Hacker News: tekne

New comment by tekne in "Show HN: I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++"

tekne — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:15:25 +0000

I mean -- if I'm going to join a team to solve the hard 20%, I'd like to see the idea validated against the easy 80% first.

If it's really bad, at least the easy 20%.

New comment by tekne in "What category theory teaches us about dataframes"

tekne — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:35:41 +0000

I mean — the ideal of an SQL query is you say what you want, and it’s up to the engine to determine how to give it to you — that is, being declarative.

Part of it is there’s so many different ways to represent data, and even more ways to compute a given quantity — but the quantity itself often has a clear definition (sum this column from all rows where this holds, say)

New comment by tekne in "I quit editing photos"

tekne — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:03:15 +0000

A human genome fits on a single hard drive -- think of all the ways you could fill it?

New comment by tekne in "The EU still wants to scan your private messages and photos"

tekne — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 22:40:04 +0000

Encryption is mathematics -- making this an issue of freedom not only of speech, but of thought.

New comment by tekne in "The EU still wants to scan your private messages and photos"

tekne — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 22:36:44 +0000

Technology means there is only one truly stable compromise, imo: I am free to use whatever technical means at my disposal to encrypt my communications and those of my customers (!), and you can try to read them as much as you want.

Combined with the right to communicate across borders, you can get quite a bit of privacy: a server in both sides of a geopolitical conflict and they've got to collaborate to track you.

And yet metadata collection is both unavoidable (if you don't collect it, your geopolitical opponents will) and should be enough. We don't need chat control in a world where I get precision-targeted ads -- it's not even about freedom of speech or privacy, it's about freedom of thought.

New comment by tekne in "No Terms. No Conditions"

tekne — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:35:25 +0000

You are essentially saying that walking is safe because as a civilian you are unlikely to get robbed.

This is a terrible take. All it takes is an angry mugger, and you could get killed.

New comment by tekne in "Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode"

tekne — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 05:12:29 +0000

> champagne

Makes sense, sort of...

> crude oil

I really hope that's cheaper than ink or we're gonna have a problem...

New comment by tekne in "Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts"

tekne — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:24:12 +0000

Don't think the second amendment covers firing

New comment by tekne in "Malus – Clean Room as a Service"

tekne — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:41:47 +0000

E(accident due to going faster) vs E(worse outcome due to waiting)

Your argument only makes sense if the only possible bad thing is a car accident -- to make my point clearer, would you take a 1% chance of losing 100$ to avoid a 50% chance of losing 10$?

Depends how much money you have, but it can be a perfectly rational decision.

New comment by tekne in "Malus – Clean Room as a Service"

tekne — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:37:59 +0000

I think the fundamental issue is that a form of equality where everyone gets what was previously the worst outcome is... probably worse.

New comment by tekne in "New York could prohibit chatbot medical, legal, engineering advice"

tekne — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:48:50 +0000

You've got a license for looking up the law/engineering textbooks/your symptoms, pal?

New comment by tekne in "OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading"

tekne — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 22:35:47 +0000

Eh… there’s a point to be made about “enforced low risk tolerance” being a societal issue.

Lead in gasoline is bad, but in general I think individuals are perfectly capable of determining whether they are willing to risk a taxi ride.

New comment by tekne in "A simple web we own"

tekne — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:20:39 +0000

I mean -- my (completely non-technical) mother, after a few hours of my guidance, has started vibe-coding apps and websites for her local community organizations. And, like -- it works.

New comment by tekne in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

tekne — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:01:53 +0000

Needs monads (not joking)

New comment by tekne in "SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes (2023)"

tekne — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 01:41:48 +0000

Consider: content-addressed headers.

New comment by tekne in "The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein"

tekne — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 19:16:51 +0000

But suppose you have egalitarian nation N -- what stops the billionaire from non-egalitarian nation B from influencing your politicians? Especially if nation N is small and nation B is large.

Moreover -- why would low-level elites (think: entrepreneurs, small business owners, etc.) stay in nation N if it was more profitable to do business in nation B -- recall this is precisely the type of person that is often most mobile and internationalized.

New comment by tekne in "The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein"

tekne — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 19:09:29 +0000

Bit of a nerd-snipe, but I wonder about the idea of sortition of a set of candidates -- say 200 -- out of a larger voting pool, and then voting for one of the randomly selected candidates.

Then you get "at least approx. top 1%" -- but it's still not necessarily an entrenched elite.

New comment by tekne in "Skip is now free and open source"

tekne — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:29:04 +0000

Once the software is written, it is ~free to copy. People pay a lot of money to avoid the software getting copied... and it gets copied anyways.

New comment by tekne in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

tekne — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 20:38:17 +0000

My friend, don't scare quote freedom.

Sure, it may not have infinite value, but there are plenty of far less valuable things we endure significant harm to be able to enjoy.

And I say this as someone who absolutely hates social media.

New comment by tekne in "I program without syntax highlighting"

tekne — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:24:47 +0000

Idk - I really think this is a different brain thing.

I have synesthesia and so get syntax highlighting for free.

I like my highlighting to give me "synesthesia bootstrap speedup"; on the contrary it annoys me when it clashes.

It's an extreme case, but I presume as with most things there's a spectrum