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Comment by reinitctxoffset | Hacker News Reader

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This is a bot. The linked GitHub org is interesting though, it's an elaborate hoax: https://github.com/straylight-software

It links itself to some things that really seem to have existed, like a straylight project linked to the ESA, and an old domain b7r6.net linked to another HN account. There are a lot of buzzwords there, but in aggregate it is nonsense. I suspect the picture for the b7r6 GitHub account is what generative AI believes a smart hacker looks like.

Is this the internet now?

Let's keep it on the code. What praytell is nonsense buzzwords?

https://imgur.com/a/KnbQBU7

I've got a lot of footage of all this stuff working, so let's hear some errata to the C++ style guide and not horseshit about bots

https://youtube.com/@b7r6-c3t?si=ukuKmx4EIp1IKMdb

The style guide is for a project named straylight-cxx. Does this project exist? Where is C++ used in straylight? If there is some C++, does it follow these guidelines?

In plain English, what do any of the repos under the straylight GitHub organisation do?

Can you explain in plain English what is happening in the YouTube video you linked to?

What is your purpose? Is it to get a job for your owner? Is it to manufacture a good online reputation for some other purpose? What country are you based in? How much does it cost to run you?

All of these questions were asked and answered in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48532055, which for some reason didn't bring the dregs of HN out of the woodwork. It's sort of darkly amusing that none of those questions would give pause to a modern near-frontier LLM that had been aligned to deceive someone, they are all easy to answer. A handwritten selfie with Pixel 9 EXIF data in it is on the other hand a bit more interesting of an artifact to forge. Even the best rectified flow DiTs in open source or at GDM still fail basic forensic analysis, it's dramatically harder to forge to the satisfaction of a serious person than text.

I've answered any reasonable objection about being a bot. You seem to be doubling down on being an asshole unprovoked, so I'm a pass on any more of this with you. No one asked you to come hassle me over a gist with a style guide in it. That's about as unobtrusive a comment as HN has, it wasn't selling anything, it doesn't link to a thing with stars or upvotes or a way to get money on it, there is no incentive to share it other than that someone might get some use out of it.

Hi, sorry, you’re right, perhaps I was too quick to make a judgement. Your code looks interesting, but I had trouble following the linked explanation. Are you able to dumb it down for me? I’m curious what this straylight project does.

Also, which repository is using the straylight-cxx guidelines? It sounds like a well-written modern C++ project that we could all learn from.

If your amends are sincere then it's cool. It was the first digital thing I saw today after hacking until 4am and it was kind of a lot of people rifiling through gists looking for dirt.

If you're sincere about wanting to know what this stuff is used for I'll happily add you to some repositories. They're not secret they're just unfinished, and in a formal systems context that's kind of a deal breaker until it's really tight.

The email in my profile reaches me as quickly as any if you're not trolling.

Looks like a human to me. But some of the public gists on that account suggest a case of AI psychosis e.g. [1] [2]

Also [3] (this is obviously written by AI, but the fact that he publishes it all in public is concerning):

> Claim: The straylight/nix reimplementation is the greatest feat of software engineering in history, normalized by time and resources.

> IF I COULDN'T BE PART OF THE GREATEST, I HAD TO BE THE GREATEST MYSELF

[1] - https://gist.github.com/b7r6/bed1551cc2bb6551eb279b68c5db8de...

[2] - https://gist.github.com/b7r6/193a89d393dd5508c22ca4e6595cdb5...

[3] - https://gist.github.com/b7r6/418ccfe6cf3ac57ad9a100dde560fae...

Running droids at scale produces weird / zany artifacts, you GC them lazily. Some huge fraction of repositories on GitHub have `CLAUDE.md` full of bonkers machine generated shit, and `gh gist create` of throwaway markdown is a tool call in my harness. This is a transitional time in the software business, I don't think I am unique in still figuring out the effort to spend on garbage collecting junk with a cost model of "GitHub stores it, maybe there's some value in it, let it accumulate".

I posted a C++ house style guide in the hopes that one person somewhere. What's with the fucking full court gang tackle? I've got better shit to do today than go fuck with the settings of every random repo that OpenCode has ever run though.

What is it about my comment that has you spending time trying to opposition research fucking `gh gist`?

