HackerLangs
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

aeonfox

346 karmajoined last year
Hi! I'm a software engineer from east coast Australia that has been architecting, building, and maintaining products for over 20 years. My experience ranges from full-stack web, infra, mobile apps, to video graphics and optimisation.

Experience: Elixir/Phoenix, Typescript, .NET, Django/Flask, Svelte/Vue/Angular, Android (inc. Jetpack Compose), iOS (inc. SwiftUI), AWS, Cloud VPS, Terraform, Ansible

Fishing for Elixir development work. Working from UTC+10/11.

[email protected]

Submissions

The groundbreaking AI tool helping Victorian rangers protect native species

abc.net.au
2 points·by aeonfox·2 months ago·0 comments

Type inference of all constructs in Elixir

elixir-lang.org
5 points·by aeonfox·6 months ago·0 comments

Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density

donutlab.com
276 points·by aeonfox·6 months ago·268 comments

30k watt light bulb experiments

youtube.com
2 points·by aeonfox·8 months ago·0 comments

Australia's Forgotten Electronics Giant

youtube.com
4 points·by aeonfox·9 months ago·0 comments

Show HN: Hacker News as a biological simulation (with time travel)

hackernews.life
1 points·by aeonfox·9 months ago·0 comments

Show HN: Hacker News as a Primordial Soup

hackernews.life
6 points·by aeonfox·9 months ago·2 comments

comments

aeonfox
·5 hours ago·discuss
This is where fuzzing would be useful. We have an at-least-parity-bug-level oracle with the reference PostgreSQL implementation. Just build a generator of queries (both invalid and valid) and ensure the output matches. The yardstick is how many log10(queries) it can go on average before a discrepancy is found.
aeonfox
·11 days ago·discuss
Or gosh, just read my comment! I said in somewhat gloomy places. Sometimes people are working when the 10 minutes of sunlight comes out. Often that's not enough time to get down the elevator and get outside before the sun hides behinds the clouds again, even if you can take the daytime break.
aeonfox
·11 days ago·discuss
The article cites another study by Richard Weller:

> Sure enough, when he exposed volunteers to the equivalent of 30 minutes of summer sunlight without sunscreen, their nitric oxide levels went up and their blood pressure went down.

I can't find information on the methods for this particular study. So I'm curious if he just set up UV lights on a timer and sat his subjects under them. That's something anyone can set up in their home office if they live somewhere gloomy. Instead of taking a vitamin D pill, turn the timer switch on for 30 minutes of a properly calibrated and positioned low-dose UV light (and out of direct line of sight to anyone not under it)

Or just take a nitric oxide supplement :)
aeonfox
·12 days ago·discuss
Elixir is not just expressive, it's highly conventional. I've found best practice code usually converges on the same idiomatic patterns, and well written codebases look very similar to each other in style
aeonfox
·24 days ago·discuss
> I feel like most would just pay for the thing that is already setup and ready for them

Nothing stopping turnkey OSS AI hardware being productised, including niceties like opt-in automated updates. If the trend continues of models becoming smaller and more capable for everyday use, it also derisks against obsolescence.
aeonfox
·last month·discuss
> philosophically insulated

As an outsider, I'm curious on how?
aeonfox
·last month·discuss
A better example are sodium ion batteries, which are about to take off in a big way

https://www.catl.com/en/news/6812.html
aeonfox
·last month·discuss
The difference with biological brains is that the 'weights' (or synaptic action potentials) are updated with greater frequency. If one were reaching to make some kind of analogy to consciousness, this update frequency could be considered the 'resolution' of consciousness.
aeonfox
·last month·discuss
I've definitely found LLM code to be syntactically/semantically correct in one-shot pretty much all the time. It's usually the functional specification/behaviour that's found wanting.

Typing probably makes sense where memory-correctness needs to be enforced (e.g. Rust), and inferring those semantics require a much wider context. But memory-correctness isn't really something that afflicts BEAM languages.
aeonfox
·last month·discuss
How did you score freelance Elixir work?
aeonfox
·last month·discuss
OP might be referring to Jose Valim's 2023 ElixirConf talk where he's explaining why Elixir should go down the path of types.

