YouAreWRONGtoo
YouAreWRONGtoo on Hacker News
links2 is still a work horse in 2025 for occasional debugging.
Posted by
YouAreWRONGtoo on Saturday December 13, 2025 @04:16AM
from the self-post dept.
If writing a multi-line replacement script for removing a top-level nested if-endif in a CMakeLists.txt file is too difficult for Gemini with Thinking 3 Pro even after 10 new prompts with the full input file available, then why are you talking about these systems "taking over jobs"?
You can solve the versioning problem on your GitHub page by using Nix.
Delimited continuations as a programming construct were somewhat of interest when I learned about them, but not even my university discussed them.
I don't think I ever had a colleague that even ever heard of the concept, let alone applied it. Of the "smart people", they typically only have heard of plain continuations, if you are lucky.
The debugger in Racket was useful when I used it years ago.
Unfortunately, it's kind of difficult to beat an entire planet cranking out libraries in other languages as many interesting programs are written for an ecosystem; if 90% of your project is building FFIs to make something work, perhaps you can better just choose the language of fools dun jour.
I don't think Scheme is the most academic language, today. Such honor would go to a language supporting a computable version of homotopy types, which I would guess only 1000 people in the world would be capable of using assuming production grade implementations (of which none exist).
If you can't post a salary, you shouldn't post a job opening.
(Not that you can afford me.)
Also, your company is breaking the law by false advertising. It suggests your current leadership is fucking stupid. Why do you work for a criminal enterprise?
How hard can it be to specify that pardons can be given by a committee of 25 randomly selected individuals with an Ivy league education when at least 2/3 is in favor with no existing financial ties and no information regarding the identity of whoever's fate is at stake?
Right, not hard at all, but apparently whoever wrote the Constitution was a fucking moron.
That's still not professional, but then again 99.9% of companies aren't.
Regarding 2., I am not stupid; I might be ignorant in some fields, but do you see me arguing against a world expert in some field I know nothing about?
Stupid people ruin everything.
What makes you think I need ChatGPT, since I just wondered whether ChatGPT was as stupid, since obviously I do know why that would be useful?
By definition, it the client Alice gives contractor Mallory access to user account alice, that's worse than giving them an account called mallory.
Accounts are basically free. Not having accounts; that's expensive.
The only goal of such ridiculous standards is to act as a form of vendor lock-in for vendors implementing those standards; the vendors get to say to governments that it is a standard and the sellers of the standards also get some money.
Any system designed picking such standards is basically betraying their client.
I think, if you want to annoy these people maximally, you should write an annotated version of the standard in a mathematical formal language.
I read the table constraints, which try to do something simple, but it's written in the most convoluted way possible.
I think I considered ASN.1 for a system once, but rejected it because of more modern technically superior system.
If the parser for something like ASN.1 doesn't fit in 80 lines of Haskell, perhaps you just shouldn't use it.
I don't know who these assholes are that say "Sure, let's make things slow and buggy, since we all hail Satan after all".
This doesn't make sense.
You said you were already using someone else's environment.
You can't later say that you don't.
Whether or not shell access makes sense depends on what you are doing, but a well written application server running in a cloud environment doesn't need any remote shell account.
It's just that approximately zero typical monolithic web applications meet that level of quality and given that 90% of "developers" are clueless, often they can convince management that being stupid is OK.
Either it wasn't a design goal or they are stupid. Why don't you tell us?
The right way this would work is via a systemd service and then it should be instant.
That just means you lack imagination, because ChatGPT can tell you in 10 seconds.
Now, add inotify and a systemd user service and you would be getting somewhere. Also packaged versions of that exist already.
So, you created a square wheel, instead of a NASA wheel.
Someone else's environment? That should never happen. You should get your own user account and that's it.
Instead of trash, reimplementing rm (to only really delete after some time or depending on resource usage or to shred of you are paranoid if the goal is to really delete something) or using zfs makes much more sense.
Is anyone sueing Reddit for banning accounts and not allowing user comments to be changed?
Please start a class action suit and ping me when it gets somewhere.
I can't help it that humanity is so stupid.
All it means is that the cloud doesn't work like a power socket, which was the whole point of it.
Things like Lambda do fit in this model, but they are too inefficient to model every workload.
Amazon lacks vision.
It's sometimes not a hit, because CPUs have caches and memory bandwidth is the limiting factor.
I did understand; it's just that I am way ahead of you.
Your point is that users are too stupid/lazy to comprehend specifications. That is, they won't bother to read that the specification of their formally verified secure version of Google Maps really just copies their credit card data to a random server.
I just don't agree.
I don't get how you can be a trillion dollar company and still suck this much.
While I don't know your specific case, I have seen it happen often enough that there are only two possibilities left:
1. they are idiots
2. they do it on purpose and they think you are an idiot
For me, it just means that the moment you integrate with any API, you are basically their bitch (unless you implement one from every competitor in the market, at which point you can just as well do it yourself).
Formal verification would solve everything. It's just that whoever is using the software actually needs to understand the specification, but when there is some trusted base of I/O primitives (like "read a file"), such things become trivial to check; even Haskell has such things in a limited fashion via SafeHaskell and to an even lesser extent via its IO monad.
The specification for a text editor would be much simpler than an implementation. For example, efficiently searching for a substring is non-trivial, but a specification is easy. So, all that I would be interested in, is a proof that "eval(optimized_substring_search needle haystack) = eval(easy_substring needle haystack)", for example. Obviously, there are many thousands of such theorems that would have to be done to clone Emacs, but at least a new release wouldn't contain bugs anymore (wrongly specifying something would happen, but it's much easier to write a specification of desired behavior than to find the exact bug in some mess from someone else, because it conflates implementation and specification in the first place).
More like 2-3 times per year and this is not counting smaller outages or simply APIs that don't do what they document.
When it allows installing any Linux with working drivers, I will consider it. Otherwise, you can go back to your garage and I will continue to make fun of people using Macs.
Emacs itself is probably secure and you can easily audit every extension, but if you update every extension blindly via a nicely composable emacs Nix configuration, you would indeed have a problem.
I guess one could automate finding obvious exploits via LLMs and if the LLM finds something abort the update.
The right solution is to use Coq and just formally verify everything in your organization, which incidentally means throwing away 99.999% of software ever written.
Millions of compilers have been written and those languages have simple grammars. As such, those are trivial problems.