Hacker News: anitil

New comment by anitil in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

anitil — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:39:36 +0000

I've had a colleague call it out 'Is this AI slop? Please write your opinion'. I don't think I could do that myself, but I really appreciate that they were drawing attention to it

New comment by anitil in "Nontrailing separators do not spark joy"

anitil — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:38:08 +0000

I think 'do not spark joy' is the perfect description. Does it significantly ruin my day? No. Do I just feel a little bit less content with the world when my clean diff has an extra noop deletion and insertion? Yes.

Interesting too that javascript (but not json) seems to allow it. And a comment on that page highlights javascript's _sparse arrays_ which I'd never heard of [0]

[0] https://dev.to/damil/beautiful-perl-feature-trailing-commas-... ctrl-f for 'sparse'

New comment by anitil in "Test-case reducers are underappreciated debugging tools"

anitil — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 03:01:52 +0000

What a great idea to include tree sitter

New comment by anitil in "Test-case reducers are underappreciated debugging tools"

anitil — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:57:19 +0000

> Unfortunately, Shrink Ray has no principled way for me to express this. Fortunately, I have no principles, and use unsafe hacks like this

I really appreciated the humour in this article. I've always wanted to use creduce, but it looks like Shrink Ray is easier to set up and get running (pip install, set up a harness, run)

New comment by anitil in "Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?"

anitil — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 05:50:21 +0000

I remember a Planet Money episode, but I can't find it now. Maybe it was NPR instead

New comment by anitil in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

anitil — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:16:38 +0000

I've effectively dropped reddit because they've made the mobile web version near-unusable (and I find old.reddit.com difficult on mobile). Honestly, it's an improvement in my life. I don't know how I found myself spending so much time on it for so little benefit

New comment by anitil in "Gooey: A GPU-accelerated UI framework for Zig"

anitil — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:37:03 +0000

I've always loved this project, I've used it a lot for making my scripts into internal tools for everyone in the team, even non-technical staff

New comment by anitil in "The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription"

anitil — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 04:06:37 +0000

> people using them feel more productive but take longer than using GUIs

I hope that this isn't the case for me poking around in vim, using ctags etc. But sadly it may be true.

New comment by anitil in "Decades of Effort Restore Steelhead and Salmon Passage on Alameda Creek"

anitil — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:22:15 +0000

That's really interesting, I didn't think you'd be able to spot nests from the shore like that

New comment by anitil in "The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)"

anitil — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:20:25 +0000

Oh 100%, I was responding to the parent who's response was 'No'. Even if you have 100% ban on strcpy and z-strings you're forced to use them in certain cases (like argv), and I was pointing out that sometimes we engage with certain conceits in a job interview, and by refusing to engage with it you're giving out a signal that you'll be difficult to work with

New comment by anitil in "Decades of Effort Restore Steelhead and Salmon Passage on Alameda Creek"

anitil — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:17:17 +0000

That's amazing thanks for sharing it

New comment by anitil in "Decades of Effort Restore Steelhead and Salmon Passage on Alameda Creek"

anitil — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 06:37:18 +0000

That's really surprising that they could survive with such a small range! How are they counted during their migration?

New comment by anitil in "The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)"

anitil — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:15:45 +0000

Well in an interview I guess something like "Of course we shouldn't allow C-strings in general outside of syscalls and argv, but for the purpose of the exercise...." And now you've shown that you know what you're talking about and that you won't be difficult to work with.

New comment by anitil in "SQLite now has a machine-generated bug forum"

anitil — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:19:47 +0000

Interestingly, sqlite has had many AI-generated bug reports, so Dr Hipp has created a forum only for those reports. As one of the most-tested codebases out there, I'm surprised to find something like 50 reports, and most of them look reasonable, or at least they have fixes provided.

Some are trivial (formatting errors in the cli not the lib), others seem more serious.

SQLite now has a machine-generated bug forum

anitil — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:19:47 +0000

Article URL: https://sqlite.org/bugs/forum

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48318602

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by anitil in "Freediving, Embodiment and Humanity"

anitil — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:20:48 +0000

I find it very quiet and calm compared to when I'm near scuba divers - I can often hear them from 50+m away. I've never tried scuba myself though, so I can't directly compare them

New comment by anitil in "A new EDIT tool for LLM agents"

anitil — Wed, 20 May 2026 05:26:20 +0000

A fun read until the got banned!

New comment by anitil in "VoIP brings back old-fashioned pay phones to rural Vermont (2025)"

anitil — Mon, 18 May 2026 05:22:40 +0000

Do you know why they did this? I wonder if they worked out that the advertising space was more valuable than retiring the service, or some other reason

New comment by anitil in "The Worlds Left to Conquer"

anitil — Sun, 17 May 2026 23:26:57 +0000

Interesting! I suppose my thought is that once you scale up to running a team of recruiters you end up incentivising behaviours like 'build a list of CVs', 'pattern-match on keywords' and other pointless nonsense. I have run in to a couple of decent recruiters and their behaviour was much closer to 'have a coffee and chat'. I hope you'll talk about your experience because I'm keen to hear about it.

New comment by anitil in "Microbial Dark Matter and the Search for Life on Earth"

anitil — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:47:49 +0000

This was a really fun read. I loved the retelling of the explosion of new discoveries -

"A consistent pattern in the new era of discovery has been that some bizarre microbe is discovered living in a preposterous environment like a hydrothermal vent, and then a couple of years later we find out it also makes up 40% of our intestinal flora"