Hacker News: mackeye

New comment by mackeye in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

mackeye — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:07:21 +0000

awesome article! i appreciated the alternatives and misc. workarounds to OT/unicode typesetting toward the end, very helpful :D (go blue!)

New comment by mackeye in "Why Janet? (2023)"

mackeye — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 23:19:29 +0000

this is good to know :) my use for janet hasn't involved much processing of external data but i'll keep bb in mind when the use case arises. thank you for the information!

New comment by mackeye in "A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)"

mackeye — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:59:39 +0000

"we" didn't pass them --- i don't think changing the severity of law enforcement alone can achieve what i wish for in society, but the existence of many laws (and severity of their punishment) i disagree with and thus do not want enforced

New comment by mackeye in "Why Janet? (2023)"

mackeye — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:07:15 +0000

janet has replaced sh, python, awk, etc. for me, for system scripts over a certain length! it has a very fast startup time (on my system, 1.4ms via hyperfine vs. 1ms for dash) for scripts (not compiled executables), and its sh-dsl module allows typing shell commands very elegantly, like ($ cmda w x | cmdb y z). the ability to load an image to debug is a big help, too. i've started using it very recently but it's probably one of my favorite languages now, and the only other lisp i've used is mit scheme for sicp.

New comment by mackeye in "Gemini Omni"

mackeye — Tue, 19 May 2026 22:34:08 +0000

i've tried not to

New comment by mackeye in "Gemini Omni"

mackeye — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:31:47 +0000

god help us if we have to choose between the two );

New comment by mackeye in "Gemini Omni"

mackeye — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:31:19 +0000

i do photo restoration as part of my research (bizarre place to be for a math undergrad), so i do think AI is a lifesaver for very small adjustments that would be tedious or subpar otherwise. i just disagree that its creative output is of value (which isn't the case you made, anyway).

New comment by mackeye in "Gemini Omni"

mackeye — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:13:23 +0000

you would watch a movie generated with the sterility of an LLM?

New comment by mackeye in "We are retiring our bug bounty program"

mackeye — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:51:48 +0000

:D https://github.com/UnsafeLabs/Bounty-Hunters

New comment by mackeye in "The soul of maintaining a new machine"

mackeye — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:29:07 +0000

not much to add but this was an excellent read :D

New comment by mackeye in "Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language"

mackeye — Sat, 02 May 2026 03:30:53 +0000

umich currently has a course like this (but it's a bit of a blowoff)

New comment by mackeye in "Kasane: New drop-in Kakoune front end with GPU rendering and WASM Plugins"

mackeye — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:58:30 +0000

the original kakoune is just cli; the binary has a json ui client option to allow communication with the kakoune server, with the intent of any gui or alternative client being separated from the kak binary/repo. that being said, this seems entirely ai-generated :( i had planned to write a kakoune frontend that supported rtl text (arabic in particular) + unicode, prop fonts, etc., and might look to how some things were done here, but i'd be blown away if this didn't have a great number of rough edges w.r.t. line wrap, unicode, rtl, etc. ...

New comment by mackeye in "SDF Public Access Unix System"

mackeye — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 14:20:23 +0000

just got my stickers from there yesterday! :-) i wish my less cs-oriented friends could see how cool i think the sdf is, lol; and, that some kind of "small-web" system, complete with the self-expression the sdf offers via web-hosting, a radio station(!), etc., was accessible to more people (not at the fault of anyone; just that there's a lot to the internet that most people will never see). :>

New comment by mackeye in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

mackeye — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:48:03 +0000

adding a zero to the left of a binary integer doesn't double it

New comment by mackeye in "You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)"

mackeye — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:36:39 +0000

i don't entirely disagree, but

> the cheapest usable tier of Claude Code is $100/mo

is, imo, false. cc pro, $20 per month, gets you a lot of sonnet usage, and code review with opus (which i find very valuable, even as someone who tries to use ai little). i guess it depends how you use ai, but if you use it to plan, debug, and review, rather than having it write code, i think pro is pretty comfortable.

to add, i've seen people say these subscriptions will get far more expensive, as they're offered at a loss. but, it seems far more likely that free tiers will be degraded or disappear, as (especially for openai?) the relative number of subscribers to free users is very small, so the latter probably dominates compute time greatly. anthropic probably has a higher relative number of people who pay for claude code (and use it to its fullest), so this is probably less true. i can see pro getting less usage, and max increasing in cost.

New comment by mackeye in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

mackeye — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 04:51:08 +0000

western liberal democracies tend to use "autocratic" as an epithet (though, i guess, there are fewer countries that marker is used against for which it's false now than ~50 years ago). for the first sentence, "the opposite" of western liberal ideas will yield 10 answers from 9 people :-)

New comment by mackeye in "27-year-old Apple iBooks can connect to Wi-Fi and download official updates"

mackeye — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 02:54:09 +0000

what would you say makes a UI look as if it's for a computer (genuine)? aside from purely(!) cosmetic things, like the skin on the windows 11 taskbar vs. 10. i think to windows <= xp, or tiling window managers (bar hyprland, probably) as the two most popular evolutions of mouse- vs. keyboard-based UIs (plan 9 probably fits well under the former, too). i guess i'd prefer if macos looked like dwm, but i wonder what else would need to change for the friction i feel with it to disappear.

New comment by mackeye in "Show HN: Sameshi – a ~1200 Elo chess engine that fits within 2KB"

mackeye — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 03:29:25 +0000

a readable version seems to have just been added! https://github.com/datavorous/sameshi/tree/master/readable

New comment by mackeye in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

mackeye — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 23:42:30 +0000

95% of the commenters on this post own no private property.

New comment by mackeye in "Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in"

mackeye — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 02:35:17 +0000

some would say their money is our money via the ltv :-)