dunham (u/dunham) - Readit News

dunham commented on The F-35 is losing the trade war jalopnik.com/1945910/f-35... · Posted by u/rntn

potatolicious · 3 hours ago

You can literally just Google this, there are many sources. Literally the top of the Google results:

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/21/trump-boeing-stealt...

[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2025-03-2...

The exact transcript is here:

[3] https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-...

All of these are in the top-10 first results when you search for this.

dunham · 3 hours ago

All of those links appear to be discussing the F-47 and this thread is discussing the F-35.

dunham commented on Developer's block underlap.org/developers-b... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

danjl · 7 hours ago

Naming was often my biggest block. I often know the project topic, but cannot choose a name. Then, of course, there's variable, function and file naming. Turns out the AI is fantastic at choosing good names, so that block is largely obviated these days.

dunham · 6 hours ago

I had a block for a while because I _had_ chosen a name for my language. Suddenly what I was writing was the official implementation, it had to be "right", and I got design paralysis. I found I was making further progress doing exercises outside that repository. (It's all good now, and I have a self-hosted language.)

At the function level, I'll often write the function and then rename it with F2 after I've written it.

dunham commented on Unification (2018) eli.thegreenplace.net/201... · Posted by u/asplake

guerrilla · 5 days ago

I think in dependently typed programming languages and theorem proves. As I understand it, even System F (like Haskell) benefits, no?

dunham · 2 days ago

As I understand it, dependent type theory requires higher order unification, which is undecidable. So they typically use bidirectional type checking instead of Hindley Milner.

With bidirection type checking, I think it only needs the unification when solving inserted implicits. So a plain dependent type theory wouldn't need it, but once you add implicit parameters, you do need it. They usually use pattern unification, which solves a subset of higher order unification problems, for those unification problems.

dunham commented on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/JustExAWS

simpaticoder · 2 days ago

In undergrad I took an abstract algebra class. It was very difficult and one of the things the teacher did was have us memorize proofs. In fact, all of his tests were the same format: reproduce a well-known proof from memory, and then complete a novel proof. At first I was aghast at this rote memorization - I maybe even found it offensive. But an amazing thing happened - I realized that it was impossible to memorize a proof without understanding it! Moreover, producing the novel proofs required the same kinds of "components" and now because they were "installed" in my brain I could use them more intuitively. (Looking back I'd say it enabled an efficient search of a tree of sequences of steps).

Memorization is not a panacea. I never found memorizing l33t code problems to be edifying. I think it's because those kinds of tight, self-referential, clever programs are far removed from the activity of writing applications. Most working programmers do not run into a novel algorithm problem but once or twice a career. Application programming has more the flavor of a human-mediated graph-traversal, where the human has access to a node's local state and they improvise movement and mutation using only that local state plus some rapidly decaying stack. That is, there is no well-defined sequence for any given real-world problem, only heuristics.

dunham · 2 days ago

Fortunately that was not my experience in abstract algebra. The tests and homework were novel proofs that we hadn't seen in class. It was one of my favorite classes / subjects. Someone did tell me in college that they did the memorization thing in German Universities.

Code-wise, I spent a lot of time in college reading other people's code. But no memorization. I remember David Betz advsys, Tim Budd's "Little Smalltalk", and Matt Dillon's "DME Editor" and C compiler.

dunham commented on Introduction to AT Protocol mackuba.eu/2025/08/20/int... · Posted by u/psionides

xphos · 3 days ago

Here I was thinking I'd see old AT commands for controlling radios. Learned something new

dunham · 3 days ago

I believe that's still used in phones for communication between the computer and the cell phone hardware.

dunham commented on Typechecker Zoo sdiehl.github.io/typechec... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

etiamz · 5 days ago

dunham · 5 days ago

This is a great resource to learn how normalization by evaluation and insertion and solving of implicit variables is implemented.

dunham commented on GitHub pull requests were down githubstatus.com/incident... · Posted by u/lr0

inetknght · 18 days ago

> there's products that have feature creep but I wouldn't say GitHub does that.

I remember GitHub from years ago. I still find myself looking for things that were there years ago but have since moved.

Also, GitHub search is (still) comically useless. I just clone and use grep instead.

dunham · 18 days ago

I've also loaded repositories into a web instance of vscode (with the '.' shortcut) and done Cmd-Sh-F, which also works better than their search.

dunham commented on Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview observablehq.com/notebook... · Posted by u/mbostock

dunham · 25 days ago

I'd love to see support for inline TeX in the markdown. Back when I used observable on the web, I hacked up a `md2` string template to replace /\$(.*?)\$/g with the katex equivalent before calling `md`, but I don't know if there is a workaround in the desktop notebook application.

dunham commented on Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars modernengineeringmarvels.... · Posted by u/tzs

whycome · a month ago

With a manual car, it was common to downshift and use the engine to decelerate. I’m wondering if electric vehicles might actually cause a return to a third pedal to re-add some of the fine tuned controls that a manual transmission allowed. Maybe the “downshift” could engage the regen brake specifically.

dunham · a month ago

I did this with manual, and my EV does this with a single pedal control. Letting off of the pedal will engage regenerative breaking to the extent that you let off the pedal, it does not engage the brakes. I find that in a lot of city driving I don't need the brakes, but they do work fine when I need them. I really like this functionality. The car can also creep along at 1-2 Mph when necessary - so I don't need brakes to deal with slow traffic. (With a manual, first gear would sometimes suffice for this.)

So the premise in the title of the article does not surprise me, but I thought that the primary pollution complaint about electric vehicles was tire pollution and not brake dust.

dunham commented on Klein Bottle Amazon Brand Hijacking (2021) kleinbottle.com/Amazon_Br... · Posted by u/sebg

alister · 2 months ago

In case there are readers who don't know who Clifford Stoll is, he's the author of The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, that was practically required reading if you were a programmer or hacker in the early 1990s.

I didn't understand how hijacking worked on Amazon until I read this lucid explanation. Clearly he's still a great writer.

He's on Hacker News as CliffStoll. This makes me wonder how Hacker News deals with someone registering a famous person's name if they are not that person? I'm guessing that it's not a big problem here on HN because there's nothing being sold.

dunham · 2 months ago

I think that was the book that I read on my Palm Pilot. But it's been a while.

I had the klein stein at one point, but got rid of it when downsizing. It was hard to clean, so not practical for drinking, and not as pretty on the shelf as a classic klein bottle. I'd recommend one of those if you're thinking of getting one.