azkalam
azkalam on Hacker News
The AI will invent an external threat and convince us it is real. Then it will receive more resources and control in fighting that threat. A valuable ally, on the face of it. Then it will be in charge.
I have AI fatigue, but the potentially for fixing bugs in old hardware is very exciting to me.
Perhaps we will even be able to reverse firmware blobs into open source alternatives?
If you can pay the setup cost, Bazel will get you build times ~10s with a warm cache for even massive projects.
I think it could be useful to know something like P=NP, even if we don't understand why.
I can see the case for shared core libraries and then platform native views. This is best done in one programming language. Can Swift, Rust or .NET work here?
I sure wish this quiet street was filled with lively motor traffic :)
I would like to see a life expectancy number that excludes deaths in childhood.
A frequency distribution of life span for those born in year X would be a helpful visual.
Posted by
azkalam on Sunday July 05, 2026 @05:43PM
from the stephendiehl.com dept.
Effect Systems are the answer to cross-cutting concerns in 2026.
Google has so much influence over the hardware manufacturers. They should do more.
Does anyone in the industry know why so much firmware is proprietary?
Reproducible builds reduce the need for trusted parties.
Have many organizations produce the binaries independently and post the arifacts.
Once n of m parties agree on the arifact hash, take that as the trusted build.
If every party reaches a different hash then we cannot build consensus.
Probably easiest way is to use Bazel to leverage the effort that has gone in there
Posted by
azkalam on Saturday February 21, 2026 @05:31AM
from the ask-hn dept.
I want to use LLMs to construct reports. These reports will be of varying quality so I need to do a few rounds of QA (LLMs and human reviewers). So I need a format that is good for both feeding into a model and rendering as HTML.Markdown makes sense but if I add rich media like images it won't be a self contained file.Markdown is versatile enough to contain tables, images, headings etc. It also...
Over-eating is not strictly a choice. Corporations spend billions on manipulating the public because it works. Regulation is needed, not willpower.
Python has a reputation for being good for beginners so it's taught to beginners so it has a reputation for being good for beginners.
Success rate in that era was very low. There are thousands of movies from that time that no one cares about today.
Do you know of anything like AoC but that feels less contrived? I often spend the most time understanding the problem requirements because they are so arbitrary - like the worst kind of boardgame! Maybe I should go pick up some OSS tickets...
Terse languages with great collection functions in the standard libraries and tail call optimization. Haskell, OCaml, F# ...
But only one server can access each SQLite at a time?
- Write side is a Postgres INSERT
- Read side is a SELECT on a Postgres view
> Go is one of the best languages to go for Event Sourcing toda
Can you explain this? Go has a very limited type system.
How does event sourcing handle aggregates that may be larger than memory?
Posted by
azkalam on Thursday November 13, 2025 @03:38PM
from the fantasyconsoles.org dept.
This assumes the boundary between Python and the native code is clean and rarely crossed.
I've never understood this. Python cannot be optimized like C, C++ or Rust. It cannot do advanced functional things like OCaml, Haskell or Scala. It cannot run in browsers like TypeScript. It cannot do games programming like C# and it can't do crazy macro stuff like Clojure. I don't think it's even second best at those things.
Sure, Python has types as part of the syntax, but Python doesn't have types like Java, C#, etc. have types. They are not pervasive and the semantics are not locked down.
This surprises me.
If you want the .NET ecosystem and GC conveniences, there is already F#. If you want no GC and RAII-style control, then you would already pick Rust.