Hacker News: zavec

New comment by zavec in "Queryable Executables"

zavec — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:45:07 +0000

Between this and the nix/guix stuff, Farid is definitely becoming one of my favourite mad computer scientist bloggers, right up there with Justine.

(Or computer mad scientist? Whatever (mad scientist) && (computer scientist) is)

New comment by zavec in "How Compaction Works in Pi"

zavec — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:35:40 +0000

The way I've done it has been when there's a longer task, I give it a markdown document that has a plan with numbered steps, and then for each step start a fresh context window and tell it to update that doc as it goes with any decisions taken or deviations from the plan, or other context needed for future steps. If it gets close to the end of the context I tell it to summarize the current state and anything a fresh context would need to know.

New comment by zavec in "Learn Vim motions with an ice-cream van"

zavec — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 10:11:39 +0000

I always wonder about the choice of hjkl, because don't people normally rest their hands one row to the left, on jkl;?

New comment by zavec in "Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal"

zavec — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:15:28 +0000

I was just looking at conductor and was not very jazzed about the fact that it was running the agents directly on the host. Being able to launch from a terminal means this one can (hopefully) run from inside the sandboxing setup I use for coding agents.

New comment by zavec in "Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal"

zavec — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:14:00 +0000

I think generally harnesses have this. In claude code it's `"preferredNotifChannel": "terminal_bell"` in the settings.json, pi and opencode looks like you have to either add a hook yourself somewhere or use an extension.

New comment by zavec in "Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity"

zavec — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:11:22 +0000

Hmm, where have I seen a story before where a kid wants their parents to read the same book over and over. I can't quite put my finger on it...

New comment by zavec in "Who's the smartest corvid?"

zavec — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:11:07 +0000

It definitely seems brutal, but when I stop and think about it it's actually probably more humane for the prey than getting eaten alive, right?

New comment by zavec in "Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency"

zavec — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 07:21:10 +0000

Hell, I grew up with English as my first language and I still learned a lot of obscure vocabulary from magic!

It's definitely not so good these days, but a format called premodern is getting more popular. You may find it worth looking in to that one.

New comment by zavec in "FBI looks into dead or missing scientists tied to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX"

zavec — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 06:18:56 +0000

Homestuck is finally happening?

New comment by zavec in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"

zavec — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:48:54 +0000

Alive 2007 is a bit late to be the 90s though

New comment by zavec in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

zavec — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:39:15 +0000

Lock picking is great! Many security conferences will have a "lockpick village" where there are just a bunch of locks, lockpicks, and volunteers teaching people how to do it.

New comment by zavec in "Google open-sources experimental agent orchestration testbed Scion"

zavec — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:21:37 +0000

This looks really promising, I am curious about the choice to use containers as the isolation layer though. If the goal is to treat agents as untrusted and isolate them fully I feel like microVMs would be a better option.

If it supports OCI runtimes though then maybe kata containers can be plugged in, I'll have to dig in after work and see.

New comment by zavec in "FSF statement on copyright infringement lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic"

zavec — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:13:06 +0000

> The courts decided that rap records had to clear every single sample, thereby basically destroying the art form, but now you can literally feed every book into a blender, piece another book together out of the pieces, and sell it.

Are they still enforcing the old way on hip hop samples, or has that changed with the recent rulings? If the new way of doing things is applied fairly to everyone that seems like a win.

New comment by zavec in "How to record and retrieve anything you've ever had to look up twice"

zavec — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:04:32 +0000

This sounds fascinating, if you ever write more about it I'd love to read it!

New comment by zavec in "Sealos – AI Native Cloud Cloud Operating System"

zavec — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 12:48:43 +0000

Last rc is 2025 but there are at least still new commits (one from 3 hours ago)

New comment by zavec in "On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]"

zavec — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 19:17:11 +0000

> IMO the issue is not propaganda at all, but real physical problems that are not being addressed.

I don't think those are mutually exclusive. There can be real problems, and propaganda can magnify those and lead people to decisions that are for the benefit of the propagandist rather than things that will actually solve the problem.

New comment by zavec in "Giving university exams in the age of chatbots"

zavec — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:57:39 +0000

It was the same when I graduated 6 years ago. We had projects to test our ability to use tools and such, and I guess in that context LLMs might be a concern. But exams were pencil and paper only.

New comment by zavec in "Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app"

zavec — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 08:26:35 +0000

There's also a sex toy

New comment by zavec in "C Is Best (2025)"

zavec — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:02:25 +0000

You haven't been getting the checks? Bring that up at our next secret cabal meeting.

New comment by zavec in "No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter"

zavec — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 18:08:38 +0000

I think you can with a user.js file, unless they changed that?