Hacker News: fergie

New comment by fergie in "AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware"

fergie — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:10:25 +0000

How does this actually work? Are they talking about browser fingerprinting or something else?

New comment by fergie in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

fergie — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 05:57:45 +0000

All of this is correct, but it still requires PHP on the server- this will not work in HTML itself.

New comment by fergie in "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?"

fergie — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 05:56:03 +0000

As a philosophy major, I can confirm that the field generally rewards those who make good arguments for bad ideas, and that for reasons that I never fully understood, texts always seem to be far more verbose than necessary.

New comment by fergie in "Ask HN: What is the current trajectory of a senior engineer?"

fergie — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 11:15:25 +0000

Ultimately you still need somebody to decide what we are going to tell the machines what to do, and then actually tell the machines what to do, and it doesn't really matter if that is in JavaScript or plain English.

There does _seem_ to be some pressure on the top end of SWE salaries. Its possible that this is just wishful thinking, but if true, I suspect that it has more to do with an increase in job applicants rather than a decrease in actual work. AI seems to have driven up the amount of applications received for every vacant position.

New comment by fergie in "Do Frameworks Matter Anymore?"

fergie — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 08:42:23 +0000

In web development:

Frameworks- possibly.

TypeScript, and other metalanguages- probably not.

New comment by fergie in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

fergie — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 06:32:43 +0000

Agree that handling state is also a big part of js frameworks.

New comment by fergie in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

fergie — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:51:28 +0000

> It would tie in an additional feature with potential future incompatibilities

No offense but this is a bit of a non-argument that could be applied to just about any development in HTML.

> There’s also just not a super great reason to do it.

Most web dev frameworks exist in large part to solve the problem of templating. (yes, they do other stuff, but templating is the central problem that they are solving)

New comment by fergie in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

fergie — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:48:48 +0000

They embed webpages into other webpages and definitely have their place, and could arguably be used more, but they are definitely not a way to consolidate a single piece of HTML from constituent pieces.

New comment by fergie in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

fergie — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:44:02 +0000

mate, I've been a full time web developer for 26 years, plus the time I spent at uni :)

New comment by fergie in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

fergie — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:43:17 +0000

Big fan of what you did there- baffling that it was beaten out by Webcomponents. I feel like should be brought back.

New comment by fergie in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

fergie — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:40:40 +0000

Yes, partial refresh strategies are interesting, but its an adjacent problem.

New comment by fergie in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

fergie — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:36:51 +0000

Thats XSLT which is tragically being removed from browsers as we speak: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/deprecating-x...

I say tragically, because XSLT was indeed the only sort-of workaround that was available for templating in the browser, even if it was limited to v1 rather than the much more useful v2 and v3.

New comment by fergie in "A look at the math that OpenAI claims computes faster Fourier transforms"

fergie — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:27:34 +0000

This made me chortle:

> Did I read this paper? Of course not. No one at OpenAI read this paper either, so why should I? I did what every other mathematician in the world does with AI slop mathematics: I fed it back into the slop machine and ran an information retrieval session with a chatbot interface to extract salient facts. Anthropomorphically speaking: I asked ChatGPT what it thinks about its own output. This is how we do mathematical research now. What a world.

New comment by fergie in "AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities"

fergie — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 06:38:52 +0000

Not wrong, but applies to any software whether open source or not.

New comment by fergie in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

fergie — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 06:16:21 +0000

SSIs are not widely supported any more, and were never a part of the HTML standard

(but yes- I used these a lot like 25 years ago)

New comment by fergie in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

fergie — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 06:14:57 +0000

Yes, but then you need php

Why is there no direct support for templating in HTML itself?

New comment by fergie in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

fergie — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 05:56:40 +0000

W3C: Why can't we just have and be done with it?

New comment by fergie in "Claude Opus 5.5"

fergie — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:37:32 +0000

The colours are suspiciously consistent across every svg. Like why should the bike always be that shade of red for example? It does seem to be trained on this problem.

New comment by fergie in "Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake"

fergie — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:15:53 +0000

I read this article and was beginning to feel like it wasn't really going anywhere or making good arguments. Was disappointed, although in hindsight not surprised to find out that it was AI-slop.

Stop upvoting AI-slop people!

New comment by fergie in "AI Robots – When will they be in our homes"

fergie — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 10:28:29 +0000

I am suspicious of "articles" in this format. They seem to be simultaneously pushing an agenda whilst deliberately targeting midwits.