Hacker News: zetalyrae

New comment by zetalyrae in "The Feedback Loop Is All You Need"

zetalyrae — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:27:43 +0000

> Instructions are mere suggestions — linters are law

Written by AI.

New comment by zetalyrae in "Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026"

zetalyrae — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:35:59 +0000

I remember! I also used Pidgin OTR over the Facebook XMPP gateway. At some point Facebook started recognizing it, but not banning it: you could go to the web interface and you'd see "encrypted message" instead of noise.

New comment by zetalyrae in "Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026"

zetalyrae — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:14:12 +0000

I remember using Pidgin in ~2009. A dozen chat networks, all on one app. Desktop software built with a native GUI toolkit. And, on top of all that: you could keep your chat logs forever. The world of yesterday.

New comment by zetalyrae in "Letting Claude play text adventures"

zetalyrae — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 07:31:40 +0000

I expect it's somewhere in the training data, but it's very unlikely to be salient. A few textfiles here and there in the ocean of the Internet is nothing. If Claude had memorized the walkthrough, it would have performed better.

11:59 PM

zetalyrae — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 23:37:51 +0000

Article URL: https://atharvaraykar.com/reinforce/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673351

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by zetalyrae in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

zetalyrae — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:42:23 +0000

https://borretti.me/ my blog + fiction

New comment by zetalyrae in "SQL Studio"

zetalyrae — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 23:04:24 +0000

Unfortunately, I doubt this would be a sustainable model for the developer.

New comment by zetalyrae in "Ask HN: How are most people converting HEIC to jpg?"

zetalyrae — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 01:03:43 +0000

On NixOS, the libheif package provides a `heif-dec` command, which you can use as follows:

    heif-dec foo.heic foo.jpg

New comment by zetalyrae in "Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system"

zetalyrae — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 03:59:50 +0000

Yes.

New comment by zetalyrae in "Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system"

zetalyrae — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 03:58:54 +0000

Yes, and that's fine.

New comment by zetalyrae in "Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system"

zetalyrae — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 21:01:48 +0000

I actually know about Recfiles lol.

On Slop

zetalyrae — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:46:41 +0000

Article URL: https://minihf.com/posts/2025-10-02-on-slop/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239515

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by zetalyrae in "Ly – A lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager for Linux and BSD"

zetalyrae — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 19:56:35 +0000

NixOS 25.05 had a very old version of Ly that doesn't support the latest config. I switched to NixOS unstable and that worked.

New comment by zetalyrae in "Ly – A lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager for Linux and BSD"

zetalyrae — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 08:40:22 +0000

I use this on NixOS[0] with the Matrix digital rain animation and enjoy it way too much :)

[0] https://github.com/eudoxia0/dotfiles/blob/a812dd5b5e62e53b30...

Ad-Hoc Emacs Packages with Nix

zetalyrae — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 18:43:15 +0000

Article URL: https://borretti.me/article/ad-hoc-emacs-packages-with-nix

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45956562

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by zetalyrae in "You can choose tools that make you happy"

zetalyrae — Mon, 26 May 2025 03:34:55 +0000

In fairness to Emacs, this is a bit sour grapes on my part!

I have tried to go fully into the "Emacs mindset" (org-mode for everything, multiple pages of custom hydra keybinds etc.) a number of times and I always bounce off. I always feel there is some activation threshold that if I could cross it, I could enter editor nirvana.

I used to joke that the way I use Emacs is I open it, give the empty buffer a very meaningful look, C-x C-c, and open VS Code.

New comment by zetalyrae in "You can choose tools that make you happy"

zetalyrae — Mon, 26 May 2025 01:42:07 +0000

> The author's call is that we acknowledge this subjective side.

I think that acknowledging the subjective side is a necessary step to making more rational choices. If you don't know your motivations, you will be a motivated reasoner.

When you can add "I like this tech because it helps me build an identity I aspire to" as an item in the pros column, you realize you no longer have to.

New comment by zetalyrae in "You can choose tools that make you happy"

zetalyrae — Mon, 26 May 2025 01:39:45 +0000

The title of the post here ("Choose tools that make you happy") is wrong.

I wrote "You can choose tools that make you happy" to mean "you have permission to use tech just because it makes you happy or triggers your curiosity", so that people don't waste their time coming up with false technical reasons why their technology choices are rational. It is not a command that you should choose tools entirely or mainly for affective reasons.

New comment by zetalyrae in "You can choose tools that make you happy"

zetalyrae — Mon, 26 May 2025 01:36:10 +0000

I'm describing the set of posts that jointly satisfy:

- The thesis is "tool X is superior to (Y, Z, ...)" or "X is a modern/practical choice".

- The argument is purported to be technical and rational.

- The arguments are fallacious and do not stand to rational scrutiny.

Where you can reasonably think that the author's actual reasons are affective, and they are trying to make rational arguments by backward-chaining from the conclusion and failing.

New comment by zetalyrae in "Don't Guess My Language"

zetalyrae — Mon, 19 May 2025 11:29:35 +0000

This was the bane of my existence when I lived in Uruguay! Despite having the Accept-Language header set permanently to en_US, Google would constantly reset my UI language to Spanish, despite being logged in and having the account language set to English.

The worst offender was eBay which would machine-translate listings from English to Spanish.