was never in question that I would attend university.

Privilege is intersectional blah blah, there are layers to things. I'm not of the dominant Anglo culture, I have an "ethnic" last name, I don't have the same connections people who grew up upper-middle class do. But people certainly see me as white, I'm smart, and I built my career as a bearded guy.

Living as a bearded white guy is just a lot easier, it presents a lot less friction, than being gender non-conforming. That's it, really.

in my experience, the main pain point people experience is:

a) they don't like Ruby for whatever reason, b) they probably only deal in backend or only deal in frontend, and so don't understand the value of the bundled dev experience rails delivers, and therefore c) because of a + b they find the moderate learning curve to be extra painful, so they lash out.

at the end of the day it's all just code. why would it be harder to integrate a service in Rails than in Go? of course it isn't.

Hello,

1. Package managers are very hard! The same problems wrt dependency resolution pop up again and again. Whatever you do, I recommend uhm, copying whatever Yehuda et al did for Ruby, Rust, Yarn, i.e. bundler/cargo/yarn

There's lots of prior art out there, and a few days of reading can save you months of terrible effort! Here's one example but there's loads more out there https://yehudakatz.com/2016/10/11/im-excited-to-work-on-yarn...

2. Namely, I don't see any lock files! I didn't look very hard. But get yourself some lockfiles. I also can't stress this enough.

3. Packaging signing really needs to be baked in from the get go, re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19733085).

Good luck!

different from _desktops_, but pointedly not browsers. from a HCI standpoint it's actually quite similar to browsers: sandboxed point and click