vouwfietsman

> do not acknowledge trade-offs when it comes to type systems

> gives link to "limited evidence of benefits"

I'm not looking for absence of evidence, as absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence. The original post claims tradeoffs, where are they? What are we trading? Even the most dynamic-language friendly results in your linked post either claim: "look at what we did without types!" or "even though there's no types in ruby, devs think about them all the time", which I mean, come on.

The only real criticism or tradeoffs on types mentioned is a person getting stuck on a single static type check compilation error, but I can easily counter that with "undefined is not a property of null".

From the link:

> if the strongest statement you can make for your position is that there's no empirical evidence against the position, that's not much of a position.

This is how hypotheses work. Maybe the problem is that we have a hard time proving anything about programming languages?

I think his point is: rather than "leaning into" it as in, masking through epsilons, he argues that tolerance is fundamental to the problem space, not a way to resolve edge cases.

Nice thanks, gotta love knowing a bit about a niche and then encountering someone who knows a great deal more. That's the beauty of HN.

Could you point to any literature/freely available resource that comes close to the SOTA for these kinds of operations? I would be greatly helped.

This explanation is relatively reductive when it comes to its criticism of computational geometry.

The thing with computational geometry is, that its usually someone else's geometry, i.e you have no control over its quality or intention. In other words, whether two points or planes or lines actually align or align within 1e-4 is no longer really mathematically interesting because its all about the intention of the user: does the user think these planes overlap?.

This is why most geometry kernels (see open cascade) sport things like "fuzzy boolean operations" [0]) that lean into epsilons. These epsilons mask the error-prone supply chain of these meshes that arrive in your program by allowing some tolerance.

Finally, the remark "There are many ways of solving this problem" is also overly reductive, everyone reading here should really understand that this is a topic that is being actively researched right now in 2026, hence there are currently no blessed solutions to this problem, otherwise this research would not be needed. Even more so, to some extent this problem is fundamentally unsolvable depending on what you mean by "solvable", because your input is inexact not all geometrical operations are topologically valid, hence an "exact" or let alone "correct along some dimension" result cannot be achieved for all (combination of) inputs.

[0] https://dev.opencascade.org/content/fuzzy-boolean-operations

> do not acknowledge trade-offs when it comes to type systems

Could you elaborate?

Transpilation and bloat are orthogonal. Javascript being bloated or not is also a relative: consider Python, which is much slower than js, and much more memory hungry.

To further argue your original point: chrome & electron are the only reason desktop is still around, both Microsoft and Apple tried their very hardest to build a walled garden of GUI frameworks, rejecting the very idea of compatibility, good design, and ease of use, until they were surpassed by the web, and particularly Google, showing that delivering functioning applications to a computer does not require gigantic widget libraries, outdated looks or complicated downloads & install processes, but is in fact nothing more than a bit of standardization and a couple MBs of text.

All this electron & web hate is so incredibly misplaced I don't even know where to begin. Have you tried making a cross platform mac/win native app? I have, its like being catapulted into the stone age, but you're asked to build a skyscraper.

Do you have a source for that? Does your source imply that this is desired by the population?

My question is mostly rhetorical: it is obvious that government & safety institutions are themselves fanning the flames of this ridiculous movement away from privacy and towards a surveillance state of over-protectionism. The world has not significantly changed in 50 years in terms of terrorist threats, (except for, ironically, threats to your identity online), yet suddenly now that we can track people online, we must to combat this non-changing threat factor? It's all security theater.

All intelligence agencies benefit from more data, and will happily use lack of data as a scapegoat for their own incompetence. They instill fear to justify their existence, unlawful behavior, and lack of results.

> distribute pornography to minors. which i think is something that a reasonable parent would have a problem with.

I'm sorry what?

This is not even close to consensus, as you present it.

Also, a thought exercise, just for you:

1. Should stabbing people be illegal? 2. Should we make it impossible to stab people?

Think about those things, and how they relate to eachother. What would the consequences be of #2?

I'm not sure what motivates you to write a comment like this, but maybe you should reflect on it.

The person you are replying to is consciously trying to make the world a better place, and probably succeeding in a small way. Are they perfect? No. But they are literally sacrificing something for the good of someone (or something) else. This is the definition of altruism.

For some reason, you felt the need to criticize them for not being more altruistic?

Finally, if you really want to live cruelty free and 100% sustainably, the only option is to throw yourself off of a bridge because any time you interact with modern society you are producing CO2 indirectly and potentially harming animals, no matter how careful you are.

I can't speak for proof of identity in the US, but please understand that digital privacy is a slippery slope we're already sliding down, it is not unreasonable to be critical of any privacy violating initiative, because privacy is never given back, only taken away.

> Ignoring the reality that some system of age ... system is desired by a significant portion of the population

How do you think this came to be?

This data is indeed not irregularly distributed, in fact the fun thing about geospatial data is that you always know the maximum extent of it.

About your binary tree comment: yes this is absolutely valid, but consider then that binary trees also are a bad fit for distributed computing, where data is often partitioned at the top level (making it no longer a binary tree but a set of binary trees) and cross-node joins are expensive.

I think the key is in the distributed nature, h3 is effectively a grid so can easily be distributed over nodes. A recursive system is much harder to handle that way. R-trees are great if you are OK with indexing all data on one node, which I think for a global system is a no-go.

This is all speculation, but intuitively your criticism makes sense.

Also, mapping 147k cities to countries should not take 16 workers and 1TB of memory, I think the example in the article is not a realistic workload.

> equivalent written in "two weeks"

This is indeed a nonsensical timeframe.

> What I am saying is that just throwing out phrases that something is "simple" or "basic" needs proof, but at the time of writing I don't see examples.

Fair point.

