keyserj (u/keyserj) - Readit News

keyserj commented on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic? · Posted by u/publicdebates

keyserj · a month ago

I think there's a lot of good advice in these comments already, at least for individuals to think about for themselves.

I happen to have discovered a fantastic contra dancing community[1] in Chicago that could be great for some who are lonely. You have to chalk up the courage to go (if you aren't used to trying new things, or dancing), but everyone is extremely welcoming, the dancing is easy even for people "with two left feet", and the happiness going around is truly contagious.

I think it's a terrific place to find community. It's a social dance where you'll basically dance with everyone by the end of the evening. There's time before, in the middle (snack intermission), and at the end for striking some conversation. The dancing is every Monday so it's routine. The crowd (100-150 people on average) is diverse in many ways (at least in age, gender, income, interests) so you're bound to find people with commonalities that, using some of the other advice in these comments, you could try to hang out with outside of the dancing.

As far as getting people to feel like they can join, I'm not the expert, but I've had such a great experience that I'm happy to at least bring it up and "spread the good word".

For outside of Chicago: contra dancing is a bit niche, but a surprising amount of large-ish US cities have it. I think it's more popular (relatively) on the East coast. Can't speak for outside of the US.

[1] https://www.chicagobarndance.org/

keyserj commented on · Posted by u/SanthiSithara

keyserj · 3 months ago

I feel the author loses points (persuasiveness? respect? integrity? I can't think of the word) by not acknowledging what they think accurately happened. What's the word alternative to genocide in this case? "War" with large sprinkles of civilian casualties?

> To defend truth, one must defend vocabulary

I completely agree with this. The decay of words reduces our ability to communicate accurately, which leads then to a myriad of disagreement, misinformation, disinformation, etc.

I think "semanticide" happens often when there's outrage, and there aren't accurate words that carry enough connotation to reflect the emotion and frustration in the speaker. What's the solution in this case? I don't blame the speakers for resorting to it in haste, but perhaps the issue comes when the word abuse becomes well-meditated, and repeated?

keyserj commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025) · Posted by u/david927

ryanrasti · 4 months ago

Thanks! That's a great question.

First off, I'm a huge fan of Kysely and it's a massive source of inspiration for Typegres.

You've nailed the two big differences:

* Architected for Business Logic: The primary innovation is the class-based model. This is all about co-locating your business logic (like calculated fields and relations) directly with your data model. The cool part is that these methods aren't just for SELECT; they're composable SQL expressions you can use anywhere: in a WHERE, an ORDER BY, etc. The goal is to create a single, type-safe source of truth for your logic that compiles directly to SQL.

* PostgreSQL-Native: The other fundamental difference is the focus on going deep on a single database rather than being database-agnostic. That massive list of functions you saw is a core feature, designed to provide exhaustive, type-safe, and autocomplete-friendly coverage for the entire PostgreSQL feature set. The philosophy is to stop forcing developers to reinvent database logic in their application code.

Philosophically, it's a shift from composing type-safe SQL strings (like Kysely, which is brilliant for its WYSIWYG approach) to composing SQL expressions as if they were first-class TypeScript objects.

keyserj · 4 months ago

Cool, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation

keyserj commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025) · Posted by u/david927

ryanrasti · 4 months ago

I'm working on Typegres, a new data layer for the modern stack (TypeScript + PostgreSQL).

My take is that for years, ORMs have hidden the power of PostgreSQL behind generic, database-agnostic abstractions. This made sense in 2010, but now it's a bottleneck.

Typegres rejects this. It's a "translator, not an abstraction," designed to express the full power of PostgreSQL (all statements, built-in functions, etc.) in a type-safe TypeScript API.

The latest killer feature my take of "object-relational mapping done right": class-based models with methods that are actually composable SQL expressions. This lets you extend your tables with expressive logic and fully-composable relations.

It's easier to show than tell. Take a look: https://typegres.com/play

keyserj · 4 months ago

Neat idea. Would you say that biggest difference from something like Kysely is the focus on extracting common calculated SELECT targets into methods that can easily be accessed when querying? Or perhaps it's more thorough with providing TS versions of all the SQL syntax available? The list of reference fields/methods in your docs is certainly massive.

keyserj commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025) · Posted by u/david927

cantor_S_drug · 4 months ago

I wanted something similar for a worldview. I want an app where I can dump all the things that actively go into shaping my worldview and then when someone wants to know why I think the way I do, I will share them the link of my worldview board. We are not famous people to have our memoir written but this is another way to peek into minds of strangers.

keyserj · 4 months ago

That's a cool idea. Seems like there would be a ton of things contained in an individual's worldview, that it'd be hard to build all of it up. Perhaps when you encounter something that makes you think of some core philosophy, you note it and the philosophy, and eventually there would be a loose picture that forms amongst all the relations.

Certainly would be helpful for trying to understand someone else. Not sure if this is totally appropriate, but it does seem like something that a chatbot would be good at combing through to find examples to suggest why one thinks a certain way about a new topic. You could even ask it about your own worldview!

keyserj commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025) · Posted by u/david927

keyserj · 4 months ago

Working on a webapp for critically think with others about a problem.

