Hacker News: a57721

New comment by a57721 in "Substack writers, you need a website"

a57721 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:33:11 +0000

I feel like the internet used to be "cool that way", but it's not anymore. You don't do stuff for "engagement", but you probably want some audience and feedback, otherwise why bother publishing your work at all. Nowadays almost all audience got sucked up by the black hole of social media and LLMs, and most authors just scream into the void.

New comment by a57721 in "Latta Java"

a57721 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 03:49:38 +0000

It seems like this project tries to replace various battle tested and widely adopted things like sdkman, serialization libs, build systems, HTTP servers and web frameworks. Even if there's something wrong with any existing solution in every category, your scope looks a bit too ambitious, even the biggest frameworks with many contributors don't dare to do and support all of that.

New comment by a57721 in "Goodbye, Forever, Probably"

a57721 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 22:58:10 +0000

I don't know anything about the author, but they seem rather humble, not giving "do you know who I am" vibes at all, the writing is very humanizing, raises many good and relatable points. I enjoyed reading the whole text without being familiar with the author and context. I only wish them luck and happiness.

New comment by a57721 in "Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off"

a57721 — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:20:42 +0000

Most international broadcasters have left the shortwave band quite some time ago, unfortunately. I think it is still easy to find BBC, China Radio International, Romanian radio, Radio Havana Cuba, but the list is relatively short (compared to 20 years ago).

In the US, WRMI sells its air time to anyone at low prices. It's mostly religious stuff but there are some regular music shows too, I think.

New comment by a57721 in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

a57721 — Thu, 28 May 2026 04:52:11 +0000

> quirky California college radio stations

I listen to SomaFM (https://somafm.com/) and FIP (https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip), they have online streams by genre. When something gets me interested, I look up the artist, and I keep discovering lots of new names, independent labels, etc.

New comment by a57721 in "Formatting a 25M-line codebase overnight"

a57721 — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:42:06 +0000

Normally you don't want to format automatically generated code, you adjust the code generator instead.

New comment by a57721 in "Show HN: Rip.so – a graveyard for dead internet things"

a57721 — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:10:32 +0000

The text on all pages looks very much LLM-generated, and I think all "user comments" there are fake too. (Edit: I mean "what people said" sections.)

I like the idea of the site, but not the execution.

It feels weird to read "nostalgic recollections" that pretend to be human, while in reality come from gen AI.

New comment by a57721 in "Building a JavaScript runtime in one month"

a57721 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:05:52 +0000

It is obviously AI-generated, lots of filler text that communicates nothing of substance. Disappointed to see this on the front page, what a waste of reader's time.

New comment by a57721 in "EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security"

a57721 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:55:39 +0000

Usually when someone decides to share code with the world, they don't want to publish the actual development history. They publish the first version that is ready to go public as the first commit. With enough functionality etc.

New comment by a57721 in "EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security"

a57721 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 21:33:59 +0000

Isn't it normal for the initial commit to be large?

New comment by a57721 in "Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust"

a57721 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 01:25:27 +0000

I have a similar experience, I learned English much later than my first programming languages, and picking up some keywords and basic APIs was never an issue (it was BASIC and C/C++ at the time). Maybe I would occasionally look up in a dictionary what is 'needle' and 'haystack' in a code snippet, and I was puzzled by the ubiquitous "foo, bar, baz", which to my relief turned out to be equally cryptic for the native speakers. I still don't feel about code as a kind of English prose, it occupies a separate part of my brain, compared to the natural languages.

New comment by a57721 in "Recursive Problems Benefit from Recursive Solutions"

a57721 — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 14:11:01 +0000

Scala and Kotlin have 'tailrec' annotation/modifier, though not as sophisticated as you describe.

New comment by a57721 in "UUID package coming to Go standard library"

a57721 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:40:31 +0000

You mention it was 8 years ago, at that point a typical Java dev would be already using Spring Boot for requests and deserializing JSON to POJOs (with Jackson under the hood).

New comment by a57721 in "The Monad Called Free (2014)"

a57721 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:26:16 +0000

I get your point, but the natural numbers do not form a ring or field.

New comment by a57721 in "AI has a deep understanding of how this code works"

a57721 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 06:28:44 +0000

It looks like a parody of LLM delusion, but the PR is oddly specific to be just trolling, and the author also submitted his work to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45982416

New comment by a57721 in "Reinventing how .NET builds and ships (again)"

a57721 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 02:58:21 +0000

I am doing backend in Kotlin, but I must admit that Java has been catching up quickly, and it seems like Kotlin has been shifting its focus to Kotlin Multiplatform. Modern Java is a good, pleasant language and a safer bet.

Gradle with Kotlin DSL is nice, what's annoying is Gradle's constant API reshuffling for the sake of it that breaks plugins. Some plugins also introduce pointless breaking changes just to have a fancier DSL.

The IDE support is not an issue in practice, in my opinion, because IDEA is the best IDE for both Java and Kotlin. The official Kotlin LSP was released 6 months ago, but I haven't tried it.

New comment by a57721 in "Hilbert space: Treating functions as vectors"

a57721 — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 06:06:14 +0000

A vector is always a vector -- an element of something that satisfies the axioms of a vector space. The author starts with the example of R^n, which is a very particular vector space that is finite-dimensional and comes with a "canonical" basis (0,...,1,...,0). In general, a basis will always exist for any vector space (using the axiom of choice), but there is no need to fix it, unless you do some calculations. The analogy with R^n is the only reason the "indices" are mentioned, and I think this only creates more confusion.

> and they aren’t irrational (i.e. they have a finite precision)

No, if you want only rational "indices", then your vector space has a countable basis. Interesting vector spaces in analysis are uncountably infinite dimensional. (And for this reason the usual notion of a basis is not very useful in this context.)

New comment by a57721 in "Maestro Technology Sells Used SSD Drives as New"

a57721 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 03:27:09 +0000

I had a similar experience. When I bought a device with faulty electronic components on Amazon, I wrote a negative review, and almost immediately I was notified that it had been flagged and removed for violating the "community guidelines". Apparently, a seller can do that. My review was a polite explanation of the issues, obviously not violating anything and not accusing the seller of anything, but now I'm sure they had refurbished units or a batch that was known to be faulty.

New comment by a57721 in "Subverting Telegram's end-to-end encryption (2023)"

a57721 — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 18:50:14 +0000

One factual thing that looks off is "the UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets". I'm not in the UK and not following closely the situation there, but "thousands", really? Genuine doubt, would love to see some evidence.

Otherwise, the "doomer manifest" is OK, but the comically inflated ego of Durov is annoying, him thinking that such banal and commonplace sentiments are worth pushing as an alert message to all users, wrapping everything into announcing his birthday (that he doesn't want to celebrate, oh no).

New comment by a57721 in "Rating 26 years of Java changes"

a57721 — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 22:13:57 +0000

It is used for things like "Foo x = new Foo()" where the type is obvious.