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faldor20

25 karma · joined July 26, 2025

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faldor20··on Solid 2.0 RC: The Big <Reveal>
As much as the content and tech behind it is really cool, and I appreciate Ryan's ideas it does seem like a shame to culminate so much work with a very "sloppy" finish
faldor20··on Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?
It certainly does embed the original data, but that's a fair point. I made this in about 10 minutes for me and just thought others on this niche hackernews thread (who would have seen the original) might benefit.

I updated it to reference the original.

faldor20··on Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?
I enjoyed this but wanted to browse all the options. I made a site that has all the options for browsing and you can even play the game again selecting your favorite from all the options.

https://odyssey.elidowling.com/

faldor20··on Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?
I did this twice and got completely different results. Seems very dependent on which passages you happen to see.

I found some hard because they don't seem to even conform to the description given. Particularly many of the lotus eater passages leave out the information the description stays they should be portraying.

faldor20··on GC and Exceptions in Wasmtime
It seems like a bit of a shame that wasm got support for exceptions but doesn't support effects which are a generalisation of the same concept. https://wasmfx.dev/

I'm guessing this may be because exceptions exclusively require stack unwinding where as effects require full stack switching.

Seems like there is still progress on that though which gives hope https://github.com/WebAssembly/stack-switching/blob/main/pro...

faldor20··on I fed the people building the metaverse
I found this a really excellent read. Interesting to see a perspective on the industry that is normally silent.
faldor20··on Show HN: VoiceDraw – Talk system design out loud, the diagrams draw themselves
It's a great idea and something I would absolutely use. However I can't get it to draw anything at all. I just get one single box or some messy rubbish
faldor20··on Talking to strangers at the gym
This is such a wonderful template for people who struggle with interacting with strangers.

A combination of growing up in a very isolated place, and being introverted resulted in me struggling to talk to strangers for my whole life.

I think the real takeaway here, for socially anxious folks, is that like every other skill, it sucks to start but if you do the reps you get better! In the last few years IVE gotten miles better at talking to strangers, mostly thanks to travelling and just forcing myslef to practice.

The thing I try to remember is: "Almost everyone is actually just like me. If a nice stranger asked me some genuine questions I'd love to chat".

The challenge for me was just not knowing what to ask.

Some of my favorite questions:

During transit/hostels: "Where were you going?", and then "why did you go there?", "what are your plans while you're here", "what was your favourite thing you did?", "Where is your home?", ask for recommendations of things to do in their town, country, the place they just visited.

These have let me meet locals, be given tours of the city, have great restaurant recommendations and heaps of great conversations.

At bars/ in line for the toilet etc: I basically always just default to "Do you live here, or are you travelling?" You can then use the questions above.

People love if they've been to your country or a place you've been and you can ask them specific stuff about their trip. Good chance nobody they know ever asked any decent questions because they hadn't also been to that place.

Once you get someone talking it's a whole other skill to deepen the relationship, but I'm still working on that one

faldor20··on Pebble Round 2
I'm a staunch believer that watches should be small enough to never annoy, always show the time, and never have to be charged but I think this finally does all those things well enough that it's a legitimate option.

What is that warranty though? 30 days is pretty rough for a new and untested product. It's definitely enough to make me hold off for a year just in case.

faldor20··on Unison 1.0
I would love to see some benchmarks of unison somewhere on their website. I find knowing there performance characteristics helps a lot with understanding the use cases for a new language.

Even just a really rough "here our requests per second compared to Django, express.js and asp.net" Would be great to get a rough read on where it sits among other choices for web stuff.

More generally, I do hope this goes well for unison, the ideas being explored are certainly fascinating.

I just hope it one day gets a runtime/target that's more applicable to non web stuff. I find it much easier to justify using a weird language for a little CLI tool then for a large web project.

faldor20··on Marko – A declarative, HTML‑based language
I think it's worth noting Marko's proven nature.

In years of using eBay, have never had an issue with it. Sad that that's a high praise these days, but it is. eBay is fast, it works damn well, and always has.

As a counter point, React's poster children, in messenger, Facebook and Instagram. Have all been plagued with UI bugs for the entire time I've used them.

Obviously those aren't wholly comparable, but I do think it's worth taking note of the actual outcomes we have when tools are used at real scale.

faldor20··on OCaml Programming: Correct and Efficient and Beautiful
As someone who has lightly used Haskell and quite heavily used ocaml:

- Pragmatism: The ocaml community has a stronger focus on practical real projects. This is shown by the kind of packages available on the ecosystem and the way those packages are presented. (A number of Haskell packages I've tried to use often seen to be primarily intellectual pursuit with little documentation on actually using them).

- Simplicity: Haskell does have some amazing features, but it has so many different ways to do things, so many compiler flags, code can look vastly different from one codebase to another. It's kind of the c++ of FP. Ocaml is definitely more cohesive in its approach.

Tooling: last I used Haskell the whole ecosystem was pretty rough, with two package managers and a lot of complexity in just setting up a project. Ocaml is not at the level of rust or other modern languages, but is definitely a stop above I'd say.