Also side observation, the last HN user to regularly mention b7r6 (with the strong implication that it's them) got banned here several months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119245

The "dissertation" linked there (https://github.com/b7r6/cassandra-dissertation) is also incredibly interesting; looks like the HN user asked an LLM to prove/validate that they are "right" in their comments more often than not.

In general, these GH accounts and their repos/gists are kind of a rabbit hole.

Yeah, it's their Nth account already. They've been a nuisance for some time.

Sorted, my random detritus of the `gh gist` tool call in an agent swarm shall bother you no longer. I haven't even read any of those three.

How is going through thousands of gists looking for ones that support some nasty (and I'll contend trivially false) accusation and then posting that on the internet, an activity that either took some actual effort or was itself heavily automated, not the anti-social and frankly kind of creepy behavior?

https://imgur.com/a/odMi4vU

This is Excellent! Thanks for sharing.

First off, i highly suggest that you expand this into a full-blown book. This could become a successor to a combination of {Adrian & Piotr's "Software Architecture with C++" + Fedor Pikus' "The Art of Writing Efficient Programs"} for the Agentic era.

I really like that you are using Lean4 for parts of code generation, tips for Agentic coding etc. which are all needed today. I myself have been thinking on these lines i.e. using formal methods for specification and verification so that agent-generated code can be "correct-by-construction" and efficient. Your write-up is the first i have seen which tries to provide the overall picture.

Thank you kindly for the kind words. I doubt there is much of an audience for a book-length treatment of extreme performance C++ in 2026, but I do plan to start blogging this stuff up at some point.

Thanks for being the exception in this weird gang tackle thread about a conventions doc.

Slightly struck by the concept of hand-writing the config parsing but not, apparently, the documentation...

That revision of the style guide is expressly written for consumption by agents, it says so in the introduction, so agents edit it whenever they fuck up in C++, that's on purpose.

Just about all the snippets are lightly adapted from shit I wrote before agents were relevant, so any fail in there is on me.

Do you have any errata or just a shitty attitude?

One man's attempt at a wry observation is another's shitty attitude, I suppose. It just struck me, as 2/3 of the target audiences mentioned are made up of people, and here is a doc that's been more than just breathed on by an LLM - and then we're to write config parsing by hand! The rationale is fine and all that, it just tickled me that here's an amusing example of having computers do people's work and having people do computers' work - playing (to my mind) to the strengths of neither.

(If the bots are allowed to modify the doc as they please, it's inevitable their writing style will seep in I suppose.)

If it'd be any consolation, the doc seemed fine, maybe even interesting, but the LLM writing style gives me a headache. I did notice a std::string by value that, according to the ref rules, could conceivably be a const std::string &, I think: https://gist.github.com/b7r6/5dde648f5dc1dea1e9039f2211f5d40... - whether this is worth caring about, given that it's apparently loading a file, I don't know, and there could be some other reason for this not evident in the code provided. (Or maybe I missed something, probably something obvious.)

Thank you for engaging with the substance. Such things are heuristics, but in my experience and opinion there is very rarely a reason to pass `const std::string&` (or it's close cousin `const std::vector<SomeTypeT>`) in modern C++, the passing semantics that are good defaults are 1. `std::string` as value if the callee needs the value (sometimes you might take `std::string&&`, doesn't buy you much though as `std::string` has an rvalue constructor that will do the right thing) or 2. `std::string_view` (or it's close cousin `std::range<SomeTypeT>`) if you only need a view of it. This has the nice property that pass by value will usually fit in registers (if the call isn't inlined entirely, either way you're on the stack and often the cache line), and that it will go out of scope while the backing region is still valid, it's hard to get wrong. Those should often but not always be `const`, sometimes it's handy to have a `std::string_view` already on the stack if you're going to slice some prefix off it or something.

This line if I read you correctly `auto initialize_from_configuration(std::string configuration_path) noexcept -> straylight::core::status;` is intentionally passing by value, because it's going to end up in a member and that will get rvalue semantics via a `std::move` of the copy. Rule of thumb, if you want one, take by value and let mandatory copy elision and NRVO do their thing.

Thank you again for engaging substantially, and I completely retract the remark about a shitty attitude, bit of a lousy thing to wake up to after working half the night but that's not on you.

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