jstrieb

On the Craigslist homepage (on desktop) there is a gray navbar on the left side of the screen. That area has a calendar and some group of links below it. The second group of links below the calendar includes "best-of-craigslist" link.

https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/all

I like that the Craigslist site design is utilitarian and hasn't changed much over the years. The downside is that stuff like this can hide in plain sight.

Many people don't know that Craigslist has a "best of" which includes this (relevant) post that makes me laugh every time I read it:

https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/ric/6881185958.html

Interesting! I periodically try it with new models and seem to get the same results. Maybe I'm not using enough capital letters :)

Giving hints.

On math or programming problems, they are overfit to solving the entire thing end to end (presumably for benchmarks). I have had very poor results asking for pointers and hints that don't give away key insights. This has been the case across models I have tested.

An architecture with a "judge" that gates responses and ensures a lack of spoilers would probably work better. But this is a simple thing that they keep messing up.

If you use Firefox (and will pardon me plugging my own project), you might be interested in a version of this I made a while ago as a browser extension:

https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button

My project is somewhat different from the userscript in that mine uses Bloom filters to check whether a link has been submitted, whereas this userscript sends every page you visit to the Algolia search API. Using Bloom filters means that there are no external requests unless you actually press the button. My project also doesn't show the comments in a sidebar.

Having a link to past discussions, whether using this userscript or my extension, is useful not only to read the comments for a page you're browsing, but also to find good sites that haven't been submitted yet!

Wow, I'm seriously impressed! Questions for the author:

I haven't had a chance to read the code yet, but how does this actually adjust the text? I get that it uses Knuth-Plass to calculate layout, but what does it do in CSS (or SVG?) to apply the layout to the DOM?

Looks like the first commit was sometime last week, which is pretty tight turnaround for something like this. For my own sanity when reading the code (no judgment either way), did you use LLMs to help write this? Knowing is helpful for me to calibrate what I pay attention to when reading through the code.

I agree with the spirit of what you're saying: that many aspects of this post seem unnecessary. But I do think there are reasonable answers to your (admittedly probably rhetorical) questions.

Zig is a relatively young language with a small community, and Oven/Bun is one of few places that someone could previously have written Zig code professionally. It's therefore Zig's business to make sure that either it's a good place to refer community members for work, or that they don't explicitly encourage people to work there. Likewise, as one of the highest-profile Zig projects, the community's leaders were understandably invested in making sure it represented the language well.

I feel like I am exactly the target audience for this post: someone who uses Zig regularly, but hasn't touched Bun, despite being aware of it. While I would have proceeded differently than Andrew Kelley here in terms of framing and phrasing (and leaving out some parts entirely), I do think reading this gave me new information about Zig's relationship to Bun. The specific dry, professional post you suggest wouldn't have given me any new information at all.

This is awesome!

I do want to point out that the data in that ClickHouse playground only seems to go as far back as April 6, 2024 according to the query below:

  SELECT * FROM hackernews_history ORDER BY update_time ASC LIMIT 10

This is of course still extremely useful, and generous! It just wasn't obvious from the comment that this isn't querying against all Hacker News data.

The best exploration of this that I have seen in media is one of my favorite movies: Nightcrawler (2014), starring Jake Gyllenhaal. The movie doesn't touch on the government/democracy aspect of the article, but it very much captures the notion that desparate people can be pressured to do horrible things when their job is at stake.

In Nightcrawler, some characters are trying to get ahead, and others are desperate not to fall behind, but their opportunism (driven by the necessity to make money in order to survive in our capitalist society) makes all of them vulnerable to exploitation by an ambitious psychopath. In that case, he is profit-motivated, whereas the article here is about dictators retaining power, but the same principles apply. The movie does an amazing job of exploring how these individuals can wield power irresponsibly, poison everyone who gives them an inch, and sound almost reasonable while they do it. It is a masterful portrayal of how much some people can be willing to compromise on their morals for their job.

If you haven't seen it, you should watch it. If you have seen it, but don't remember it being deeply critical of capitalist society, you should re-watch it. (It's easy to get so engrossed by the truly suspenseful and thrilling moment-to-moment action that you miss the big picture.) The deterioration of American news media is a more overt theme in the movie, but in my opinion, that serves as a complementary backdrop to the anticapitalist message, which is the engine that drives the movie inexorably onward. Also the acting, directing, and writing are great.

Don't spoil it by reading the plot summary, just watch it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film)

I like currying because it's fun and cool, but found myself nodding along throughout the whole article. I've taken for granted that declaring and using curried functions with nice associativity (i.e., avoiding lots of parentheses) is as ergonomic as partial application syntax gets, but I'm glad to have that assumption challenged.

The "hole" syntax for partial application with dollar signs is a really creative alternative that seems much nicer. Does anyone know of any languages that actually do it that way? I'd love to try it out and see if it's actually nicer in practice.

Thanks! I also told Aga via email in the thread where I submitted my article.

Worth noting that the HTML tag in the title was stripped from the PDF table of contents as well, so the title for that article in the contents is missing a word. No big deal, but good to know for future submissions!

The article I submitted has an HTML tag in the title, and seems to have broken the web viewer :(

Note that you can link to pages in a PDF with a hash like #page=64 (for example) in the URL.

https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_008.pdf#page=64

Wow, this is jam-packed with interesting information. Thanks for writing it! (Also thanks for all of your other great open source work!)

Are there plans to upstream this into the Zig std library? Seems like it could be useful for more than just the cryptography package, since the benchmarks at the end have it often being faster than std pdqsort. I just checked the issue trackers on Codeberg and GitHub, and didn't see anything mentioning djbsort or NTRU Prime, which leads me to believe there aren't (official) plans to upstream this (yet).

If those announcement posts don't take off, how do you end up finding a community of users/players?

I consider Recursion by Blake Crouch to be similar, even though I liked Antimemetics much better. I haven't read Crouch's other books, but have heard that Dark Matter is better than Recursion, though it may be less similar to Antimemetics.

Nice fork! (I am the person who wrote the original.)

My version is still working well for me, so it's been hard to find motivation to update it. Also, I've been using my increasingly limited free time to work on some exciting new projects, rather than maintenance tasks that feel like a continuation of my day job.

All that to say I'm excited about new repos like yours that take the idea further! I also really appreciate your attention to detail calling out the differences with the original, and that you licensed your version under the GPL.

As an aside, you may want to add "Show HN" to the title. It will allow the page to show up on https://news.ycombinator.com/show