Hacker News: slaymaker1907

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"

slaymaker1907 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:05:13 +0000

While less necessary with AI, Excel is still the king of data entry and basic data manipulation (sorting, filtering, updating, etc.). I’d say that SQLite with a GUI for visualization is a far stronger competitor than Jupyter at those sorts of things. You can do that stuff in Jupyter, but it’s easier in Excel.

Jupyter also has a janky execution model. It doesn’t track dependencies so you have to be very careful in how you separate cells from one another and just running the whole notebook every time seems kind of pointless vs just writing a pure Python script.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "Practical Guide to Bare Metal C++"

slaymaker1907 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:26:24 +0000

std::array can sometimes give you the best of both worlds for stack allocation in that you statically constrain the stack allocation size (no alloca) while guaranteeing that your buffers are large enough for your data. You can also do a lot of powerful things with constexpr that are just not possible with arrays. It is very convenient for maintaining static mappings from enums to some other values.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear"

slaymaker1907 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:43:38 +0000

That is not what they should do according to microeconomics because luxury goods are Veblen goods. Decreasing price would lower demand, at least until they lowered it enough that it was no longer a Veblen good.

Basic microeconomics is just that: basic and thus an oversimplification.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear"

slaymaker1907 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:39:40 +0000

This already happens a lot for used clothes with the thrift store->poor country->landfill pipeline. That third step will likely be a lot less rare with new clothes.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "Swift is a more convenient Rust (2023)"

slaymaker1907 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:55:32 +0000

A vector of boxes is beneficial if you need to move objects around. If each T is 1000B or something, you really don’t want to copy or even do true moves in memory.

Hell, even if you’re not moving things around explicitly, don’t forget that vectors resize themselves. If you use Box, then these resizes will be less painful with large objects.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "Employers, please use postmarked letters for job applications (2025)"

slaymaker1907 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 01:22:42 +0000

As long as you have a FedEx or library nearby, you can print things there

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks"

slaymaker1907 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:40:21 +0000

I enjoy both and have ended up using AI a lot differently than vibe coders. I rarely use it for generating implementations, but I use it extensively for helping me understand docs/apis and more importantly, for debugging. AI saves me so much time trying to figure out why things aren’t working and in code review.

I deliberately avoid full vibe coding since I think doing so will rust my skills as a programmer. It also really doesn’t save much time in my experience. Once I have a design in mind, implementation is not the hard part.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)"

slaymaker1907 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 14:54:08 +0000

I think the examples others have highlighted show the problem with just making it a library. They’re all lacking a lot of features from Prolog, particularly in terms of optimization. Just use Prolog if you need its features and invoke SWI-Prolog like you’d call any other language’s interpreter.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "Using Python for Scripting"

slaymaker1907 — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 02:39:13 +0000

I might need to try it out. However, I haven't really found a use case yet where the speed of Python has been a major factor in my day job. It's usually fast enough and is a lot easier to optimize than many languages.

I actually sped up a script the other day that had been written in bash by 200x by moving it over to Python and rewriting the regexes so they could run on whole files all at once instead of line by line. Performance problems are most often from poorly written code in my experience, not a slow language.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "We should all be using dependency cooldowns"

slaymaker1907 — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 15:48:22 +0000

And it needs to be said that you generally cannot tell if a vulnerability is critical for a given application except by evaluating the vulnerability in the context of said application. One that I've seen is some critical DoS vulnerability due to a poorly crafted regex. That sort of vulnerability is only relevant if you are passing untrusted input to that regex.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts"

slaymaker1907 — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:01:13 +0000

That sounds like mania which is even more likely considering that early depression is often actually bipolar.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs"

slaymaker1907 — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 17:58:51 +0000

You absolutely don't need extensions for JS development. It is absolutely NOT notepad level. In my experience with beginners, installing an extension is also incredibly easy compared to getting them to edit some vim/emacs config.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules"

slaymaker1907 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:22:13 +0000

I think it depends on the music. Most people will have a greatly improved experience when listening to opera if they have access to (translated) lyrics. Even if you know the language of an opera, it can be extremely difficult for a lot of people to understand the lyrics due to all the ornamentation.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules"

slaymaker1907 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:18:36 +0000

Why not both? As the GP mentioned, lyrics are also invaluable for people besides training for AI.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules"

slaymaker1907 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:17:15 +0000

I'm pretty sure you could even have lyrics with a separate copyright from the composition itself. For example, you can clearly have lyrics without the music and you can have the composition alone in the case that it is performed as an instrumental cover or something.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "Claude Code on the web"

slaymaker1907 — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 23:01:26 +0000

I haven’t used Codex a lot, but GPT-5 is just a bit smarter in agent mode than Claude 4.5. The most challenging thing I’ve used it for is for code review and GPT-5 somewhat regularly found intricate bugs that Claude missed. However, Claude seemed to be better at following directions exactly vs GPT-5 which requires a lot more precision.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "What happens when coding agents stop feeling like dialup?"

slaymaker1907 — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:25:22 +0000

My favorite is when someone is demoing something that AI can do and they have to feed it some gigantic prompt. At that point, I often ask whether the AI has really made things faster/better or if we've just replaced the old way with an opaque black box.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers"

slaymaker1907 — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:50:37 +0000

The interesting question is how/if this impacts the recommendation engine. If it does impact recommendations, then that will directly penalize channels with more adblock users.

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers"

slaymaker1907 — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 23:40:18 +0000

There is also kind of a built in sponsorblock for YouTube on mobile. If you double tap to skip 5s repeatedly, a button quickly pops up to skip ahead (not explicitly about sponsor segments, but I'm sure this is what it is used for 99% of the time).

New comment by slaymaker1907 in "Emacs as your video-trimming tool"

slaymaker1907 — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 14:54:06 +0000

I'm not sure I agree that non-emacs things are not extensible, but I agree VSCode could be a lot better about extensibility. It's a shame that there isn't some convenient way to add JS hooks at startup like how you can with emacs and elisp.

For an example of a system that I think is probably just as extensible as emacs, look at TiddlyWiki. If you really want to, you can add in arbitrary JS and even the main tiddler edit form is itself a tiddler that can be customized as much as you want.