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noelwelsh

HN member
Joined
Mon, Mar 22, 2010, 1:50 PM UTC
HN karma
10,079
Public activity
2,245 items

About noelwelsh

I'm interested in machine learning, distributed systems, programming languages, and entrepreneurship. I have a personal site at https://noelwelsh.com/

I'm a partner at Inner Product (http://inner-product.com) and Underscore (http://underscore.io), where I teach, mentor, and develop Scala.

I'm previously was a co-founder of a startup called Myna which applied multi-armed bandit algorithms to the problem of content optimisation -- where A/B testing is traditionally used.

Recent public activity

  1. comment
    Comment #49220173

    The general term for this is an indexed type. Specifically what is shown here is indexed codata. Indexed data is more commonly known as generalized algebraic data types (GADTs), wh…

  2. comment
    Comment #49148147

    Writing the notes is more the point than re-reading them, at least for me. Writing stuff down forces me to kick things around and find a good structure, and that's where the useful…

  3. comment
    Comment #49101499

    A few comments on the previous abundance of cod, from https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/a-tragedy-wi... In 1873, French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote that if every e…

  4. comment
    Comment #49083421

    Very nice!

  5. comment
    Comment #49081220

    Scala's capture checking [1] is a modal type system. [1]: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/experimental/cc...

  6. comment
    Comment #49081078

    Good article. We really need more nuance in the discussion of using LLMs for SE. Not all tasks are the same; we shouldn't expect to use the same process across them! In my experien…

  7. comment
    Comment #49051628

    Good article. Not much to add to it, other than I think more people should look at modal type systems like found in Scala 3 and OxCaml. If you want safe arena allocation they are a…

  8. comment
    Comment #49048659

    You might enjoy digging into the world of effect handlers: it's a very neat model for expressing these features and boils down to continuations in the implementation.

  9. comment
    Comment #48955906

    These are not things I need to know :-)

  10. comment
    Comment #48955835

    A nice thing about being left handed is there a few things I can't get precious about. Fountain pens are never going to feature in my life as I'll just smudge everything. Similarly…

  11. comment
    Comment #48947269

    Can anyone explain how this works? Humans have 3 (sometimes 4) cones, so I thought that going beyond 3 primaries wouldn't increase the perceivable gamut. Update: thanks for all the…

  12. comment
    Comment #48944375

    Absolutely. Take a look at "unconscious perception".

  13. comment
    Comment #48932818

    A collection of thoughts I had while reading the article: 0. Overall, a nice article. 1. There are several places where the (LLM assisted?) writing is a bit odd. For example, the c…

  14. comment
    Comment #48908429

    There is no real evidence that we'll reach AGI any time soon. It relies on AI continuing to scale, and we have no proof that will continue to be possible. There is an alternative i…

  15. comment
    Comment #48907538

    The premise is "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away". If this is tru…

  16. comment
    Comment #48879581

    This blog post is very relevant to the discussion: https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-multiversity-is-finis... A quick summary: the modern university is really a "multiversity"…

  17. comment
    Comment #48860109

    Wow. Not a Haskell user, but a big user of other languages with expressive type systems (mostly Scala; some Rust). My experience is the complete opposite. I can't imagine using a l…

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  20. comment
    Comment #48745947

    This is the book I'm working on about mental models for better code. It's getting very close to complete, and there is a 150 page free sample. The book is all about making explicit…

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  22. comment
    Comment #48734801

    That's a reasonable way of looking at it, but capabilities are not restricted to low-level system properties. Here's a terminal UI system built around three main capabilities: - la…

  23. comment
    Comment #48731066

    You'd probably like the work of Tomas Petricek: https://tomasp.net/ He does research in "the history and philosophy of programming", amongst other things.

  24. comment
    Comment #48730747

    You're right, they are related. One difference is simply lineage. Capabilities come out of the erights / security world (e.g. [0]), while dependency injection comes from the XP / a…

  25. comment
    Comment #48730202

    What Zig is doing is called "capability passing". I don't know if the Zig team is aware of this field of work, or have independently arrived upon it, but that's what is achieved by…