Hacker News: justinhj

New comment by justinhj in "Even more batteries included with Emacs"

justinhj — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:13:01 +0000

Both Emacs and Neovim reward rtfm and working up from a vanilla configuration to your own custom one.

The distribution style packages for these editors make the user skip all that initial learning and discovery. It leads to people writing plugins and packages that simply replicate what was already possible. I have written plenty of elisp myself only to find out I was rewriting builtin functionality.

I'd also say that both editors are fully discoverable but you have to first learn how to use the various help available. Emacs is a bit ahead here with its help options, letting you search for functions, variables, info and man pages, apropos (fuzzy search) and more.

In short start vanilla and explore; this kind of blog really helps with that.

New comment by justinhj in "AI coding at home without going broke"

justinhj — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:54:59 +0000

What metric shows performance? Lines of code added, deleted, number of commits? None of these are are good measure of quality and actual contribution.

New comment by justinhj in "AI coding at home without going broke"

justinhj — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:44:58 +0000

I had no idea git metrics could show your best performers

New comment by justinhj in "Emacs appearances in pop culture"

justinhj — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:47:15 +0000

There's a perl script in the book that does some encryption/decryption. I remember typing it out and fixing it so it worked.

New comment by justinhj in "AWS Bedrock to require sharing data with Anthropic for Mythos and future models"

justinhj — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:35:59 +0000

Yes. There are all kinds of reasons companies need the guarantee of no training and this is a deal breaker for everyone with such a reason.

AI cracked an Erdős math problem. Now experts want guardrails

justinhj — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:51:31 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-guardrails-erdos-math-problem

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48461929

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by justinhj in "Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models"

justinhj — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:54:51 +0000

They already have a very codependent relationship because of their revenue share over putting Google search up front in iPhones so I doubt either party would put that at risk.

New comment by justinhj in "Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years"

justinhj — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:22:46 +0000

May be of interest: A Critique of Modern SQL And A Proposal Towards A Simple and Expressive Query Language.

It is a critique of modern SQL and a suggestion for "SaneQL":

"SaneQL features a straightforward and consistent syntax, which improves its learnability and ease of implementation. Additionally, it provides extensibility, with the added ability to define new operators that integrate seamlessly with the existing built-in ones. Unlike most data frame APIs and NoSQL query languages, SaneQL fully embraces the core principles behind SQL, especially multiset semantics."

https://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2024/papers/p48-neumann.pdf

A colleague of mine is working on an implementation of these ideas:

https://github.com/wvlet/wvlet

New comment by justinhj in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

justinhj — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 03:26:11 +0000

Thanks, always get those two mixed up.

New comment by justinhj in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

justinhj — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:22:47 +0000

This is like the Adam Sandler movie where he says bomb on an airplane. It's an overreaction, is it not? A terrorist is not going to call their bomb's bluetooth trigger bomb. Even if they are, are you telling me we have no idea whether there is a bomb in luggage or not?

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

justinhj — Sun, 31 May 2026 01:40:13 +0000

Passing an allocator around is a design choice of Zig, so yeah, it is not supposed to be avoided

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

justinhj — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:04:26 +0000

An arena allocator lets you treat a series of allocations as a single block. In cases where you find yourself needing to micromanage a bunch of small memory allocations you can simply ignore freeing them individually and free the whole arena when you are done.

New comment by justinhj in "GTA 6 Developers Unionize"

justinhj — Sat, 30 May 2026 02:33:12 +0000

And many a game developer doesn't have to write any of this because it already is commodity software.

New comment by justinhj in "GTA 6 Developers Unionize"

justinhj — Sat, 30 May 2026 02:32:06 +0000

A lot of game development is not technically sophisticated, especially when the engine is bought or developed already. The other factors are the hit driven nature of the business, meaning you can spend years building a game that flops, and the fact that many people want to make games which drives down salaries. In my opinion game developers should work like movie staff; mid level wages but the ability to earn residuals from all their games. It means a secure life if you have enough hits.

New comment by justinhj in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

justinhj — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:55:37 +0000

https://x.com/sawyermerritt/status/2060174287563116696?s=46&...

New comment by justinhj in "Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded during a static fire test"

justinhj — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:55:08 +0000

https://x.com/sawyermerritt/status/2060174287563116696?s=46&...

New comment by justinhj in "Use boring languages with LLMs"

justinhj — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:06:30 +0000

Thanks for the tip. If they are representative the results are quite surprising. Anecdotally, I always thought Go would be on one of languages LLM's were best at.

https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/AutoCodeBenchmark/blob/ma...

New comment by justinhj in "Bun support is now limited and deprecated"

justinhj — Sat, 23 May 2026 16:00:01 +0000

I was thinking along similar lines today. An AI assisted audit of the issues that caused segfaults could find and implement safe memory management patterns in Zig. It sounds like the Rust port process essentially has had to do this anyway when it analyzed all of the places unsafe is needed and started mitigating some of them. The project also sounds like it has unique memory management problems in its nature: native code calling js code which calls native code and trying to manage lifetimes amongst that.

New comment by justinhj in "AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills"

justinhj — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:08:52 +0000

Smart, motivated juniors have incredible tools to amplify their learning and capabilities.

New comment by justinhj in "Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026"

justinhj — Wed, 20 May 2026 04:37:12 +0000

we never learn agy seems to be garbage

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...