Hacker News: zem

New comment by zem in "AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain"

zem — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 11:38:23 +0000

asimov had a great story, "sucker bait", about this form of intelligence. (the story's premise was that we would always need some form of "human computer" because machines would never make intuitive leaps by joining facts that did not seem like they belonged together in the same problem)

New comment by zem in "Software Engineering fundamentals matter more"

zem — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 11:28:32 +0000

I would read (and work though the exercises in) "how to design programs", then follow it up with "the pragmatic programmer". that should catch you up with a lot of best practices.

New comment by zem in "The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services"

zem — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 08:00:35 +0000

there was cheap shareware earlier, it just didn't have as much reach

New comment by zem in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

zem — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:29:51 +0000

honestly he should have won on his main if unstated plank, "not be nigel farage"

New comment by zem in "Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out"

zem — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:28:05 +0000

that's a good comment for sure, but it doesn't address what I was talking about - specifically, in the "old internet" it was a lot commoner for a community to own its online spaces, usually by virtue of having one or two technically minded members who volunteered to run the infrastructure, and thanks to a lot of the required software being open source. sure, it's nice that anyone can just create a subreddit or facebook group now with no technical knowledge required, but there are definite ways in which living in someone else's space shapes your experience for the worse.

New comment by zem in "Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out"

zem — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:42:16 +0000

right, i agree with you - there's no one size fits all. that's why the best thing would be to let the reader toggle views on any given post/thread. one could even experiment with fancier views like a flat layout but with a git tree like sidebar that shows the perhaps multiple parents for any post and support for clicking on a post and popping up a mini thread with just the posts it's replying to.

New comment by zem in "Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out"

zem — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 01:45:20 +0000

it's not "another thing", it means that your community forum lives on reddit (or whoever's) sufferance, and is subject to some corporation's capricious and arbitrary whims.

this comment brings up a good concrete example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293553

New comment by zem in "Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out"

zem — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 01:38:55 +0000

what would be amazing would be a resurgence of the old style forums, but where users could choose to see a flat or tree view of a discussion (and even customize those views, e.g. the tree could be reddit style without subject lines, or slashdot style with them)

New comment by zem in "Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out"

zem — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 01:36:10 +0000

the article already lists one positive - the LLM assistance made the engineering effort to keep their site up and running feasible again. insofar as spam killed the remnants of old web, that is a promising sign.

New comment by zem in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

zem — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:45:12 +0000

been waiting for this feature to come back forever. hope it's still around the next time I get a new phone.

New comment by zem in "Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app"

zem — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:35:47 +0000

I've been an active user for ages now and I didn't even know they had an app! the mobile website works very well.

New comment by zem in "OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining"

zem — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 06:11:56 +0000

you are indeed correct

New comment by zem in "Bumble gives up on women making the first move"

zem — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 02:55:50 +0000

I wonder why there was a time window at all! that sounds like a horrible user experience - at the least they could have told the other person that you didn't respond but left their profile sitting in your inbox somewhere so you could choose to message them later.

New comment by zem in "OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining"

zem — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:26:40 +0000

I think in this case it was more a plea to have his judgement valued when he said "dude, if the qa team has found this many bugs this is only going to harm our reputation with the client, and we are going to be the ones doing emergency bugfixes at midnight". but also the company had a pretty toxic culture where the CEO knew how to manipulate people to get his way. he definitely managed to guilt trip me into working overtime when he told clients we already had features that we didn't in order to close a sale, basically "we've worked so hard already and we really need to close this sale, can't you just work up a basic version of it over the weekend?"

New comment by zem in "OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining"

zem — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:48:51 +0000

reminds me of a startup I was in, where one of the devs accepted a promotion to head of engineering on the condition that the CEO would not override him when he said a release was too buggy to go out to customers.

the CEO agreed because (I imagine) he really needed someone to take that position. and as everyone should probably have seen coming, the first time he really wanted to send out a release bugs and all, he called the guy into a room and pretty much browbeat him for an hour about how making the promosed release date was more important than making a good release, until he said "fine but I'm not responsible if it breaks".

the CEO held this up as an example of how he had kept his word not to send the release out without the guy agreeing to it. that startup, needless to say, is long dead.

New comment by zem in "What's the best programming language for coding agents?"

zem — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:50:18 +0000

having claude to work with has actually been pushing me from ocaml to rust for some of my personal projects. the LLM makes up for the fact that rust is less ergonomic, and being able to pull parts of my project out into libraries that can be called from any language is a rust superpower that is hard to turn down.

New comment by zem in "Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments"

zem — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:30:23 +0000

I think we're talking past each other here :) I wasn't speaking of whether it was a good or a bad thing, I was just pointing out that "woe" meaning "a misfortune or calamity" is the only meaning of the word that applies to the phrase "woe betide", the more common meaning of woe meaning grief or sorrow doesn't apply here because it's an idiom, not two separate words.

I was pointing it out because the first comment I was replying to was clearly unpacking the word "woe" from the phrase "woe betide" and I figured they would appreciate the linguistic footnote.

New comment by zem in "A physicist rigged his pet hamster’s wheel to upload to Strava"

zem — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:00:48 +0000

the hamster averaged over 10km/night!! given the size of the animal I would not have imagined anywhere near that.

New comment by zem in "Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments"

zem — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:54:36 +0000

sure, but what I was pointing out here is that "woe betide you" is a specific idiomatic phrase. it's usually used as a threat, i.e. "woe betide you if you do that".

New comment by zem in "Microsoft Edge is about to lock out older ad blockers, just like Chrome did"

zem — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:50:31 +0000

I've been using firefox happily for years; I'm still emotionally invested in chrome having proper ad blocking, because that's good for users.