Hacker News: Zecc

New comment by Zecc in "The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)"

Zecc — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:36:49 +0000

> astronut

I honestly can't say for sure whether that was intentional or an actual typo. Good job.

New comment by Zecc in "Making your own programming language is easier than you think (but also harder)"

Zecc — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:56:12 +0000

Elastic tabspots everywhere would be ideal. But in the real world I think 'tabs to indent, spaces to align' is the superior way, as every dumb text editor will support it.

New comment by Zecc in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

Zecc — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:34:33 +0000

If you're good at SQL, or SQL-like languages like Linq, it might be more efficient precisely writing a reasonably complex query than trying to explain it in detail to an AI.

New comment by Zecc in "Who Asked for This?"

Zecc — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 23:54:24 +0000

> You're absolutely right

This got a smirk out of me.

New comment by Zecc in "Modern Rendering Culling Techniques"

Zecc — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:09:22 +0000

Unless it's being observed externally it is in a state of quantum uncertainty, I think.

New comment by Zecc in "AI chatbots could be making you stupider"

Zecc — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:33:17 +0000

> if you [...] mentally integrate them properly.

There it is.

New comment by Zecc in "Union types in C# 15"

Zecc — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:45:53 +0000

> Careful not to mix unions with sum types, though. The key distinction is that the latter are disjunct sets, even if you "sum" together the same type twice, you can always tell which "way" you went.

This is a really good point. I'd love to be able to have a sum type of two strings ("escaped" and "unescaped"); or any two kinds of the same type really, to model two kinds of the same type where one has already passed some sort of validation and the other one hasn't.

Edit to add: I figure what I want is for enums to be extended such that different branches are able to carry different properties.

Edit again (I should learn to think things through before posting. sorry): I suppose it can be faked using a union of different wrapper types, and in fact it might be the best way to do it so then methods can take just one of the types in arguments and maybe even provide different overloads.

New comment by Zecc in "Music for Programming"

Zecc — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 06:20:49 +0000

Which brings us to: SpaceChem's soundtrack.

New comment by Zecc in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"

Zecc — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:23:33 +0000

Elon Musk's ears are burning.

New comment by Zecc in "21,864 Yugoslavian .yu domains"

Zecc — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:43:10 +0000

I don't remember which HN thread I've heard this joke originally from, but...

People in Montenegro: it's not .yu, it's .me

New comment by Zecc in "Death of the IDE?"

Zecc — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 02:40:39 +0000

> The core of what we were doing (Writing code) dictated the core of our tool kit (IDE). > > Now that we're not writing code anymore it's very exciting to see how this unfolds in the tool kit.

So maybe the text area in your IDE becomes read-only. Even when not actively debugging, you still need to read code and efficiently browse through it as you review it. Because you always review code, don't you? Don't you??

New comment by Zecc in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

Zecc — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:41:47 +0000

For what is worth, I prefer the name pomato to totato.

New comment by Zecc in "Show HN: Fixing Google Nano Banana Pixel Art with Rust"

Zecc — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:42:33 +0000

For what it's worth, it's what caught my attention. I wouldn't have found it so captivating if it had only said "Fixing Google Nano Banana Pixel Art". To be clear, it's not because of Rust in particular. It would have been the same if it said "with C#", or "with Python", or even just "programmatically". And on that note: I feel disappointed. I thought I would be reading about the development process, and not just a product presentation.

New comment by Zecc in "Prediction-Encoded Pixels image format"

Zecc — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:06:44 +0000

If someone makes a presentation about this format, it will be a PEP talk.

New comment by Zecc in "Faking a JPEG"

Zecc — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 16:15:43 +0000

> Once (a) models are capable enough to distinguish between semi-plausible garbage and possibly relevant text

https://xkcd.com/810/

New comment by Zecc in "Derivation and Intuition behind Poisson distribution"

Zecc — Mon, 05 May 2025 09:05:21 +0000

It breaks scrolling with the arrow keys or PgDn/PgUp as well.

New comment by Zecc in "Firefox tab groups are here"

Zecc — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 06:43:16 +0000

After a certain number of open tabs, the titles are less truncated with vertical tabs than horizontal tabs. You also have more of the titles in your center view if you have the text distributed in a more rectangular shape than a technically-also-rectangular-but-much-more-elongated shape.

New comment by Zecc in "Giving Software Away for Free"

Zecc — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 03:28:25 +0000

> I haven't seen GitHub break a working URL that they have hosted in the 17+ years since they first launched.

I'd like to have working links in the directory tree again, please. Some of us like middle-clicking to open files in new tabs.

New comment by Zecc in "Succinct data structures"

Zecc — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:55:27 +0000

Since there are _literally_ people who use, and have been using for a while, the word without the same exact meaning as we both agree on... well.

Having said that, I will join you in this fight.

New comment by Zecc in "JavaScript Temporal Is Coming"

Zecc — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 11:35:51 +0000

About time. (not sorry)