Hacker News: mseepgood

New comment by mseepgood in "Timmy the Whale Released After Being Stranded Off the German Coast for Weeks"

mseepgood — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:56:30 +0000

He's probably dead by now.

New comment by mseepgood in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

mseepgood — Sun, 03 May 2026 09:12:11 +0000

> It seems to me that humans often fall into the trap of anthropomorphism.

That's true, but they also often fall into the trap of exceptionalism.

New comment by mseepgood in "Sunsetting the Techempower Framework Benchmarks"

mseepgood — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 03:32:15 +0000

This text lacks information about why it is being sunset.

New comment by mseepgood in "Almost a third of Gen Z men agree a wife should obey her husband"

mseepgood — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 21:44:50 +0000

A third that will never have a wife.

New comment by mseepgood in "Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows"

mseepgood — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:18:10 +0000

> We would immediately build better telescopes to track it precisely, refine its trajectory models, and begin developing propulsion systems capable of interception

That's not what would happen. We wouldn't mobilize. We'd fragment. Within days, the prediction would be declared partisan. One bloc would call it settled science; another would call it statistical hysteria. Billionaires would quietly commission private shelters while publicly funding studies questioning whether the asteroid even qualified as "large." News panels would debate whether the projected impact zone was being unfairly politicized. Conspiracy channels would insist the asteroid was fabricated to justify global governance. Others would insist the real asteroid was being hidden. Amateur analysts would flood the internet with homemade trajectory charts proving the professionals wrong. Death threats would arrive in astronomers' inboxes faster than research grants.

New comment by mseepgood in "Turn Dependabot off"

mseepgood — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 08:08:10 +0000

With a statically compiled language it is usually culled through dead-code elimination (DCE), and with static linking you don’t ship entire libraries.

New comment by mseepgood in "Building a TUI is easy now"

mseepgood — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:59:22 +0000

The question is how many decades each user of your software would have to use it in order to offset, through the optimisation it provides, the energy consumption you burned through with LLMs.

New comment by mseepgood in "Italy Railways Sabotaged"

mseepgood — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 22:32:35 +0000

Our railways don't need sabotage - trains fail to run anyway.

New comment by mseepgood in "CSS now has an if() conditional function"

mseepgood — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 09:20:17 +0000

So why do people still design declarative languages?

New comment by mseepgood in "Go's Sweet 16"

mseepgood — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 16:42:35 +0000

> Octals must start with zero and then o/O literals.

No, the o/O is optional (hence in square brackets), only the leading zero is required. All of these are valid octal literals in Go:

0600 (zero six zero zero)

0_600 (zero underscore six zero zero)

0o600 (zero lower-case-letter-o six zero zero)

0O600 (zero upper-case-letter-o six zero zero)

New comment by mseepgood in "Go's Sweet 16"

mseepgood — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 16:36:21 +0000

You're looking at the wrong production. They are octal literals:

    octal_lit      = "0" [ "o" | "O" ] [ "_" ] octal_digits .

New comment by mseepgood in "It’s not wrong that "\u{1F926}\u{1F3FC}\u200D\u2642\uFE0F".length == 7 (2019)"

mseepgood — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 08:35:15 +0000

The values for x and y should't come from your brain, though (with the exception of 0). They should come from previous index operations like s.indexOf(...) or s.search(regex), etc.

New comment by mseepgood in "The Daily Life of a Medieval King"

mseepgood — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 10:45:05 +0000

Delegation is key

New comment by mseepgood in "The daily life of a medieval king"

mseepgood — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 10:42:40 +0000

So he only did four hours of actual work per day.

New comment by mseepgood in "MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System"

mseepgood — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 15:48:29 +0000

Is it some kind of CORBA?

New comment by mseepgood in "Prompt engineering playbook for programmers"

mseepgood — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 14:19:35 +0000

You don't even have to write proper sentences. "me get error X how fix here code:" usually works.

New comment by mseepgood in "Prompt engineering playbook for programmers"

mseepgood — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 14:13:54 +0000

Is asking good questions or making clear requests what people now refer to as 'prompt engineering'?

New comment by mseepgood in "(On | No) Syntactic Support for Error Handling"

mseepgood — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 21:42:48 +0000

The second most popular issue was adding generics. So it's probably not a resistance to change.

New comment by mseepgood in "(On | No) Syntactic Support for Error Handling"

mseepgood — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 21:03:12 +0000

> sometimes a decision is better than nothing

Not in this case. The most popular Go proposal/issue of all times was 'leave "if err != nil" alone': https://github.com/golang/go/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20%20sort%3...

New comment by mseepgood in "(On | No) Syntactic Support for Error Handling"

mseepgood — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 18:45:01 +0000

It's good to have languages with different approaches to design and and with different design philosophies.