He gives a lot more nuanced take than 'types are useless', which is more like 'types are less useful than people think in the context of Elixir development'. (Which makes sense because he's in the middle of implementing a type system for Elixir.)

https://youtu.be/giYbq4HmfGA?t=571
aeonfox
·2 months ago·discuss
?
aeonfox
·2 months ago·discuss
Separate to the self-host/datacentre argument, it would be interesting to see a speed/performance/watts-per-token leaderboard between leading models. Which model is the most watt-efficient?
aeonfox
·2 months ago·discuss
> Using mouse motion as a control scheme is particularly genius - how did no one think of this before?

Point-and-click adventure games and the golden age of Macromedia Flash might be before your time? This really reminds me of novelty sites built in Flash which was all point and click and vector animation. A lot of those sites are lost to time, or perhaps hidden in some deep crevice of the web archive.

> I particularly like the points where the mouse control is taken away from you

One thing Flash couldn't do. But it had plenty of RCE exploits, so maybe it could.
aeonfox
·3 months ago·discuss
> the user doesn't really care all that much

They do. But not in the way that you think.

I recently switched from Spotify (well known Electron-based app) to Apple Music (well known native app). The move was mostly an ethical one, but I must say, the UI functionality and app features are basically poverty in comparison. One tiny example, navigating from playlist entry to artist requires multiple interactions. This is just one of many frustrations I've had with the app. But hey, it has beautiful liquid glass effects!

In short: iteration time matters. Times from design to implementation, to internal review, to real user feedback, and back to design from each phase should be as fast as possible. You don't get the same velocity as you do in native. Add to that you have to design and implement in quadruplicate, iOS design for iOS, Android for Android, MacOS for Mac, Windows design for windows. All that is why people use Electon.
aeonfox
·3 months ago·discuss
> really bad at native

Yikes. I spent 15 years developing native on both mobile and desktop. If you think that native has the same design flexibility as HTML/CSS, you're objectively wrong.

By design, each operation system limits you to their particular design language, and styling of components is hidden by the API making forward-compatible customisation impossible. There's no escaping that. And if you acknowledge that fact, you can't then claim native has the same design flexibility as HTML/CSS. If you don't acknowledge that fact, you're unhinged from reality.

There's pros and cons to the two approaches, of course. But that's not what's being debated here.
aeonfox
·3 months ago·discuss
Who said anything about mockups? Design goes all the way from concept to real-world. If a designer can specify declaratively how that will look, feel, and animate, that's far better than a developer taking a mockup and trying their hardest to approximate some storyboards. Even as a developer working against mockups, I can move much faster with HTML/CSS than I can with native, and I'm well experienced at both (yes, that includes every tech I mentioned). With native, I either have to compromise on the vision, or I have to spend a long time fighting the system to make it happen (...and even then)
aeonfox
·3 months ago·discuss
And HTML/CSS/JS are far more powerful for designing than any of SwiftUI/IB on Apple, Jetpack/XML on Android, or WPF/WinUI on Windows, leaving aside that this is what designers, design platforms and AI models already work best with. Even if all the major OSes converged on one solution, it still wouldn't compete on ergonomics or declarative power for designing.
aeonfox
·3 months ago·discuss
> unlikely to ever be competitive

Bold claim to say these challenges will never be surmounted. Either a more-economic technology would have to mature first, or civilisation halt progress for that to be true. If scientific advances could yield miniaturised photonics that offer a significant cost/benefit over any contemporary technology the concept will still be pursued. Unless you are suggesting that it is theoretically and physically impossible?
aeonfox
·3 months ago·discuss
Are there any polls (or any educated guesses) gauging what proportion of people who identify as Zionists want equal status with all Palestinians (particularly democratic rights) within the bounds of what was once Mandatory Palestine?