Hacker News: e3bc54b2

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "A Eulogy for Vim"

e3bc54b2 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:58:12 +0000

I've been reading and reading about DeVault for more than a decade now. If I can point to one person on the internet and definitively say that their today's version is better than a decade ago, it would be him. (Yes, I can say that he appears to have improved better in this time than I myself have, which can be interpreted in a more than one way).

In fact, Andrew Kelley, whom I respect fair bit, also chose to stand behind redict, Drew's fork of redis with similar observation.

People change over time, some of them for the better, and I personally like to give them a chance. Some of Drew's opinions and expressions are still a bit much for me, but that is just us both being human.

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "Java 26 is here"

e3bc54b2 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:34:43 +0000

> a better build system is sorely needed - one of the things that Go / Rust did right

Honestly there are only two reasons I wouldn't pick up Java for personal projects, difficult to build single executable (Graal is still very un-ergonomic), ridiculous build systems.

I can kind of live with former, but Gradle is so very extraordinarily terrible that I don't know where to begin. Problem is, it solves some real problems (in extremely bad way) that people keep using it.

I long of a cargo-style revolution in Java world. (No, the newly popped up alternatives haven't really cut it so far)

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?"

e3bc54b2 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 05:24:49 +0000

> It should be a distillation of the session and/or the prompts, at bare minimum.

Huh, I thought that's what commit message is for.

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "When employees feel slighted, they work less"

e3bc54b2 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:52:21 +0000

> How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?

Oh they don't! In exactly the same way US didn't. Right now, a lot of factors have put enough tailwind into Chinese economy and the inertia is a bitch to retreat, as can be seen with US itself. These tailwinds are strong enough that they lift everybody up, even considering the corruption taking its share.

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "Bluetui – A TUI for managing Bluetooth on Linux"

e3bc54b2 — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 17:05:20 +0000

> all come out at “question mark in a box” (Chrome, Edge) or “codepoint hex in box” (FF) on the old Win10 box that I'm currently trying to retire. The come out find on a similarly default Win11 setup.

This is pretty funny to me, because on plain ol' Firefox on NixOS everything looks just fine!

We've come pretty far from the days when things were randomly broken on Linux..

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "Modern Linux tools"

e3bc54b2 — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:00:46 +0000

> we remember the days where systems only had vi and not even nano was a default

What are you talking about? I'm still living those days in modern day AWS with latest EC2 machines!

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies"

e3bc54b2 — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 15:27:17 +0000

> Après moi, le déluge

That phrase is chilling, and perfectly describes what I've been feeling like where the society at large is heading.

Thank you for introducing it to me.

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "Austria's military just ditched Microsoft for open-source LibreOffice"

e3bc54b2 — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 10:52:35 +0000

> for me that's _peak incompetence_

Empires always fall from within. It was inconceivable for a young me to ever think of day when MS Office would be unworkable. Advance couple of decades and MS 365 Copilot is just the thing that just doesn't work. Not because somebody exploited a bug and created unviewable doc, but because MS decided to pile on bugs while leaving old ones in..

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "China's 200M gig workers are a warning for the world"

e3bc54b2 — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 05:18:57 +0000

> Just don't complain when large corporations copy your work one day with no legal recourse.

To be fair, that is the schadenfreude. Large corporations have been copying works of little people for ages. They only started crying about 'IP theft' when someone bigger (China) started doing the same to them, and to make it worse, most of the corps willingly handed the IP over because they wanted cheap exploitable labor.

Implementing a safe garbage collector in Rust

e3bc54b2 — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 15:37:29 +0000

Article URL: https://coredumped.dev/2022/04/11/implementing-a-safe-garbage-collector-in-rust/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45150225

Points: 26

# Comments: 0

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "Why language models hallucinate"

e3bc54b2 — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 13:32:26 +0000

Hallucination is all an LLM does. That is their nature, to hallucinate.

We just happen to find some of these hallucinations useful.

Let's not pretend that hallucination is a byproduct. The usefulness is the byproduct. That is what surprised the original researchers on transformer performance, and that is why the 'attention is all you need' paper remains such a phenomenon.

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks"

e3bc54b2 — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 18:16:02 +0000

The zeroeth law of Wikipedia – The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline"

e3bc54b2 — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 14:32:07 +0000

As the other comment said, LLMs are not an abstraction.

An abstraction is a deterministic, pure function, than when given A always returns B. This allows the consumer to rely on the abstraction. This reliance frees up the consumer from having to implement the A->B, thus allowing it to move up the ladder.

LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic. Probabilistic is NOT deterministic. Which means the consumer is never really sure if given A the returned value is B. Which means the consumer now has to check if the returned value is actually B, and depending on how complex A->B transformation is, the checking function is equivalent in complexity as implementing the said abstraction in the first place.

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "Brazil offers America a lesson in democratic maturity"

e3bc54b2 — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 15:24:54 +0000

I hope it does that, as I hope the same for USA.

Growing the Java Language [video]

e3bc54b2 — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 04:13:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz7Or9C0TpM

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44993084

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils"

e3bc54b2 — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 15:15:06 +0000

simply staying on stable channel makes this a non-problem :)

Besides, Nix is even better for such breakages. If GCC breaks you packages, the system does not build and never gets into broken state, all the while old system remains available and kicking.

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "GitHub was having issues"

e3bc54b2 — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 16:19:23 +0000

Hetzner charges extra for IPv4 address, as I believe most of them do. I know because I went through the same crap.

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "A ChatGPT Pro subscription costs 38.6 months of income in low-income countries"

e3bc54b2 — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 17:18:17 +0000

The morons who want to replace developers with these so called tools already feel like developers need babysitting. Partly because they suck at giving requirements or sticking to them or both. It will be fun to see them finding out the devs do more that bashing code.

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?"

e3bc54b2 — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 17:05:52 +0000

LLMs did not destroy copyright. They inky destroyed copyright for the little guy. As I understand it, neither of the FAMANG have put their main codebase in training dataset. If I train an LLM on the leaked sources I'll get sued right down to my undies. But all the LLM vendors took my code, betrayed the license term about attribution/viral licensing of derived content, but I am told to get stuffed.

I am assuming you are commenting in good faith, but it does tingle my gaslight-senses.

New comment by e3bc54b2 in "Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?"

e3bc54b2 — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 16:25:49 +0000

Yes.

I always licensed my projects under GPL variants. That contract was broken by LLM vendors. So now I'm taking my toys and going home.

All my new projects are hosted on Sourcehut. I trust Drew when he says they are not letting LLM bots have at it.

Its not just the dev either. I'm no longer posting any content on blogs. Almost all of my other online interactions have moved to private channels and closed forums. I'm no longer giving my work away for free, unless you've passed the entry tests.