Hacker News: defen

New comment by defen in "Buz – A fork of Bun using modern Zig, with sub-1s incremental builds"

defen — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 22:42:26 +0000

iOS

New comment by defen in "Buz – A fork of Bun using modern Zig, with sub-1s incremental builds"

defen — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:47:14 +0000

Not sure about op but if I post here from my phone I get those. Example: “quoted string”

New comment by defen in "Em dashes are amazing"

defen — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:35:34 +0000

That’s a common trope I see in “old” books (most recently for me in _Old Mortality_) that I can’t recall ever seeing in modern ones - deliberately obscured words intended to convey a notion of realism without naming an actual place or person. I guess it’s the 555 phone number of old books.

New comment by defen in "Dupes took over the world"

defen — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 07:03:29 +0000

So what are the good Australian boot/shoe brands now?

New comment by defen in "Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship"

defen — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:07:02 +0000

"US jurisdiction" also includes foreign heads of state residing in, and present in, their own country. I don't think a theoretical definition of jurisdiction is tenable; only a realist one.

New comment by defen in "An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time"

defen — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 19:56:06 +0000

Is this a very obscure Norm Macdonald reference?

New comment by defen in "Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed"

defen — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 23:49:43 +0000

How does that work when you don't have enough assets to cover the cost of the thing you broke or stole?

New comment by defen in "Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity"

defen — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:22:33 +0000

I bought my 8 year old daughter the hardcover box set for Christmas. When she opened it her initial reaction was definitely "oh...thanks" (she was clearly not excited about it but wanted to be nice). Within a week it was borderline impossible to get her to put them down and go to sleep at night.

New comment by defen in "Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity"

defen — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:53:14 +0000

There are some absolutely fantastic web comics out there but none of them have had the cultural impact of Calvin and Hobbes. I don't see how any of them could, to be honest. Even though the technical means of distribution are there at near-zero cost, there's no logistical way in practice to get a webcomic in front of a vast cross-section of society for an entire decade.

New comment by defen in "Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers"

defen — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:00:20 +0000

IIRC that is how Uber implemented their "Greyball" system, which was designed to prevent government employees from actually hailing rides, without completely locking them out of the system (same idea as "shadowbanning"). One team works on "figure out where people work" with the pitch that you can improve routing and ride-share capacity for predictable demand. Another team works on "Display fake data to users" with the pitch being "This is for testing the mobile app in new markets with no drivers yet". Another team works on "mark a user as unable to successfully hail rides" so you can test the failure paths in the app. Then, only the people at the top have the full picture and can put the pieces together to shadowban the regulators.

New comment by defen in "Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap"

defen — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 02:54:59 +0000

Martin Amis level prose is neither possible nor desirable for a technical blog post.

New comment by defen in "Waymo Premier"

defen — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:37:08 +0000

How much liability coverage are you getting for ~ $100/month? In other words if you injure or kill someone with your vehicle how much of that cost will be covered by your insurance company? With Waymo the answer is "not my problem".

New comment by defen in "Waymo Premier"

defen — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:28:31 +0000

I've never lived in Los Angeles but the one that gets you in San Francisco if you do street parking is the street cleaning, and the random vandalizations.

New comment by defen in "When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement"

defen — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:36:55 +0000

Vibe coding is the breakthrough. There's always been "no-code" solutions to problems in various business domains, but they were invariably janky, underpowered, and/or overpriced. Now we have a way for domain experts to go directly from ACTUAL natural language directly to implementation in a real programming language, fully automated, in minutes or hours. How is that not a science-fiction level breakthrough? In 2011 if anyone had said that would be possible "in 15 years", I think most professionals at the time would not have replied with "yeah it's coming but your timeline is off". It would have been "you have no fucking idea what you're talking about".

New comment by defen in "Nabokov's pale fire: the lost 'father of all hypertext demos'? (2011)"

defen — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:49:11 +0000

Pale Fire is one of my favorite books of all time. BTW the crown jewels can be found in the book, if you know where to look :)

New comment by defen in "Zig: Build System Reworked"

defen — Sat, 30 May 2026 19:51:30 +0000

I used exactly what you posted; should I make an empty hello-world type of file instead?

New comment by defen in "Zig: Build System Reworked"

defen — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:40:24 +0000

> Just creating a file with dummy test like

> if (2 * 2 != 5) { @panic("fail"); }

> And running `zig test file.zig -OReleaseSafe` takes a couple seconds on my computer.

What kind of computer are you on? I just ran that test (latest master build, first run):

   ~ % time zig test file.zig -OReleaseSafe
   file.zig:1:17: error: expected type expression, found '{'
   if (2 * 2 != 5) { @panic("fail"); }
                ^
   zig test file.zig -OReleaseSafe  0.03s user 0.44s system 505% cpu 0.094 total

Granted I'm on an M4 Mac but I wouldn't expect another system to be 20x slower.

New comment by defen in "Zig: Build System Reworked"

defen — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:17:27 +0000

I love Zig and I am generally very happy with Andrew's benevolent dictatorship and the benefits of having one single smart tasteful person in charge of decisions, but the unused variable one really hurts. My guess is that he's seen what a mess C code can be with regard to warnings and so is just totally unwilling to compromise by adding the concept of warnings to Zig. But if I had one wish about the language, it would be for a command-line flag to disable unused variable errors. So much effort has been put into making iteration fast (all this build system stuff, the custom backend, incremental compilation) and then there's just this giant blocker preventing fast iteration on the editing side.

New comment by defen in "The real cost of owning a home"

defen — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:01:27 +0000

Multiple people in this thread have mentioned the Seattle real estate market going to shit (for sellers) - is that related to tech layoffs or is something else going on? San Francisco's market is just as crazy as ever.

New comment by defen in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"

defen — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:46:09 +0000

If OP hadn't written his reply to 'dhouston 19 years ago I for sure would have flagged it as LLM-generated.