Hacker News: maleldil

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

maleldil — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:04:49 +0000

When did you last look at the neovim ecosystem? Because what you describe is the opposite of what's happened recently. The core has been getting more stable over time, with fewer breakages, and more essential functionality has been added, such as LSP support, completion, and a package manager, with plans to add more.

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

maleldil — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:01:59 +0000

neovim core has most of what you need for LSPs. The only thing missing is server-specific configuration (e.g. binary name, flags), which you can copy from nvim-lspconfig or write yourself. There's also a native package manager in the core.

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

maleldil — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:59:46 +0000

> emacs often makes a call and adopts one of the very popular packages to the core

> No such thing exist in neovim

neovim has been doing that too. Plugin manager (vim.pack), treesitter stuff, LSP management, completion, comments, etc.

> which-key

neovim also has this.

> neovim ecosystem is concentrated on one (very productive) developer in an unhealthy manner

folke has nice stuff, but I find a lot of it is largely unnecessary and bloated. The only thing I use is his which-key, and there are alternatives, such as mini.clue.

New comment by maleldil in "An introduction to functional analysis for science and engineering"

maleldil — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:21:01 +0000

It's "bad form" to write STEM papers in Word. Which is stupid, of course, as every major publisher offers both Word and LaTeX templates. I wish they'd offer Typst too.

New comment by maleldil in "Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?"

maleldil — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:22:56 +0000

DICE is awesome. I'm bummed when I need to use anything else. I rarely ever need to use Ticketmaster.

New comment by maleldil in "Coreutils for Windows"

maleldil — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:17:22 +0000

Even Python has str.splitlines, which accepts a range of line separators (not just LF and CRLF), and the same when iterating over a file handle (which iterates over lines).

You're right, this is a complete nonissue.

New comment by maleldil in "It's Not Just X. It's Y"

maleldil — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:44:12 +0000

You're right, of course. But today, it's not a risk worth taking, at least not for professional writing where the suspicion of LLM writing can be damning.

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

maleldil — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:42:47 +0000

I agree that S-expressions for defining data are pretty nice, but you don't need to actually use a Lisp to use them. You can just use them like you would XML.

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

maleldil — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:41:03 +0000

Python (with types), Go or Rust, depending on the complexity. I really missed static types in Clojure. I think no Lisp does static typing well. I guess there's Coalton, but it's too niche.

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

maleldil — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:39:38 +0000

Python, Go, or Rust, depending on the complexity. Python (with strict typing) for the simplest ones, or those where startup time wasn't a concern, Go for the medium-complexity ones that I could do with only the standard library, and Rust for everything else. Besides lisps in general still feeling alien to me, I also really like static types.

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

maleldil — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:40:12 +0000

> You don’t program in Lisp, do you?

Not anymore. I started with Racket and went through the Little Schemer. I did Clojure for a while. I even used Babashka to write all my scripts, then later rewrote them in other languages.

I gave it a good try. Maybe it wasn't enough to properly "get it"?

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

maleldil — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:26:14 +0000

I don't see why Lisp's history would necessarily imply the family is worth learning in 2026. What (other than macros) do lisps offer that other modern languages don't?

New comment by maleldil in "Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI"

maleldil — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:29:24 +0000

> but language evolves

Totally, but we can try to resist it. Technocrat is a perfectly fine word, and I'd hate to see it go away permanently from its current meaning.

New comment by maleldil in "It's Not Just X. It's Y"

maleldil — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:02:37 +0000

> I'm not going to think twice about what I write just to avoid an AI checker

It depends on your environment, I guess. If you're a student writing an essay or a researcher writing a paper, it's in your best interest to avoid sounding like an LLM, which means going out of your way to avoid certain idioms, even if it means letting go of things you liked to write.

I used to love a spaced en dash (the British English equivalent of the American unspaced em dash), but I wouldn't risk it now.

New comment by maleldil in "Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team"

maleldil — Sun, 31 May 2026 19:22:13 +0000

If you're someone who can separate the work from the author, sure. She's a very intelligent person. Many of us can't.

New comment by maleldil in "Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team"

maleldil — Sun, 31 May 2026 11:59:23 +0000

> favorite

Interesting choice of word

New comment by maleldil in "Pandoc Templates"

maleldil — Sun, 31 May 2026 11:40:41 +0000

You can use Typst 100% for free, just like LaTeX. There's a CLI for compilation, there's an LSP, code formatter, etc. Complaining that the web app has a paid tier is like complaining that Overleaf is paid.

As for why people shill Typst over LaTeX, it's just a better overall experience. Things that are annoying in LaTeX are easy in Typst. I've written plenty of LaTeX for academic papers and my Master's dissertation, but I'm now writing my PhD thesis in Typst. It's so much better. The only barrier to using it everywhere is that my colleagues still prefer to use Overleaf for collaboration, which forces me to use LaTeX for papers.

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

maleldil — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:49:41 +0000

There are different licenses that used to be referred to as "MIT", and explicitly stating "Expat" tells you which one they're referring to (in this case, the "standard" one). This is largely unnecessary, as nearly all mentions of the MIT license refer to this one.

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

maleldil — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:45:49 +0000

As long as you can express everything you need on the library's terms. As soon as you write a Python loop, your performance plummets.

New comment by maleldil in "Constraint Decay: The Fragility of LLM Agents in Back End Code Generation"

maleldil — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:54:27 +0000

The university doesn't « ban » using the OpenAI APIs directly. It's a question of funding. If you want to use OpenAI, you usually use your own account and ask the university for a refund later, where you justify your usage. It's easier for the university if you use their pre-approved Azure endpoint instead, though you'll still need approval if you're going to spend a significant amount of money.