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sjamaan

564 karma · joined November 8, 2018

CHICKEN core maintainer

Personal blog: https://www.more-magic.net

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sjamaan··on Britain to make salary disclosure in job ads mandatory
Same here. You don't even know what you're worth if you keep working at the same company. And even then, if you don't know what you could ask, you will never know how much you're really worth.

Let's say you could command 100k/year but your first job is 30k/year and stay there for several years because you like the work environment. Then you'd go to the next company and ask for, I dunno, maybe 50k/year and think that's a huge bump. If you saw salary ranges for similar positions elsewhere you'd be more inclined to start looking around even if you were happy at your current employer.

Nowadays things are a bit more transparent in the tech world with stuff like levels.fyi (but you have to know about those), but I'm thinking it would benefit people in all fields.

sjamaan··on Britain to make salary disclosure in job ads mandatory
> The European Union adopted pay transparency rules the following year, giving member states until June 2026 to implement them in national law.

That's the first I've heard of it, and I've seen plenty of job postings the past year for European companies where there was no salary indication. See for example the recent HN Who's Hiring? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50338728

sjamaan··on sshole
Where did you get that idea? The entire bug is about password hashing. With password auth off, that's not even attempted.
sjamaan··on Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier
You are only screwing yourself by doing this, it trains your brain to have a shorter attention span due to the constant context switching.
sjamaan··on Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome
Obligatory updated comic link: https://contrachrome.com/

A good context for why the market dominance of Chrome is such a big deal.

sjamaan··on The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening
> if you haven't used the agentic tools with a frontier model in the past month or so

We keep hearing versions of this same drivel since late 2025. This time it's different! Now it's really super duper amazingly awesome powerful and if you don't believe it, just trust me bro.

sjamaan··on Will Linux phones become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly?
> this shows it’s possible to create a new stack. It’s not Linux, though, and I think a large reason for this succeeding is that it started in the Chinese market after the US sanctioned Huawei.

Even so, I think it's helpful in that it weakens the duopoly. If app builders are getting used to building apps for other platforms than Android/iOS, it hopefully also becomes easier for others to gain some foothold.

Especially given the heavy commissions and other developer-hostile behaviour of these two. They've been essentially treating devs like shit and IMO a reckoning has been coming for a while now. Of course, you do have to meet the users where they are, at least up to a point.

sjamaan··on Interview with Chicken Scheme Maintainer Sjamaan/Peter Bex
Each procedure gets called with an extra argument, which is the continuation. That continuation is simply another closure which accepts a single argument, the return value of the procedure.

At the toplevel, the compiled code has a C function for every toplevel expression, and these functions just wrap up the "next toplevel expression" as the continuation that gets passed to the compiled C function that "executes" this expression. The final expression in the toplevel gets handed a special continuation which is the "implicit exit handler".

Inside procedures, we do something similar, but we keep the continuation we got from the toplevel and keep passing that along, creating new continuations as needed for the expressions inside.

sjamaan··on Interview with Chicken Scheme Maintainer Sjamaan/Peter Bex
maw maw! That's a blast from the past :)
sjamaan··on Interview with Chicken Scheme Maintainer Sjamaan/Peter Bex
> I really want to read about how chicken's continuations are compiled, hope to see an article there about it someday.

https://www.more-magic.net/posts/internals-data-representati... has a very brief bit about the closure objects we create. What exactly from the continuation compilation process would you be interested in? I could probably write up a post about it.

sjamaan··on Interview with Chicken Scheme Maintainer Sjamaan/Peter Bex
It's just a somewhat-funny-at-the-time nickname which has been going on for too long to change it. I don't particularly like the nickname anymore nor do I identify as a shaman.
sjamaan··on Meta takes down a critical video about meta AI Glasses after filming at Meta
You might want to think twice about this. The videos from those glasses are uploaded and used for AI training, for which they are also reviewed by humans in Kenya, according to the explainer from Bits Of Freedom (with English subs, here: https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/campagnes/gluurbril/)
sjamaan··on Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code
It also supports PostmarketOS. This post made it to HN yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338285
sjamaan··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
It's a shame grandparent's link gives a 404 now, I'd love to compare the two.
sjamaan··on AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere
> Regardless of your political views a tool is a tool at the end of the day. Attempting to anthropomorphize a category of objects in order to shift blame all for the sake of furthering an agenda is plainly bad faith behavior.

