Viewing profile — hackermailman

In Sussman's book 'Software Design For Flexibility' he uses Match? in the pattern matching chapter to run on graphs. I think OCW archived his MIT course for the book too

It's a welfare economics theory course that requires many frameworks with measures where you are maximizing some graphical representation. It also requires assumptions to work and …

They're going to have change everything so use of an AI assistant doesn't matter because once they graduate they're just going to continue using it anyway. If it's a math for finan…

Usually it's paired with an Apache license to prevent patent lawsuits but the problem was that anyone could make a proprietary fork and then actively steal your labor. For example …

The origins of mandatory education was Athens citizens being bamboozled by rhetoric all detailed here in this lecture https://youtu.be/H0z9sJyTv2w Neitzsche had an interesting set …

Using lightweight formal methods to verify models that the AI later builds. Example is Forge: https://forge-fm.github.io/book/2026/ Another skill is conceptual design or figuring o…

Knuth had to stop sending real checks for errors spotted in his books because they would post pics of the check and thieves abused the account https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~…

AI can't yet come up with any new ideas to make the inductive leap to solve a math problem. New ideas are what get the accolades and using an old idea just means the original autho…

There's a livestream every Tues about house/landscape remodeling I've followed for years to fix my own property https://m.youtube.com/@PerfectGuyLife/streams and they talk about ho…

There's a well run diner here beside the courts and because they have booths which are a little more private than tables it's always full of lawyers with clients or architects with…

This is how you get to 10x with a LLM in my limited agentic experience for doing all the scratchwork of architecting a program before you generate it: The user facing part of your …

I still write anything critical by hand. For example some app that accepts uploads of PDFs to change format I'm going to escape and prep that data by hand so the vibe coded microse…

If you can skip some or all electives and instead receive credits for joining research on campus as an undergraduate then it's worth it. There were a few TAs at my school who joine…

AI copilots and prompts give me massive lines of imperative OCaml and the interface for that code always requires changing to properly describe the data it will receive when I can …

Had to modify some program so just read the code and guessed mimicking what I read. It mostly just worked so continued doing that and reading enough docs I could write my own. Did …

"Lightweight formal methods" meaning you build a model of some program logic and test it's properties hold. https://forge-fm.github.io/book/ Beyond that is dependent types

I assume this works where the ransomware authors, who likely are in some untouchable nation and the son of some major politician, provide a binary/kit with their own addresses to t…

Sometimes except I learned the hard way that if you write everyday Python math code it's actually variable-time arithmetic and totally unsuitable for applied cryptography, oops

You could always have a theme then publish the rest as "online extras" many books do that recently

Math was always the stumbling block for me then I realized through work how easy it is with pure rational or reals except when you need to translate it to an algorithm now you are …

Brown PLT group has a lot of Rust resources like a debugger for traits https://cel.cs.brown.edu/blog/an-interactive-debugger-for-ru... a model of ownership types https://blog.brown…

Wildberger has videos about this on his YouTube channels. He came up with 'universal geometry' to get around the parallel assumption in Euclidean geometry if foundations interest y…

There's a guy in his 50s doing ultra marathons named Kerry Ward who films some of his runs, he came in 11th during the Moab 240 miler which is 2-3 days of running https://youtube.c…

There's some good lectures from CMU if you search for 15-213 on YouTube. The lectures explain how x86-64 works and enough about operating systems you know how virtual memory and si…