Hacker News: junek

New comment by junek in "Why is AI so slow to spread?"

junek — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 10:08:14 +0000

Let me guess: you hold some crank views that aren't shared by the people who maintain Wikipedia, and you find that upsetting? That's not a conspiracy, it's just people not agreeing with you.

New comment by junek in "GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom"

junek — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 11:55:46 +0000

Please step away from the lathe

New comment by junek in "ICE Agents Realize They Arrested Wrong Teen, Say 'Take Him Anyway'"

junek — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 15:02:57 +0000

Because one kind of thing helps people and the other kind of thing inflicts pointless cruelty on the innocent.

And the regime loves pointless cruelty.

New comment by junek in "Garfield Minus Garfield"

junek — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 17:56:37 +0000

Garfield Minus Garfield has the same bleak sense of desolation as Goya's "The Dog". Just wonderful.

New comment by junek in "Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it"

junek — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 13:13:13 +0000

I doubt they think much, in general

New comment by junek in "New speculative attacks on Apple CPUs"

junek — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 18:51:33 +0000

OK, fun. What can we do to mitigate this until it gets patched?

New comment by junek in "Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]"

junek — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:10:57 +0000

I'm generally in favour of the joycons as a concept. They make multiplayer party games a breeze.

But the execution in the Switch 1 is flawed. They're on the small side, and generally fiddly. If the joycons for the Switch 2 are larger and just more ergonomic then I think it'll be a win.

EDIT: the joycons also being little motion wands was also quite good. You don't need a separate accessory like on the other consoles. Overall the joycon is a neat little package of functionality, if imperfect.

New comment by junek in "Dungeons and Dragons rolls the dice with new rules about identity"

junek — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 17:26:40 +0000

> you'll quickly learn you can't use it to block political ideology from the DM

That's like, not true at all. The X card is exactly for that purpose, the GM doesn't get a special exception from the effect of the X card.

As a GM, if a player reaches for the X card for any reason I'm obliged to stop and listen.

I'm curious what exactly you mean by "political ideology" in this context. Can you give a concrete example of the kind of thing that makes you uncomfortable?

New comment by junek in "Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus"

junek — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:54:53 +0000

I know it's a typo but this:

> what more could a shell?

Is quite good. It could almost be the tag line for fish shell.

New comment by junek in "Ruby 3.4.0"

junek — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 16:17:47 +0000

> It is very practical to actually have a grammar

I fully agree that you need to have a grammar for your language.

> and thus the possibility to use any language that has a perser generator.

See, this is where it falls down in my experience. You can't just feed "the grammar" straight into each generator, and you need to account for the quirks of each generator anyway. So the practical, idk, "reusability"... is much lower than it seems like it should be.

If you could actually just write your grammar once and feed it to any parser generator and have it actually work then that would be cool. I just don't think it works out that way in practice.

New comment by junek in "Ruby 3.4.0"

junek — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 13:01:12 +0000

My hot take is that the allure of parser-generators is mostly academic. If you're designing a language it's good practice to write out a formal grammar for it, and then it feels like it should be possible to just feed that grammar to a program and have it spit out a fully functional parser.

In practice, parser generators are always at least a little disappointing, but that nagging feeling that it _should_ work remains.

Edit: also the other sense of academic, if you have to teach students how to do parsing, and need to teach formal grammar, then getting two birds with one stone is very appealing.

New comment by junek in "Every V4 UUID"

junek — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 18:43:51 +0000

Sometimes I feel bad when I generate a UUID without using it for anything. Like I've wasted it.

New comment by junek in "Charset="WTF-8""

junek — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 23:27:16 +0000

The fundamental mistake is in trying to take input for one purpose and transform it for another purpose. Just have the user fill in an additional field for their name as it appears on bank statements, or whatever the second purpose is. Trying to be clever about this stuff never works out.

New comment by junek in "Honoring the Legacy of Chip Design Innovator Lynn Conway"

junek — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 17:24:43 +0000

Don't be an asshole

New comment by junek in "AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft"

junek — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 14:49:04 +0000

They're absolutely transfixed by the "wow cool robot" effect.

New comment by junek in "Mercury: Council and Parliament strike a deal to phase out mercury in the EU"

junek — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 14:56:18 +0000

What's wrong with being homosexual?

New comment by junek in "World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year"

junek — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 12:55:56 +0000

This is magical thinking

New comment by junek in "American Ornithological Society changing the names of birds named after people"

junek — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 21:57:11 +0000

Seems like a bit of a leap from the renaming of birds to collapse?

Can you explain the causal chain there?

New comment by junek in "Fake Trees: Using Indents for Simpler UIs"

junek — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 17:12:18 +0000

I would be _very_, very cautious with this. The problem is precisely that the system presents itself in a way that implies more than it actually has going on. Users will naturally assume there is a real parent-child relationship in the underlying data model.

A soon as someone asks for , then you have to admit that it's a smoke-and-mirrors trick and you can't actually achieve that with the data you have.

Avoid storing visual figments in your database, they'll come back to haunt you.

New comment by junek in "Post-apocalyptic life in American health care"

junek — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 07:44:37 +0000

Why does it matter to you?