skoodge (u/skoodge) - Readit News

skoodge commented on Terrence Malick's Disciples yalereview.org/article/bi... · Posted by u/prismatic

sharkweek · 3 months ago

I should give Malick another shot. I love film, but only first tried him when I was much younger (Thin Red Line) and don’t think I really got it.

Never tried Tree of Life or any of his more recent stuff.

Got any recommendations in the first 2-3 of his you’d suggest?

skoodge · 3 months ago

Badlands and Days of Heaven are definitely his most conventional films and thus good starting points. Badlands especially is a great film, Days of Heaven is a bit uneven in terms of plot and pacing, but the cinematography is beautiful.

Then you have The Thin Red Line and The New World, which to me feel like a transitional period between the more conventional films and The Tree of Life, which is the first film that is characterized through and through by Malick's extremely divisive style. I personally love The Thin Red Line, but I can see why it's not for everyone. (I would skip The New World.) All later films have a very recognizable style, for which I think The Tree of Life is the best starting point.

Long story short: I'd start with Badlands, then watch The Thin Red Line, then The Tree of Life. If you like the last one, watch any of his later films.

skoodge commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

sbenitez · 6 months ago

Formal | Multiple Positions | REMOTE | Full-Time | $100k - $250k + Equity

At Formal [0], we’re rethinking serverless from scratch: we’re building a new computing stack for instant, globally available, truly elastic, soundly isolated execution. We leverage formal methods and languages to build OS interfaces with low overhead, formally verified isolation without containers or VMs. Our immediate goal is to write a new programming language to replace eBPF and build the world's first serverless networking infrastructure.

We are a 5-person, VC-funded team with PhDs from Stanford, UW, OSU, and Brown, advised by professors from MIT and UWaterloo. We are currently hiring for the following four positions:

- [1] Staff Software Engineer: Compilers, Programming Languages, and Verification (≥ $200k + ≥ 0.5%)

- [2] Formal Verification Engineer: Formal Methods and Programming Languages ($120k - $200k + ≥ 0.25%)

- [3] Software Engineer: Compilers and Programming Languages ($100k - $175k + ≥ 0.2%)

- [4] Formal Methods PhD Intern: Formal Methods and Programming Languages (≥ $5k / month)

Please see [5] for general information. To apply, email us at (work at formalstack dot com) and let us know how your experiences fit the role and its requirements.

[0]: https://formalstack.com [1]: https://formalstack.com/jobs/09-2025/staff-software-engineer... [2]: https://formalstack.com/jobs/09-2025/formal-verification-eng... [3]: https://formalstack.com/jobs/09-2025/software-engineer-v.pdf [4]: https://formalstack.com/jobs/09-2025/formal-methods-phd-inte... [5]: https://formalstack.com/jobs/09-2025/info.pdf

skoodge · 6 months ago

Hey Sergio! I applied for the role of founding engineer a couple of months ago and passed the different stages. We had even been talking about the exact salary package and start date, decided to talk again in a couple of weeks about the specifics, but then I never heard back, despite reaching out to you again.

It’s totally fine if plans change and you decide not to move forward with a candidate, but I think a short email isn’t too much to ask after spending multiple hours on the various interviews.

That said, the interview process was otherwise pretty good and the work you’re doing sounds really interesting, so I would still encourage others to apply. Best of luck with Formal!

skoodge commented on Oberon Pi pascal.hansotten.com/nikl... · Posted by u/tosh

skoodge · 10 months ago

The linked pdfs on that page are wonderful. I reread Wirth's Plea for Lean Software and it still holds up remarkably well. It reminded me of Alan Kay's VPRI and the STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming which unfortunately ended in 2012. Oberon also doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore as far as I can tell. Are there any similar projects that are still being actively worked on?

skoodge commented on Oberon Pi pascal.hansotten.com/nikl... · Posted by u/tosh

pdw · 10 months ago

I think this just a standard Raspberry Pi Linux distro with an emulator for "Project Oberon 2013" preloaded.

Oberon has a tortured version history, so it takes a bit to explain what "Project Oberon 2013" is, but it's basically representative of Oberon in a very early stage of development.

This version was originally described by Wirth in his 1992 book "Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System, a Compiler and a Computer". After his retirement he prepared a new edition, which came to be known as "Project Oberon 2013". For this edition he switched out the "computer" part -- the original used the now extremely obscure NS32000 CPU, the new edition used a custom RISC architecture implemented on an FPGA. But otherwise than this "implementation detail", the system was unchanged.

(And of course, given the FPGA source code, it's easy to build an emulator.)

But if you try this and it feels primitive -- it is. Later versions of Oberon got much fancier.

skoodge · 10 months ago

Are there any "guided" walkthroughs for someone who has never used Oberon (or any of its later versions like Bluebottle or A2) that demonstrate its most unique UI/UX aspects? Something along the lines of Russ Cox' Tour of the Acme Editor[0] but for Oberon?

Oberon seems fascinating and I would like to eventually play around with it in an emulator, but any resources that show how it's being used (as opposed to a description of its design like in Wirth's book for example) would be appreciated.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M

skoodge commented on AI Is Making Developers Dumb eli.cx/blog/ai-is-making-... · Posted by u/chronicom

dfabulich · a year ago

We've seen this happen over and over again, when a new leaky layer of abstraction is developed that makes it easier to develop working code without understanding the lower layer.

It's almost always a leaky abstraction, because sometimes you do need to know how the lower layer really works.

Every time this happens, developers who have invested a lot of time and emotional energy in understanding the lower level claim that those who rely on the abstraction are dumber (less curious, less effective, and they write "worse code") than those who have mastered the lower level.

Wouldn't we all be smarter if we stopped relying on third-party libraries and wrote the code ourselves?

