And the fact this remains a Web site is truly remarkable. The reason it is popular with a niche group of technically minded-users is because Web sites are so hard to come by these days that you need a special place to collect them.
and yet day after day, HN is flooded with links to ... wait for it ... web sites (more specifically, content on web sites thought to be potentially interesting to the HN crowdf).
That search engine results suck and it is increasingly hard to find those websites, thus HN serves as an old-school website index. I think that was his point, and I don't disagree with it.
The Web is dead. Most people access the internet through one of perhaps ten popular applications that do not contain Web content (semantic XML documents hyperlinked together).
HTML was an application of SGML, and precedes XML.
HTML is a markup language, and not all of the elements and features are semantic in nature. The "span" tag literally exists to provide a way of affecting a bit of text where no tag with more semantic meaning applies.
> Most programming languages hide complexity from you—they abstract away memory management, mask control flow with implicit operations, and shield you from the machine beneath. This feels simple at first, but eventually you hit a wall. You need to understand why something is slow, where a crash happened, or how to squeeze every ounce of performance from your hardware. Suddenly, the abstractions that helped you get started are now in your way.
> Zig takes a different path. It reveals complexity—and then gives you the tools to master it.
> This book will take you from Hello, world! to building systems that cross-compile to any platform, manage memory with surgical precision, and generate code at compile time. You will learn not just how Zig works, but why it works the way it does. Every allocation will be explicit. Every control path will be visible. Every abstraction will be precise, not vague.
But sadly people like the prompter of this book will lie and pretend to have written things themselves that they did not. First three paragraphs by the way, and a bingo for every sign of AI.
I had a discussion on some other submission a couple of weeks back, where several people were arguing "it's obviously AI generated" (the style btw was completely different to this, quite a few explicitives...). When I put the the text in 5 random AI detectors the argument who except for one (which said mixed, 10% AI or so) all said 100% human I was being down voted and the argument became "AI detection tools can detect AI" but somehow the people claim there are 100% clear telltale signs which says it's AI (why those detection tools can detect them is baffling to me).
I have the feeling that the whole "it's AI" stick has become a synonym for I don't like this writing style.
It really does not add to the discussion. If people would post immediately "there's spelling mistakes this is rubbish", they would rightfully get down voted, but somehow saying "it's AI" is acceptable. Would the book be any more or less useful if somebody used AI for writing it? So what is your point?
Check out the other examples presented in this thread or read some of the chapters. I'm pretty sure the author used LLMs to generate at least parts of this text. In this case this would be particularly outrageous since the author explicitly advertizes the content as 100% handwritten.
> Would the book be any more or less useful if somebody used AI for writing it?
Personally, I don't want to read AI generated texts. I would appreciate if people were upfront about their LLM usage. At the very least they shouldn't lie about it.
I ran the introduction chapter through Pangram [1], which is one of the most reliable AI-generated text classifiers out there [2] (with a benchmarked accuracy of 99.85% over long-form text), and it gives high confidence for it having been AI-generated. It's also very intuitively obvious if you play a lot with LLMs.
I have no problem at all reading AI-generated content if it's good, but I don't appreciate dishonesty.
There's also the classic “it's not just X, it's Y”, adjective overuse, rule of 3, total nonsense (manage memory with surgical precision? what does that mean?), etc. One of these is excusable, but text entirely comprised of AI indicators is either deliberately written to mimic AI style, or the product of AI.
"not just x but y" is definitely a tell tale AI marker. But, people can write that as well. Also our writing styles can be influenced as we've seen so much AI content.
Anyway, if someone says they didn't use AI, I would personally give them the benefit of the doubt for a while at least.
Like many scholarly linguistic construction, this is one many of us saw in latin class with non solum ... sed etium or non modo ... sed etium: https://issuu.com/uteplib/docs/latin_grammar/234. I didn't take ancient Greek, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's also a version there.
Are you a child? Probably not, so you are just accessing legally available content by alternate means. It's strange how many people think they are out-smarting a system when said system is explicitly designed to allow them access.
These laws are primarily intended to stop children browsing the internet from being exposed to porn and gore when they're simply browsing the web. A child who has gained sufficient independence to purchase their own VPN subscription or operate an SSH server to look at pictures of boobies without their parents knowing has also likely reached the point in life where doing so is not harmful to them.
Firstly, the article makes it clear that the definition of "harmful to children" is being systematically expanded to mean "makes conservatives a bit uncomfortable."
