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hirple

32 karma · joined November 26, 2020

CA. ML, formal verification.

email: hirple@corgi.coffee

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hirple··on Can the language of proof assistants be used for general purpose programming?
I've been interested in this question myself - and recently wrote a basic web 'microframework' for Lean 4 [1].

I've loved being able to use Lean's macro system to write JSX-like HTML:

  def header :=  <header class_="header">
    <h1>todo</h1>
  ...
Ironically I've come up a bit short on how to use dependent types to do anything more advanced than matching handlers' to route types, which Servant [2] can do fantastically already.

I would love to be able to write types that describe, e.g., assumptions made about external resources, so that I can prove that "assuming my DB has such-and-such a latency, my page will always render in such-and-such a time" or something similar - but it's a bit beyond me at the moment.

[1] https://github.com/alex-wellbelove/LeanServer [2] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/servant

hirple··on UK expected to be only major economy to shrink in 2023 – IMF
As a rule I find that people who take the common, simplistic, tweet-length view of British rule (i.e. that it became rich by stealing from India, that it was the deliberate invoker of India's famines, that it was racist even by its times standards, etc), assume that anyone who disagrees isn't aware of basic history.

I've also noticed that there's always an (annoying) triumphal 'gotcha' when they link to some short-form essay mentioning basic facts, denied by nobody, of the famines and loss of relative share of GDP suffered by India etc.

Again, _everyone knows this_. It comes across as naive and arrogant to assume otherwise.

The effect British rule had in India (and everywhere) was extremely nuanced, and there is a huge amount of interesting history to be debated. After all, we're talking about a subcontinent over a 350 year time period.

The British, for instance, banned the practices of Sati (burning widows alive) and of infanticide, and explicitly allowed Indians to compete on equal terms with the British in examinations to enter the Indian Civil Service.

There's very little consensus amongst historians whether or not they were responsible for the famines India suffered at the time, or if they even made any net money from India whatsoever, given their constant fear of raising taxes.

I'm not necessarily trying to take a position either way, by the way, just begging people who are nodding along to some of these bumper-sticker anti-colonialism comments to read more deeply into what is an unimaginably huge subject.

hirple··on Paredit 25 released, after 8 years
Somewhat related - does anyone use meow + paredit? I can’t find a clearly recommended way to combine the two as I can with boon.
hirple··on The ‘liveaboards’ sailing away to a new life
For canal boating, absolutely. Maybe 20-30k for a cheaper boat. Can moor for free. Coal and fuel maybe £100 a month each, depending on how much you travel/if you have solar etc. You do need to black your hull every few years, but they’re generally sturdy and don’t need much more than that.

Yachting, I have no idea.

hirple··on Show HN: Two-way Jira sync in a collaborative spreadsheet and Gantt
I assume you've taken a look at org-jira?
hirple··on Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)
You should just be able to hit `$` in the magit buffer to watch the output.
hirple··on New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity
I agree with you - but the standards elsewhere seem to be so much lower even than here that I think it's (possibly) worthwhile having political discussions on HN.

Of course, I would love to know of a place that discusses things even more sensibly.

hirple··on What's Accenture? (2020)
Speaking as a consultant, these are terrible slides.
hirple··on Ask HN: Why aren't we building a database of formally verified software?
I guess Coq/Lean standard libraries fit this definition.
hirple··on Whole school board resigns in shame after forgetting their WebEx call was public
Not true, we certainly have those that start at 8. Consider a ~45m commute and time to get ready, and waking up at 6 something is not unheard of. (I personally had to wake up at 5:45 to catch a bus to a school over an hour away).
hirple··on McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
McKinsey are involved in almost every company in the Fortune 500, and have been for decades.

Of course they're going to be around for almost any given corporate failure.

hirple··on Thinking about software engineering
Really interested in the 'custom pandas typechecker'. Are there any more details anywhere, or has anyone else tried writing something similar?
hirple··on 'Megascale' structures that humans could one day build
Hence it is impossible for an object (with mass) to reach c.

Only progressively closer - 0.99c, 0.999c, 0.9999c etc.

hirple··on On Repl-Driven Programming
org-babel might work here. There are also repl keybindings in python mode in emacs.
hirple··on Python at Scale: Strict Modules
Not exactly this, but I've had some success using logic programming (minikanren) to statically assert certain facts about dataframes in spark. E.g. "if Row_a is filtered to Row_b, and Row_a is not null, Row_b is also not null".
hirple··on EmacsConf 2020: State of Retro Gaming in Emacs
I'd be happy to help here too, let me know. I can try to hack some elisp together tomorrow.

Looks like rope would be a decent place to start.

hirple··on EmacsConf 2020: State of Retro Gaming in Emacs
Curious what you prefer about PyCharm over emacs + LSP.

I'm a pretty poor PyCharm power-user, so wondering what I"m missing.