Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 475 posts.

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2020
188

Names are not type safety

Haskell programmers spend a lot of time talking about type safety . The Haskell school of program construction advocates “capturing invariants in the type system” and “making illegal states unrepresentable,” both of which sound like compelling goals, but are rather vague on the techniques used to achieve them. Almost…

190

SLS vs. Starship

NASA just announced the lunar landers for the Artemis program. To everyone’s surprise, SpaceX’s massive Starship is one of three landers NASA chose alongside Blue Origin and Dynetics. Understandably, this is bringing up a lot of questions. Some of which we will answer in my next video/article: “Should NASA just cancel…

191

Lambda Calculus Diagrams (2015)

The following table shows diagrams of identity, the booleans, some standard combinators, some Church numerals, the predecessor function on Church numerals, and Omega. term definition diagram alternative I/1 λx.x K/true λx.λy.x false/0 λx.λy.y S λx.λy.λz.(x z)(y z) Y λf.(λx.x x)(λx.f(x x)) 2 λf.λx.f(f x) 3 λf.λx.f(f(f…

202

Rust After the Honeymoon

Two years ago, I had a blog entry describing falling in love with Rust . Of course, a relationship with a technology is like any other relationship: as novelty and infatuation wears off, it can get on a longer term (and often more realistic and subdued) footing – or it can begin to fray. So well one might ask: how is…