Viewing profile — sweeneyrod

Actually it's very controversial if we should spend marginal resources on deworming. It may have very large economic benefits, but the evidence isn't clear ( https://unherd.com/202…

I agree that dune is worse in many important ways than the build systems of languages like Rust and Go (where they were developed at the same time as the language, rather than 20 y…

It's fine to trade when you know something that the general public doesn't. Indeed that's really the only time you should trade: you presumably want to make a profit, and society w…

I believe Ruby and OCaml have both anonymous positional arguments and keyword arguments with punning (i.e. `f ~arg` expands to `f ~arg:arg` in OCaml).

You can get those cool features in languages such as OCaml/F#/Scala/Haskell, and then you don't have to worry about managing memory because you have a GC.

It is quite possible that an Erlang dev billing 3x more than a PHP dev will be more than 3x as productive.

There is an interesting take on command-line code review from Jane Street here https://blog.janestreet.com/putting-the-i-back-in-ide-toward...

Unit tests and "type systems" have very little in common with Kubernetes and GraphQL.

It's interesting that they have a much higher valuation (and from some cursory research, moderately more users) than Depop, despite (AFAIK) being completely obscure in the US/UK.

There are various universities that teach Haskell or similar languages in first year.

Yes, I think everyone would agree that OCaml has gone from competing with the predominant high-level language of 1996 (C) to the predominant languages of today (definitely not C). …

Would you consider using a non-GC language that isn't Rust outside the various domains where C/C++ is the only realistic (non-Rust) choice?

I think you are definitely pointing at something that has been a weakness of OCaml for a long time (but as you say is happily changing). But I wouldn't characterise it as elitism; …

I don't think memory safety bugs are the most widespread kind at all, unless you add the qualification "in languages with manual memory management".

As well as the Amodei siblings in charge, various other ex-OpenAI people are involved (Chris Olah, Amanda Askell, Jack Clark).

I am pretty sure anyone for whom the notation in `\forall n \in \mathbb{N}` presents a barrier to learning meaningful amounts of type theory will have greater problems from lack of…

I think many mercurial users would disagree with you about git.

"But the argument thrives because there's a kernel of truth to it, in that if you wanted to pick a programming language based purely on expressive shininess, you'd write in OCaml."…

Also, if no multicore blocks you from using OCaml, you also have to stay away from Python/Ruby/JavaScript which also lack it.

What is a program where `--help` is dangerous?

If you care about having nice self-contained commits, what is your process for sending rough work-in-progress to colleagues, or to continuous integration?

"it's hard to make a cogent argument that Paul Pelosi, who is by all measures a private citizen, should be restricted from trading specific stocks" No it's not. If you grant that N…

In which country?

"analyst" covers all entry-level roles. The analysts with total compensation close to the base salary of 50k (e.g. developers) won't work crazy hours. The bankers who do have crazy…