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.
If the author is reading: you might want to validate that the queries actually run across the entire Hacker News dataset. Last I checked, the ClickHouse playground table cuts off sometime in 2024.
It should be possible to run equivalent queries against the Hacker News table in BigQuery, which has the full dataset (but is more annoying to set up and use).
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
Hey, I wrote this! There are a couple of reasons that I included the disclosure.
The main one is to set reader expectations that any errors are entirely my own, and that I spent time reviewing the details of the work. The disclosure seemed to me a concise way to do that -- my intention was not any form of anti-AI virtue signaling.
The other reason is that I may use AI for some of my future work, and as a reader, I would prefer a disclosure about that. So I figured if I'm going to disclose using it, I might as well disclose not using it.
I linked to other thoughts on AI just in case others are interested in what I have to say. I don't stand to gain anything from what I write, and I don't even have analytics to tell me more people are viewing it.
All in all, I was just trying to be transparent, and share my work.
If I recall correctly, he used miniKanren along with formalized, structured data extracted from medical research. Unfortunately, his son has since passed away.
Note that this article is by the same Greg Egan who wrote Permutation City, a (in my opinion) really good, deeply technical, hard science fiction novel exploring consciousness, computation, and the infinite nature of the universe.
If that sounds interesting, I recommend not reading too much about the book before starting it; there are spoilers in most synopses.
You don't necessarily need a background in programming and theoretical computer science to enjoy it. But you'll probably like it better if you already have some familiarity with computational thinking.
Probably worth me revisiting! Web tech has changed a bit since I last investigated this in 2021, and I'm also not sure if I considered options like IndexedDB at the time.
This post recommends the Newsit extension to view Hacker News discussion associated with a page.
In the same vein, a few years ago, I made a Firefox extension for users who want a privacy-preserving way to see if pages have associated HN discussion:
Most other extensions probably hit an external API (such as Algolia) to check submission status, which means they send every page you visit to that API. Instead, my extension uses Bloom filters compiled from every link ever submitted (updated daily from the Hacker News BigQuery dataset) to check the current page's submission status. By using Bloom filters, my extension only hits the API when you click the button to view the discussion.
https://jstrieb.github.io
https://github.com/jstrieb