Hacker News: defen

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.

New comment by defen in "Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)"

defen — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:16:52 +0000

It's a compelling example of the common phenomenon where a certified genius in one field makes a blunder by attempting to reason from first principles to analyze a problem in another field. Not that such things never work; there are success stories too, but it's not guaranteed.

New comment by defen in "DeepSeek-V4-Flash means LLM steering is interesting again"

defen — Sat, 16 May 2026 20:19:27 +0000

If you were buying a computer today to use for DS4 (budget under 10k) what would you get? I care more about inference quality than speed. Or is it better to wait for the rumored M5 studio?

New comment by defen in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

defen — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:53:13 +0000

> Assuming the port is actually 1:1 without any behavioral changes, these bugs already exist in the Zig code

The "1:1" assumption is a massive unjustified assumption. Rust and Zig have different memory models, so it's possible to do a "1:1" translation of Zig code to Rust and end up with undefined behavior in Rust.

For example, Zig code might make assumptions about lifetimes based on implicit knowledge of which allocator was used for some memory. That could cause problems in Rust if you erase the lifetime https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/main/src/bun_core/string...

New comment by defen in "Cuba says it has run out of fuel, blames U.S. embargo"

defen — Thu, 14 May 2026 17:29:18 +0000

If we're imagining a world where the US can't stop China from doing that, I'd probably go on the internet and complain about it.

New comment by defen in "Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged"

defen — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:14:05 +0000

If LLMs can achieve this level of task in 9 days, why do we even need Bun in the first place? Shouldn't we just write our apps in Rust and not even deal with JS?

New comment by defen in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

defen — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:48:51 +0000

Princeton has so much money that they could make it free for all undergrads and literally never run out of money.

New comment by defen in "I want to live like Costco people"

defen — Thu, 07 May 2026 21:44:56 +0000

Historically speaking is that "enough food to keep someone alive for a year" or "the amount of rice one person eats in a year"?

New comment by defen in "Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement"

defen — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:39:12 +0000

One man illegally downloading copyrighted material is a crime. Multinational corporations illegally downloading copyrighted material is the only remaining growth area in the US economy and vital to national security.

New comment by defen in "Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan"

defen — Sun, 03 May 2026 18:31:59 +0000

Whoa, since when is there a Jagged Alliance 3? Is it any good? JA2 is one of my favorite games of all time

New comment by defen in "The Problem That Built an Industry"

defen — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:08:50 +0000

It's the LLM-generated-text signature.

New comment by defen in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

defen — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:57:36 +0000

let's take a second to think about the threat vectors here. The two obvious ones I can think of are: "AI hallucinates and tells you to put non-food into the food" and "AI hallucinates and gives you unsafe prep instructions" (e.g. "heat the chicken to an internal temperature of 110 degrees"). For both of those, it's not clear why "random recipe from an internet blog" is safer than something the AI generates. At some level if someone is preparing your food you need to trust that they know how to prepare food, no matter where they're getting their instructions from.