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bweitzmanon Ink: React for interactive command-line apps

Pretty neat. I adapted the state management of hooks to Haskell a few years ago. Could be used for similar purposes, but there's no support for templating or styling yet: https://github.com/benweitzman/hooks

bweitzmanon Rational Trigonometry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlnBo3APRlU

The gist of the argument is that addition + other operations on non-computable numbers (which the real numbers contain) require infinite algorithms or something similar (unlike addition on computable irrational numbers which may require infinite work, but the algorithms are finite). You can therefore get situations where, say, the tenths digit in a sum of non-computable numbers is not defined because of potentially infinite carries, and there's no way to determine if the sequence of carries terminates or not. He discusses the problem in the context of different representations of real numbers, including infinite decimals, cauchy sequences, and dedekind cuts etc. This is just the gist of it.

bweitzmanon New Hampshire set to pilot voting machines that use software everyone can see

What if the voter doesn't deposit the receipt?

bweitzmanon Beanstalk cryptocurrency loses $182M of reserves in flash ‘attack’

Applying the incompleteness theorem wouldn't say that every piece of complex code has unpredictable outcomes, but that there exists some pieces of code that have unpredictable outcome.

Seems like in this case the outcomes were entirely predicted by the "attacker".

bweitzmanon Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

How do you tell if something you're trying to determine as intelligent or not has formed a model?

bweitzmanon Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to displace traditional meat

The meat industry is also cost effective due to massive government subsidies, at least in the US. Would these subsidies be available to lab grown meat operations?

bweitzmanon The stack monoid revisited

What does xoring mean for combining two boards that have pieces in the same position? Is there a use for such an operation?

bweitzmanon Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and plant products? There are literally hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people that have been eating vegetarian diets for their entire lives, and these types of diets have been popular for millennia.

bweitzmanon Reflections on Using Haskell for My Startup

Strict by default is becoming increasingly popular in production. It makes programs behave a lot more predictably for many common use cases. Extensions are enabled on a module by module basis so if you turn on strictness by default, you can still opt in to laziness if you have certain data structures/algorithms that rely on it.

bweitzmanon Reflections on Using Haskell for My Startup

I've used Haskell + Servant help reduce backwards compatibility issues with an iOS app depending on the API. We had Servant automatically generate OpenAPI specs from the API, and then diff them against the version in prod during CI testing.

Certainly possible with other languages + frameworks, but I felt really confident relying on it to catch issues due to the strong type guarantees.

bweitzmanon Aquafaba

I made a vegan pavlova just the other week. Took chickpea juice straight out of a regular can of chickpeas and whipped it up with sugar. No adjustment necessary.

bweitzmanon 2021 will demand new kinds of video conferencing

Thanks for the bug report!

bweitzmanon 2021 will demand new kinds of video conferencing

I've been working on https://align.link/ to help make it easier for people to extend their online meetings with custom apps

bweitzmanon 20 Years Later

The logic is not "if people buy it, it must be good", but more "if people buy it, there must not be something else that they can buy that gets them what they want for less".

bweitzmanon Coolest custom mechanical keyboards

I like using the layering with my Ergodox keyboard because it helps keep special characters I frequently use (parens, braces, brackets, etc) right under my fingers in a relaxes position. It alleviated a lot of finger strain I was feeling reaching for the keys (and reaching for shift especially) so frequently.

Though I do have a standard layout with the number/symbols row available as well.

bweitzmanon Show HN: Writing SQL expressions using Java syntax

`select.project(sum(orderTable.amount) / sum(orderTable.quantity) * 100)`

How does this work? I thought Java didn't have operator overloading. Are expressions represented as numbers somehow??

bweitzmanon Show HN: Use Figma to ship simple static websites

This looks really nice and convenient! Nicely done.

Is there any way to add custom logic to the site once it needs it?

bweitzmanon “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

I've paid candidates and been paid by potential employers to complete take homes. I've also given candidates the opportunity to substitute a piece of open source code in place.

This is admittedly still biased towards people who have available time, paid or unpaid, but I think it's a step in the right direction.

bweitzmanon South Africa's lottery probed as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 drawn

FYI 0.129 = 1 / 7.75. I think you and person you're responding to are doing the same calculations, but inverted.

bweitzmanon Apache OpenMeetings – Video chat, messaging, white board, doc editing and more

We don't check all of your boxes right now, but we've been working on an API + app store for video chat apps. https://align.link/

bweitzmanon Apache OpenMeetings – Video chat, messaging, white board, doc editing and more

We've been working on something to help out with this: https://align.link/

bweitzmanon Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime

The concept of a constant distance orbit doesn't make much sense in 1D. A horizontal line in this model wouldn't indicate an orbit, but rather a completely stationary object. It would then make sense for the world line to curved because it must be accelerating in order to resist the attraction of the body it's near.

By definition, the world line of a stable orbit would be a line in curved spacetime.

bweitzmanon Ask HN: What are the pros / cons of using monorepos?

If you don't publish packages anywhere, wouldn't that mean that if you update some library with a breaking change, you have to update all call sites?

Maybe the fix for that is to never make breaking changes, but that has drawbacks as well...

bweitzmanon Calla – spatial video conferencing software based on Jitsi Meet

We've a few spatial chat apps pop up in the past few months. It's part of the reason we set out to build https://align.link/, an extensible video chat platform.

Products like these (and others like https://www.macro.io/) could exist as meeting apps, allowing people to to tailor rooms specific scenarios like one on ones, retrospectives, happy hours, etc.

bweitzmanon A Pipeline Made of Airbags

I agree, things that change frequently need more attention to make sure you're not spending more time than you need to make changes.

Acknowledging that I'm changing the goalposts a bit, I would consider a lack of understanding about the lifecycle of an application that causes development delays an abstract form of "noticing when it fails"

bweitzmanon A Pipeline Made of Airbags

On the flip side, why bother spending time optimizing a process if nobody notices when it fails? Aren't there more important problems to be solving in at scenario?

bweitzmanon Haskell RecordDotSyntax language extension proposal (Accepted)

Wow this is great! Fixing Haskell's arcane record system would be a huge step towards more mainstream adoption. It was certainly my largest pain point with the language over years of use in production.

bweitzmanon Align: An extensible video chat platform that lets you build custom meeting apps

The SDK gives developers a functional interface to responding to user interactions in the different touchpoints of a meeting app. These include things like a toolbar button, a sidebar view, and a video overlay. When responding to these interactions, the SDK assists apps to perform a few key side effects, things like mutating a shared state or sending an event to another client. The SDK handles all of the connections and consistency there so developers can focus on the unique value their apps can add.

We're currently working on a way to access raw audio + video, but it will likely not be available in the initial release of the SDK.

Some of the apps that are available right now include

* an agenda to keep your meetings organized

* a handraise app with a built in queue

* an airhorn for blasting people who talk too long

* a minesweeper game you can play while you wait for meetings to start

* A shared youtube watching experience that anybody can pause or fastforward.

bweitzmanon Which monads Haskell developers use: An exploratory study

Not sure what the status of the project is, but work on https://github.com/hasura/eff is supposed to improve the performance even more!

bweitzmanon Tracking users via CSS

Most ad blockers also block the tracking, not just the displaying of ads, so the benefit here would likely be marginal.

That said, I think minimally-tracked (i.e based on what the website you're using knows about you) server side ads would be a great step forward for both user privacy + ethical content consumption, I just don't see advertisers jumping at the opportunity.