niho

Computer Science is neither a science nor about computers. Computer Science has more in common with Magic.

Many in this community already know the value of framing — thanks to thinkers like Paul Graham, or through direct startup experience. This essay builds on that idea, but pushes it further.

It asks: What if framing isn’t just the first step of building, but a kind of building in itself? What if ideas — when clarified — are a form of infrastructure?

I’ve spent years working at the intersection of engineering, strategy, and design. I’m now formalizing that practice under a new project called The Philosopher-Maker, where I write and consult around the idea that strategic clarity is a creative act, not just a prelude to one.

This first essay is an attempt to articulate that position — especially in a time when AI is reshaping what it means to execute, and when thinking well is arguably becoming the last real moat.

It’s not a manifesto. It’s a serious, long-form essay for people who care about the structure of ideas, not just the speed of shipping. If that sounds like you, I’d love your thoughts.

SEEKING WORK | REMOTE

I’m looking for freelance work doing functional programming. I have long and deep experience with Elm, Erlang and Swift. Can also do C, Ruby and Haskell.

I’m located in Stockholm, Sweden and have worked in many different industries ranging from music, fintech, healthtech, logistics, edtech, etc. Prefer remote work. Very flexible with types and size of projects, as well as pricing.

[email protected]

Yeah. Lol. So I’m going to be talking my code? Will be super popular in the office.

“Hey Siri! Put that statement in an if-clause. …no, not that one. The other one. Argh!!!”

throws the $3499 vision across the room

The thing that amazed me the most with the presentation was that they never showed typing on a virtual keyboard. It seems like you need an actual physical keyboard to do any typing.

The keyboard was famously considered a make it or break it feature internally at Apple when developing the original iPhone. It is very telling that they haven’t managed to solve this basic HCI problem for the Vision. Steve Jobs would never have released this. I’m sad to say it, but this is not a “Pro” device. It’s a Prototype device.

Apple Vision Prototype

(And I’m sorry, but the eyes are creepy —- uncanny valley)

No, you are misinterpreting what the law is saying. The purpose of the law is to protect from the collection of data points (height, age, political opinions, etc.) about individuals. Sure, a private message between two individuals can contain such information in a way that can be associated with a specific individual. If Facebook would scan all private messages for such data and store it in unencrypted form, then yes, they would violate GDPR. But a simple text message between two individuals does not by default violate GDPR.

A very important aspect of GDPR is a consideration for the purpose of the processing of data. If your company is providing an international messaging service in order to harvest sensitive personal data from private messages, then yes that is very much illegal. But if the purpose is simply to provide a messaging service and you are taking the appropriate steps to secure the data of your users, then it is not illegal.

Well, a private message sent via Messenger is not personal data (PII), so is not covered by GDPR. This is a very simple concept that critics of GDPR seems to ignore or get wrong over and over again.

It’s not about protecting all data. It’s about protecting personal data.

https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/

I tried to create a Twitter account for my new startup a couple of days ago. Wanted a business account to promote my app and get feedback from users. But it was simply impossible. The signup didn’t work. I gave up and went with Instagram instead. Much better experience. And I’ve already spent a big pot of money there on ads. Very happy with it.

Musk is such a looser.

SEEKING WORK | REMOTE/PART-TIME/FULL-TIME

Location: Sweden

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: no

Mobile and app development (Swift, ObjC, C/C++, iOS, watchOS, macOS, etc)

Design work. Typography. Interface design. Information architecture. Product design.

Web (html/css/js/node/rails/elm).

Backend. Erlang. Haskell. Kotlin. Java. Ruby. C. Typescript.

Have built almost everything over the years. From low level, high performance, scalable stuff, to user friendly and highly successful mobile apps and web apps. Part of founding team of a number of successful startups.

EXPERTISE Sportstech Fintech Insuretech Medtech Media/streaming Compilers Distributed systems

20+ years of experience. Fairly low rates for what you get (negotiable). Mostly looking for part time remote work.

https://github.com/niho https://niklasholmgren.com/

To further complicate the pancake taxonomy there is also the curiosity of “plättar”. Very small pancakes made in a special frying pan for more festive occasions. Not sure about their origin, but they are very common in Småland in the south of Sweden.

https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plättar#/media/Fil%3APlattla...

Improved error messages is great. But one area specifically that is in desperate need of some love is the type errors from Dialyzer. They are rarely helpful to identify what is actually wrong in the code. Typically the error message will point to something several layers up or down in the call stack and prints out a huge blob of unreadable and unhelpful type signatures. Most of the time the best you can do is to simply compile and run the system to figure out what is wrong with the types. The obscurity of the type errors remind me of C++ template errors.

Art schools that teach you visual art and craft is a thing. So I don’t see why it would be impossible to teach the art of building software. We just need to change our methods.

> I often think about why/how medieval artists couldn't quite grasp how to depict depth in their paintings (as a lateral thinking technique).

The explanation for that is generally agreed on to have more to do with the aesthetics of early Christianity influencing Medieval practices, more than changes to human perception (source: I have a masters degree in Art History).

Ada was the first language I learned at university back in 2003 (I had previously taught myself C/C++, Assembler and VB). It had a huge impact on me and influenced my entire career and how I approach software engineering. These days languages like Erlang and Haskell are carrying on some of the ideas (modularity, type safety, concurrency, etc.) in more modern incarnations. But there is still something special about Ada.

Using curly braces or parentheses to signify blocks of code is the trivial and natural way to implement a parser for a programming language. Doing anything else requires a conscious design decision and some effort and extra complexity. The C philosophy is to avoid complexity in the implementation in favor of a slightly more verbose language. The Haskell (ML) philosophy is the exact opposite. These design decisions have been cargo culted by later languages.

Parsing a language like Haskell that does not use any parentheses and curly braces is slightly harder than a typical C like language (or Lisp for that matter). Haskell syntax is indentation sensitive, which require the parser to keep track of the indentation when parsing.

You make a very dubious moral argument when you imply that preventing one death can justify another death. That assumption is not at all obvious.

If taken to be true, it can potentially be used to justify any random murder.

Actually... There is a great historical example of just that. It’s called the Catholic Church.

Journal does not imply peer reviewed. The word originates from Latin and simply means "daily". I.e. a periodical publication. An academic journal can be peer reviewed but that's not always the case.