Hacker News Reader

smellfon LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals

I wonder how they can reconcile the stricter proposals with the LLM usage in kernel development. That seems totally untenable. I mean it all seems untenable, but with the kernel especially.

Also, what about when you inevitably get a situation where a critical vulnerability is discovered, and the only patch available is LLM generated? Do they have to wait to patch until some person who hasn't seen the LLM-generated patch does a clean room implementation?

I understand the objections to LLMs, but rejecting LLM-generated code really doesn't seem realistic.

smellfon PYX: The next step in Python packaging

You can have my `easy_install` when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

smellfon GPT-5

The "G" in AGI stands for "general", so talking about "AGI for software development" makes no sense, and worse than that accepts the AI companies' goalpost-shifting at face value. We shouldn't do that.

smellfon Thorium: Cross-platform patched Chromium fork

Isn't that kind of like saying my pressure washer is a non-ambulatory car?

smellfon Non-Euclidean Doom: what happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159 (2022) [video]

Antichamber: https://store.steampowered.com/app/219890/Antichamber/

Also look at myhouse.wad for actual Doom in actual non-Euclidean spaces.

smellfon "3 Body Problem" Is a Rare Species of Sci-Fi Epic

https://archive.is/ATAkf

smellfon Debloat non-rooted Android devices

Don't know how it compares to other manufacturers, but I've been pretty happy with the minimal BS that comes on my last two Sony phones.

smellfon LLM4Decompile: Decompiling Binary Code with LLM

I think the idea is that you'd have two independently-develooed systems, one LLM decompiling the binary and the other LLM formally verifying. If the verifier disagrees with the decompiler you won't know which tool is right and which is wrong, but if they agree then you'll know the decompiled result is correct, since both tools are unlikely to hallucinate the same thing.

smellfon Pi 5 overclocking: Silicon Lottery

> RK3588-based SBC

Anyone know which SBCs use this chip?

smellfon World War II 'rumor clinics' helped America battle wild gossip

Nor even the comment they were replying to, lol.

smellfon OpenVoice: Versatile Instant Voice Cloning

Examples: https://research.myshell.ai/open-voice

Seems impressive!

smellfon Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

24 * 365 times

smellfon Astronomers detect almost 100 new extremely metal-poor galaxies

Even if they were you still wouldn't hyphenate there.

smellfon Cache of 19th-Century Blue Jeans Discovered in Abandoned Arizona Mineshaft

Seconding TVR Exploring! His videos are a breath of fresh air in today's clickbaity youtube landscape. He's easily the best abandoned mine exploration channel - I can hardly even watch any of the others any more.

smellfon We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)

Actually it turns out that, at least in debian 11, you were right on the money:

    cat `which egrep`
    #!/bin/sh
    exec grep -E "$@"

But I agree that it would be cleaner and trivial to implement this behavior by depending on argv[0], GNU style guide be damned.

smellfon H.264 is Magic (2016)

From their webpage:

  Chrome: behind a flag since version 91.0.4470.0
  Firefox: behind a flag since version 90.0a1
  Edge: behind a flag since version 91
  Opera: behind a flag since version 77
  ImageMagick: since version 7.0.10-54
  XnView MP: since version 0.97.0
  ImageGlass: since version 8.1.4.18
  ExifTool: since version 12.23
  gThumb: since version 3.11.3
  OpenMandriva Lx: since version 4.3 RC
  GIMP: since version 2.99.8
  qimgv: since version 1.0.0
  PhotoQt: since version 2.4
  jxl-winthumb: with WIC-codec since version 0.1.11
  KImageFormats: since version 5.89.0

smellfon Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

They still do, and the quality of discourse on Slashdot is about as bad as it has ever been.

smellfon How to split a string into an array in Bash? (2012)

Agreed! I love bash and use it all the time, but if some solution gets to the point of needing actual data structures, that's when you know it's time to move to a real programming language.

smellfon Amazon Sidewalk

I don't understand - every set listed on that page has a nonzero score for "Smart Features".

smellfon DALL·E: Creating Images from Text

I looked around a bit and couldn't find Dall-e in there. A higher post in this thread said they don't usually release their models. It's a shame, this would have been fun to play with.

smellfon Mass Driver

Edit: I was wrong, never mind.

smellfon Ask HN: Who is the most positive impactful person you know?

How is Stallman a redirect to RMS's page? Shouldn't it go to a disambiguation or name page?

smellfon What Was the Microsoft Network?

The date is repeated below, so that's not a typo. He then talks about how Compuserve has been using PDP-10s for the previous 17 years. Compuserve was around in 1971??

Edit: Holy shit, Compuserve was founded in 1969(!) as a subsidiary of an insurance company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe

smellfon ‘A Powerful Signal of Recessions’ Has Wall Street’s Attention

What he's referring to is not leaves on the ground, but upturned leaves on the trees. The conventional wisdom says that a storm is coming when you can see the backs of the leaves.

smellfon Transfer.sh – File sharing from the command line

Yeah, and that guy is actually still active on HN and is always decent whenever someone calls him out about his ancient Dropbox comment.

smellfon Has wine gone bad?

> Jameson is better than Johnie Walker Black

Obviously this is subjective, but I disagree so completely I can't even imagine how anyone could think this.

smellfon A home-made lithographically-fabricated integrated circuit

From your link:

    INHALATION

    Estimates of the lowest lethal concentrations for hydrogen fluoride range from 50-250 ppm for 5-minute exposure and are based on accidental, ***voluntary*** and occupational exposure information.

Someone volunteered to be exposed to this stuff??

smellfon Pivotal Software S-1

What's the significance of 9:06am? These guys sound like the worst kind of narcissists.

The place sounds more like a cult than a company.

smellfon After over a decade of Vim, I’m hooked on Emacs

So I've never really used emacs... but I'm not really sure I understand why a text editor would need all these things? Like, why do you want an HTTP client in your text editor when you already have wget, curl, nc, etc available in your shell? It kind of sounds like emacs was incorporating anything remotely related to it before systemd came along and made it cool.