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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

> JS minification is fairly mechanical and comparably simple, so the inversion should be relatively easy.

This is stated as if it's a truism, but I can't understand how you can actually believe this. Converting `let userSignedInTimestamp = new Date()` to `let x = new Date()` is trivial, but going the other way probably requires reading and understanding the rest of the surrounding code to see in what contexts `x` is being used. Also, the rest of the code is also minified, making this even more challenging. Even if you do all that right, it's at best it's still a lossy conversion, since the name of the variable could capture characteristics that aren't explicitly outlined in the code at all.

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You are technically true, but I think you should try some reverse engineering to see that it is usually possible to reconstruct much of them in spite of the amount of transformations made. I do understand that this fact might be hard to believe without any prior.

EDIT: I think I got why some comments complain I downplayed the power of LLM here. I never meant to, and I wanted to say that the unminification is a relatively easy task compared to other reverse engineering tasks. It is great we can automate the easy task, but we still have to wait for a better model to do much more.

I have tried reconstructing minified code (I thought that would be obvious from my example). It feels like it takes just a bit less thought than it did to write the code in the first place, which is definitely not something I would classify as "comparably simple".

Because of how trivial that step is, it's likely pretty easy to just take lots of code and minify it. Then you have the training data you need to learn to generate full code from minified code. If your goal is to generate additional useful training data for your LLM, it could make sense to actually do that.

I suspect, but definitely do not know, that all the coding aspects of llms work something like this. It’s such a fundamentally different problem from a paragraph, which should never be the same as any other paragraph. Seems to me that coding is a bit more like the game of go, where an absolute score can be used to guide learning. Seed the system with lots and lots of leetcode examples from reality, and then train it to write tests, and now you have a closed loop that can train itself.

If you're able to generate minified code from all the code you can find on the internet, you end up with a very large training set. Of course in some scenarios you won't know what the original variable names were, but you would expect to be able to get something very usable out of it. These things, where you can deterministically generate new and useful training data, you would expect to be used.

And I can’t understand why any reasonably intelligent human feels the need to be this abrasive. You could educate but instead you had to be condescending.

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