Wouldn't we all be smarter if we managed memory manually?

Wouldn't we all be smarter if we wrote all of our code in assembly, and stopped relying on compilers?

Wouldn't we all be smarter if we were wiring our own transistors?

It is educational to learn about lower layers. Often it's required to squeeze out optimal performance. But you don't have to understand lower layers to provide value to your customers, and developers who now find themselves overinvested in low-level knowledge don't want to believe that.

(My favorite use of coding LLMs is to ask them to help me understand code I don't yet understand. Even when it gets the answer wrong, it's often right enough to give me the hints I need to figure it out myself.)

skoodge · a year ago

Not all of those abstractions are equally leaky though. Automatic memory management for example is leaky only for a very narrow set of problems, in many situations the abstraction works extremely well. It remains to be seen whether AI can be made to leak so rarely (which does not meant that it's not useful even in its current leaky state).

skoodge commented on Show HN: Tandem – An Engine for Secure Multi-Party Computation (Written in Rust) github.com/sine-fdn/tande... · Posted by u/skoodge

fspoettel · 3 years ago

How much overhead can you expect when executing code as a garbled circuit? Is there a limit to the amount of instructions before using garbled circuits becomes impractical?

skoodge · 3 years ago

Since all programs have to be compiled to boolean gates and these gates have to be encrypted, there is a difference of a few orders of magnitude between running programs natively on a CPU (which can of course use highly optimized arithmetical instructions) and running programs over MPC.

In the end, it all depends on the complexity of the program: For simple programs like the Wordle guess/solution comparison (about 40 lines of code, compiled to < 2k gates) the communication overhead is more significant than the computational overhead. The Garbled Circuits protocol used by Tandem needs 7 rounds of communication, so with a round-trip time of 50ms the whole execution takes 350ms.

For more complicated programs, the computational overhead becomes a bit more significant. For programs of > 100k gates, the time to execute a program can range from a few seconds to about a minute. For example, an AES 256 computation requires ~ 9k AND gates and 40k XOR gates.

Right now I would not use it for programs with more than a couple 100k gates, but the engine has not yet been optimized very much, at the moment the focus is on providing a good UX and an easy way for people to experiment with MPC. I'm pretty sure that with a bit of optimization efforts it will be possible to speed it up significantly.

skoodge commented on Gödel, Escher, Bach: an in-depth explainer alignmentforum.org/posts/... · Posted by u/behnamoh

a1369209993 · 4 years ago

> > Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem: any sufficiently rich formal system, together with an interpretation, has strings which are true but unprovable.

Somewhat oddly, this is actually technically correct - a "sufficiently rich" system is one that can distinguish true versus false statements of Peano Arithmetic, and a inconsistent system, by the principle of explosion, can prove any statement, so cannot distinguish statements of Peano Arithmetic (eg, 1+1=2 and 1+1=3 are both provable), and hence is not sufficiently rich.

That's a somewhat unintuitive way of looking at it in practice, though.

skoodge · 4 years ago

That's only true for systems where the principle of explosion actually holds though, isn't it? So it wouldn't apply to paraconsistent systems.

In the end, Gödel is actually giving us a choice: Either accept incompleteness or accept inconsistency. Of course it's true that historically incompleteness has been perceived as the only viable choice, but at least a few paraconsistent logicians like Graham Priest have argued for (non-explosive) inconsistency instead.

skoodge commented on Show HN: 1,900 remote company profiles with tech stacks and employee benefits himalayas.app/companies... · Posted by u/AbiTyasTunggal

jokethrowaway · 4 years ago

Serious question: what other industries are using Rust and pay at least as much as your typical web developer?

skoodge · 4 years ago

Assuming that "crypto" was meant to refer only to cryptocurrency, there are a few companies working on non-blockchain/non-cryptocurrency crypto(graphic) tech which are paying as much as web dev jobs.

For example, I stumbled upon ockam.io during my last job search (no affiliation, and never interviewed with them as they weren't actively hiring when I wrote to them last year). I vaguely remember there being a few others, though I can't remember any names off the top of my head (it has definitely gotten harder searching for those kinds of companies as most job ads are drowned out by all the blockchain jobs). Old job posts on https://this-week-in-rust.org/ often contain a few interesting companies.

(Shameless plug: If anyone is interested in working at a non-profit focusing on non-blockchain cryptography in the field of multi-party computation, the company I'm working at is hiring at the moment and the salary ranges [for a 4-day work week] are listed: https://sinefoundation.notion.site/SINE-Job-Board-d28eda00c5...)

skoodge commented on What will enter the public domain in 2022 publicdomainreview.org/fe... · Posted by u/Amorymeltzer

skoodge · 4 years ago

Unfortunately the situation is bit complex for Ludwig Wittgenstein (who died in 1951 and whose works should enter the public domain in countries with death + 70 years copyright).

Wittgenstein only published the Tractatus during his lifetime (which will enter the public domain), but all of his later works were compiled and published posthumously (as the "Nachlass") by his literary executors, most importantly the Philosophical Investigations. At the moment, Trinity College Cambridge hold the copyright to most of the Nachlass and they have more or less publicly said that they do not consider the Nachlass to go out of copyright in 2022, as there seems to be an obscure exception in British copyright for posthumously published manuscripts that would extend the copyright duration to 2039 [0].

Of course British copyright law does not directly apply to the rest of the world, but I sadly do not expect to see many public domain editions from academics in the coming years, since most of them want to stay on good terms with Trinity College. Others would perhaps like to publish an edition, but are unsure about the copyright situation.

Are there any non-profit organisations that provide legal clarification in these rather complicated situations for individuals that want to publish new editions of these works? IANAL, so I would be reluctant to sink too much time into such a project if there is the chance that I might be sued into oblivion by Cambridge.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9razevgY6TA&t=1621s