The idea is that you build a diagram that contains all the details about the problem and people's thoughts on it, and it's organized in such a way that it's easy to just keep refining, down to the smallest detail. So you build this concrete, shared understanding, and move it forward and forward, until hopefully y'all can make some best decision to improve the situation.

There's a lot to do. Currently working on UX to allow hiding intermediate nodes and still have indirect edges drawn. Want to add an LLM integration to generate/update diagrams via natural language, which I think will help a lot with usage barriers to using the app.

Happy to get any feedback :) https://ameliorate.app/ https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate

keyserj commented on Facts don't change minds, structure does vasily.cc/blog/facts-dont... · Posted by u/staph

keyserj · 7 months ago

I'm a big fan of modeling causal structures like this - I think having a diagram is a really good way of getting on the same page and making conversations more constructively focused on points that each party can follow and precisely provide counterpoints for. I appreciate reading an article about this! I feel like our society would benefit a lot from investing more in this kind of information management, but it's not particularly flashy.

I'm working on an app[1] for building these structures, centered around problems and solutions, with the addition that each node or edge can have its own structured auxiliary information, e.g. scores for intuitions, argument trees for supporting/critiquing the claims implied by nodes/edges, questions for identifying unknowns. Here's an example[2] of the two diagrams in the article as they'd be in the app. I want it to be easier for our discussions to be constructive, and I think software can reduce the effort required for it.

[1] https://ameliorate.app/ [2] https://ameliorate.app/keyserj/facts-dont-change-minds-artic...

keyserj commented on Facts don't change minds, structure does vasily.cc/blog/facts-dont... · Posted by u/staph

meowface · 7 months ago

Some of the core ideas here seem good, but the node/edge distinction feels too fuzzy. The node "Climate Change Threat" is a claim. Is the node "Efficiency" a claim? Can one challenge the existence of Efficiency? If one instead challenges the benefit of Efficiency, isn't that an edge attack?

I could give a bunch of other examples where the nodes in the article don't feel like apples-to-apples things. I feel less motivated to try to internalize the article due to this.

keyserj · 7 months ago

I think the structure inherently enables each node to be a claim (like "this thing exists"), but that there's value in making a node even if that node's claim is not particularly disagreeable, because the edges to that node might be disagreeable, or to provide more detail about how one node relates to another (e.g. through some intermediate node). In this case, maybe the main value in modeling "Efficiency" is to convey how innovation might lead to profit.

To me, it feels less fuzzy when you assume that all nodes and edges imply their own claims, and that it's just a matter of whether or not those claims are worth arguing. The fuzziness imo is based on the fact that the curator picks which nodes and edges exist, which therefore determines which claims exist and can be agreed or disagreed with, not to mention the overall legibility of the graph itself. But I would argue that a causal graph like this is better at representing reality than something like an argument tree, and that, while it might be fuzzy to determine which nodes should exist, at least there's less opinion involved about where nodes should be placed in relation to each other. Which imo makes the structure easier to refine given time and feedback.

keyserj commented on Jujutsu for busy devs maddie.wtf/posts/2025-07-... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

sethammons · 7 months ago

Nice commits can really tell a development story that makes reviews easier. That said, I want all teams to squash merge their feature into master after tests pass. One commit at the end, and one commit to remove in case of an issue affecting customers related to the release.

A very, very large problem at five out of six companies I have worked at is casual code improvement and refactoring. Devs would say, "we will address that minor and unrelated thing in a separate PR" - one that never comes. At one company, a single PR could address unrelated fixes and it was encouraged to "take out the trash" on the code. Unrelated metrics added, logging improvement, or code simplified, or test robustness improved, etc. That company had vastly better code. Easier to read. Easier to maintain. Easier to observe. And easier to test.

keyserj · 7 months ago

> I want all teams to squash merge their feature into master after tests pass. One commit at the end, and one commit to remove in case of an issue affecting customers related to the release.

Hmm what's the issue with the GitHub default of merging PRs, where there's a merge commit which individually pulls in the PR's commits? You can revert the merge PR as a whole, or the PR commits individually. E.g. with this[1] merge commit, you can `git revert 0a98f570 -m 1` (the merge commit) or `git revert b30950fc` (an individual commit from the PR).

[1] https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate/commit/0a98f570f63ffd...

keyserj commented on At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says nytimes.com/2025/07/10/wo... · Posted by u/xbryanx

labster · 7 months ago

Wealth is not the same as class, either. Even in America. A teacher with an annual salary of $60k is higher class than a plumber making $100k annually. Unless the teacher is black, of course, then racial elements of class come into play.

keyserj · 7 months ago

I agree that wealth is not the same as class, but just as a counter anecdote, my dad is a (small business) plumber and I never felt like we were treated less than any other middle class family. If anything, it seemed like people were often really grateful and giving random gifts like food from gardens or tickets to local events.