Although I understand your frustration (and have certainly been at the other side of this as well!), I think its very valuable to always verbalize your intuition of scope of work and be critical if your intuition is in conflict with reality.

Its the best way to find out if there's a mismatch between value and effort, and its the best way to learn and discuss the fundamental nature of complexity.

Similar to your argument, I can name countless of situations where developers absolutely adamantly insisted that something was very hard to do, only for another developer to say "no you can actually do that like this* and fix it in hours instead of weeks.

Yes, making a TUI from scratch is hard, no that should not affect Claude code because they aren't actually making the TUI library (I hope). It should be the case that most complexity is in the model, and the client is just using a text-based interface.

There seems to be a mismatch of what you're describing would be issues (for instance about the quality of the agent) and what people are describing as the actual issues (terminal commands don't work, or input is lost arbitrarily).

That's why verbalizing is important, because you are thinking about other complexities than the people you reply to.

Besides the other comments already here about code gen & contracts, a bigger one for me to step away from json/xml is binary serialization.

It sounds weird, and its totally dependent on your use case, but binary serialization can make a giant difference.

For me, I work with 3D data which is primarily (but not only) tightly packed arrays of floats & ints. I have a bunch of options available:

1. JSON/XML, readable, easy to work with, relatively bulky (but not as bad as people think if you compress) but no random access, and slow floating point parsing, great extensibility.

2. JSON/XML + base64, OK to work with, quite bulky, no random access, faster parsing, but no structure, extensible.

3. Manual binary serialization: hard to work with, OK size (esp compressed), random access if you put in the effort, optimal parsing, not extensible unless you put in a lot of effort.

4. Flatbuffers/protobuf/capn-proto/etc: easy to work with, great size (esp compressed), random access, close-to-optimal parsing, extensible.

Basically if you care about performance, you would really like to just have control of the binary layout of your data, but you generally don't want to design extensibility and random access yourself, so you end up sacrificing explicit layout (and so some performance) by choosing a convenient lib.

We are a very regularly sized company, but our 3D data spans hundreds of terabytes.

(also, no, there is no general purpose 3D format available to do this work, gltf and friends are great but have a small range of usecases)

> someone has to make a native cross-platform desktop UI framework that doesn't suck

That's the browser, native ui development failed because it didn't want to lose money on cross platform compatibility, security, or user onboarding experience.

The web is fast enough for 99% of UIs, the story is not about using web, the story is about using the web poorly. old.reddit is not qt.

Sure, but from the perspective of the code that has the move() its good to assume the value is moved at that call, which I guess was the intention of picking the name.

std::offer

I think it would make sense to have these issues bubble up into the public consciousness of hackernews.

I've never used AI to code, I'm a software architect and currently assume I get little value out of an LLM. It would be useful for me if this debate had a vaguely engineering-smelling quality to it, because its currently just two groups shouting at eachother and handwaving criticism away.

If you actually deal with AI generated problems, I love it, please make a post about it so we have something concrete to point to.

> I'm an adult, and I can decide for myself.

No you can't, all of this stuff is designed to influence you without you knowing it, or you would not be influenced. This is like thinking advertisements have no effect on you.

People pay good money because they know it is effective, it is influencing you, you cannot decide for yourself.

Love your progress, best of luck!

Indeed, it seems that the gap that is present politically between America and Europe is to some extent also playing out in the individual, even in the tech scene. This is a little alarming to me, as the idea of an alliance can break down on the political level and be repaired in the new cycle of elections, that's OK.

But if an individual American really thinks Europeans are as smug as described in this article, or if Europeans really think the way this article describes, there is a more concerning, deeper issue with the worldview of these historically well-aligned peoples.

Again this is a polarizing question.

There's nothing wrong with either perspective, rather its the case that the European perspective is different. That's not to say that Europeans are right, or that criticism flowing from Europe to America is justified, but it should at least be acknowledged that pitching two players in a competition that one of the players has less interest in competing on, is misguided.

This is not really fair, the story is never explicitly discounted as hyperbole in the article and follows a range of other more mellow criticisms of europe. Also, directly following this quote, is the question: "Could anyone imagine Chinese or Americans being so obedient?".

None of this points to the story being out of place, and since the author specializes in serious analysis of china's relation with america, and the author brings up europe, its fair to assume that they included this story as a relevant criticism of europe.

In that regard, its indeed not of the same quality as the analyses of china or american culture.

> poor is more about being rigid

Oh no please broaden your mindset. This is not a healthy way to look at wealth inequality in 2025. Being poor can happen for arbitrary reasons, and the impact can vary greatly across countries and continents. E.g if you get and recover from cancer in Europe you will be OK financially, while being ruined in America.

This is an extreme example, but the point is not to weigh individual examples but rather to recognize that you as an individual don't understand the circumstances that create or alleviate poverty, because entire government branches are dedicated to doing this and haven't figured it out.

Bottom line poverty is bad news for everyone, there's money to be made solving poverty. It's not a trivial problem to solve.

Do you feel that road safety dictates your life?

Question: does it make you a saint if you don't spend money lavishly when you have it? Note: its only about not spending it, not about donating or otherwise using it for an ethical purpose.

This still assumes an all encompassing transparent durability layer, what I'm arguing for is the opposite: something that can just be a library in any language, and any runtime, because it does not try to be clever about injecting durability in otherwise idiomatic code.

> I think our other primitives (task queues, streaming, concurrency, rate limiting, retries) are more widely used than our `durableTasks` feature because of this very problem you're describing

Indeed, I'm happy to hear you say this.

I think it should be the other way around: if durable tasks are properly understood its actually the queues/streaming/concurrency/ratelimits/retries that can be abstracted away and ignored.

Funny, I never realised this before.