And secondly:
> It's strange how many people think they are out-smarting a system when said system is explicitly designed to allow them access.
The whole point of the article is to draw attention to the fact that certain regions are trying to make the use of a VPN illegal. If that were to happen, using an SSH tunnel would indeed be "outsmarting the system."
I agree with you, except maybe 'using an SSH tunnel would indeed be "outsmarting the system."'
Not sure how you meant that, but I'm sure that using an SSH tunnel to get around VPN restrictions will be determined to be illegal. They'll just say an SSH tunnel IS a VPN in the legal sense.
Of course, this won't matter for the vast majority that they don't prosecute - it will only matter for the few they do, which hopefully isn't you or me. But you never know. You get pulled over for a broken taillight and then - "hey, is that a NordVPN sticker on your laptop there..." and next thing you know you're doing 10-life.
> the article makes it clear that the definition of "harmful to children" is being systematically expanded to mean "makes conservatives a bit uncomfortable."
Seems clear to me that a lot of religious sites are directly harmful to children if they allow the church elders abuse them with impunity.
A trivial amount of legislation can fix that. Law reads: ISPs must implement implement parental blocks by default, exceptions may only be made on a per-device basis. Parental controls must also be enabled on public wifi. Easy as that. It doesn't matter how lazy you are, actively going and turning something off is more effort than not.
>ISPs must implement implement parental blocks by default
This is already the case in the UK. We discovered another sad fact. Parents will suddenly develop the technical literacy to turn parental controls off because it's inconveniencing them, but won't bother to fine grain the control to make it safe for their children.
It seems it would be much more effective to regulate ISPs, requiring them to disallow users from accessing adult sites and VPNs without first verifying their age. This also wouldn't be a violation of privacy since you are already giving your ISP your physical address. The only place users would be expected to identify themselves is over public wifi.
They have realised that, in single-threaded code, an implicit mutex is created between each call to await, and therefore state variables can usually be organised in such a way to avoid explicit mutexes. Of course, one strongly suspects that such code will involve a lot of boolean variables with names such as “exclude_other_accesses_to_data”.
>Anything beyond subsistence agriculture would probably be impossible without financialization.
This is patently not true. The USSR had no financial markets and engaged in the production high value goods. Whether it did so more efficiently than its capitalist competition is another matter, and I believe the answer is likely no, but it clearly did more than subsistence farming.
This assessment is not based in historical reality. The last famine in the Soviet Union ended in 1947, more than 40 years before its dissolution, and with World War 2 being a major contributing factor.
The broader economic situation of the USSR is a very different question to whether or not they were able to progress beyond subsistence farming. One is a relatively nuanced topic, the other is a question that can be answered trivially by someone with the most basic historical knowledge, or even knowledge of modern Russia which clearly has not developed from subsistence farming to a developed economy in the time between 1991 and today.
Banks do not provide capital. When I buy 50 tons of steel, no bank has sold it to me. The smelters and miners have provided that capital. Banks allocate capital. It is management, not provision.
With that in mind, there are two types of productive financial work: actuarial services and accounting. Actuaries act as the managers of society's resources, ensuring that net profit is made and risk well distributed, and accountants determine what those resources are. It is clear that many of the people in finance are not qualified to provide either of these services and simply leach profit out of the rest of the economy.
Notice that neither of these rely on capital markets and speculation. Speculators have been repeatedly proven to be horrible managers, performing worse than random chance. History is clear on this: if left to their own devices, speculators will destroy the economy. Only by means of strict regulation can they be forced into doing the productive actuarial and accounting work for which they are hypothetically employed. Yet for some reason, we still allow these people to operate without oversight in many cases and to extract massive profit beyond the value of their work.
History is filled with bubbles and crashes. At this very moment, there are trillions of dollars invested into companies with no clear profit model who are openly and obviously fraudulent in their accounting practises. Do you think this allocation is driven by a rational consideration of the risks of investing in a business with massive obligations and no possible way to service them? Or take bit coins. They are fictional products with clear negative value, and yet some financial professional push to integrate this funny money into the real economy.
Compare and contrast: resource allocation in finance-heavy Western nations with the same in the finance-light China. It's abundantly obvious to me that, through suppressing their financial sector, China has reached a superior economic outcome than they otherwise might have. We have elected to make traders the managers of our economy, and I think they have done a clear bad job and that we aught to reassess treating their decisions with such primacy.