Guns are literally made for killing people. That's their only reason for existence. They are a weapon. This makes them qualitatively different from cars, which only incidentally kill people (and the vast majority of time, not on purpose).

To me, trying to equate deaths caused by purpose-made killing tools with those caused by generic tools is arguing in bad faith.

sjamaan··on Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
You'd still be walking around as a free advertiser for their stuff, simply by owning Google-branded hardware. And of course the hypocrisy of having a Google phone to avoid Google spying is palpable.
sjamaan··on Netherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplier
Best news of the year!
sjamaan··on Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
Java and C are older languages which have either solidified (C) or are very careful about breaking compat (Java). Most languages nowadays are indeed in the "move fast and break things" mode.
sjamaan··on Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)
> Also you get to do cool SQL shit nobody understands and you become invaluable =)

Goddamn right!

sjamaan··on Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people
The people involved in commissioning and funding nuclear power plants don't understand nuclear physics either.

The customer doesn't need to understand how the solution works, as long as they can understand that it would solve their problem (in the case of the power plant: producing "clean" energy) and any potential drawbacks or limitations (in the case of the power plant: the waste byproduct).

The point here is that as a "tech person", it's your job to help the customer understand the cost of what they're asking, and come up with a satisfactory solution based on your understanding of their needs.

sjamaan··on An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story
So much is missing from this story. Did they report it to the relevant data authority? Did the fix they said they applied actually fix anything? Etc.
sjamaan··on Stop Sloppypasta
I think before, it was easier to spot. Before, the effort spent would often show in the volume or consistency of the writing. Now, one can create a big, wordy and convincing-sounding document (without any grammatical errors!) in mere seconds. It also provides for some convenient plausible deniability: you can always claim the LLM only helped you here and there with the wording.

So now, even figuring out that it was a careless or lazy job takes a lot more time, which drastically skews the economics in favor of the careless person.

sjamaan··on Technical Excellence Is Not Enough
I realize it's been "written" by an LLM, but the content could have been written by someone I know. It's eerie how this person thinks exactly the same way. It's never their fault, always the others', and they are always obviously right and no amount of arguing can change their mind.
sjamaan··on “Car Wash” test with 53 models
Exactly this. The question states it as a fact, so why would you go back and point out the inconsistency?
sjamaan··on Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data
Also, car companies have a lot at stake and are a clear target. The scammer is hard to even identify, and has no reputation to worry about. Of course in case of a sold extension, the original author of the extension may have a reputation they care about, but only if they're still making other extensions.
sjamaan··on Why S7 Scheme? (2020)
S7 is very cool indeed. It also comes as a single C file, which makes it easy to embed.

As a CHICKEN maintainer, I'd love to hear what the author was missing in the FFI part of the manual.

sjamaan··on Show HN: We Built the 1. EU-Sovereignty Audit for Websites
Good point regarding registrar. Thinking a bit further, there's also the top-level domain: if that's under US control (eg .com), it could still be yanked away from you.
sjamaan··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
My blog is at https://www.more-magic.net, mostly about programming (with a focus on Scheme) or adjacent stuff.
sjamaan··on Eat Real Food
> - Force better labeling, like the Nutri-Score in France and EU

NutriScore is mostly useless, to the point of being misleading. The system was cooked up by the industry, which explains a lot.

It is a label that tells you how nutritious a given product is "compared to products in the same category". So you could have, say, candy or frozen pizza with a NutriScore A and that would be just fine according to this system because it happens to be more nutritious than other candy/pizza. In other words, a product having a NutriScore of A doesn't mean the product is actually healthy or good for you.

sjamaan··on The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source
Then you should support the Free Software Europe's "Public Money, Public Code" campaign: https://publiccode.eu/en/
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