throwaway150

You should report it to sigplan.org. Complaining about it here won't make any difference.

There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html -

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Your comments are very confusing.

> For someone who's used to seeing "&" as an "address of" operator (or, a pointer)

You must be talking about "&something" which takes the "address of something" but the OP does not talk about this at all. You know this because you wrote in your other comment ...

> And if this indeed the case, why is int&& x compatible with int& y ?

So you clearly understand the OP is discussing "int&&" and "int&". Those are totally different from "&something". Even a cursory reading of the OP should tell you these are references, not the "address of something" that you're probably more familiar with.

One is rvalue reference and the other is lvalue reference and I agree that the article could have explained it better what they mean. But the OP doesn't seem to be an introductory piece. It's clearly aimed at intermediate to advanced C++ developers. What I find confusing is that you're mixing up something specific like "int&&" with "&something", which are entirely different concepts.

I mean when have you ever seen "int&" to be "address of" or "pointer"? You have only seen "&something" and "int*" and "int**" be "address of" or "pointer", haven't you?

Does this read like AI slop to anyone else?

That whole "Profiles don't/aren't just $THIS; they're also $THAT" construction is classic LLM output. Then you've got the weird confusing inconsistencies like calling profiles a new feature when they aren't and there's also the rule of 3 ("avatars, colours, naming", "set boundaries, protect your information and make the internet a little calmer"). It all feels machine-written. Even the comparison of tidying your tabs to setting boundaries seems meaningless. It's just the sort of empty parallels AI loves to make.

It's a short article but I really had to power through it because with every sentence I kept thinking, this is not written by a human. If it is AI-generated slop, that'd explain why some parts of it doesn't make any sense.

That's quite a claim. I'm not sure I buy it. We never had all this lunchroom social drama growing up, and my old mates and I seem to be doing just fine.

Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more important than anything in math is because that's the kind of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's truly more important?

> but "nothing" is an overstatement

Absolutely not. There was genuinely nothing in their thoughtful and informative reply that seemed AI generated to me. Have you never seen people on HN write detailed, articulate answers? This was one of them.

Asking a question, getting a helpful response, and then implying it was written by AI is quite rude. Saying, "Excuse me if not, $SOMETHING_VERY_OFFENSIVE" does not make "$SOMETHING_VERY_OFFENSIVE" any less offensive! It's disheartening to see someone take the time to write a great answer only to be met with such a rude question. Please don't do that here. It's frustrating and discourages genuine contributors.

> How much should HN cater to junior engineers?

The assumption that HN should cater to junior engineers is curious. It implies a purpose the site has never claimed to have.

Good grief! Are we really so insufferable as software developers that we can't just appreciate a brilliant article about the work of a remarkable computer scientist without nitpicking every supposed "bad practice"?

The whole point of the piece seems completely lost on some readers. Yes, we all know that #define $(a,b) if(a)b;else is questionable. I don't need a crash course on C macros in the comments, thank you. The author already acknowledges that Whitney's style is controversial. Do we really need to keep rehashing that point in every comment, or can we finally focus on how all this unconventional code fits together beautifully to form a working interpreter?

> Any recoverability sounds very bad.

PRNGs are not meant to be cryptographically secure. If you don't want recoverability by all means use SHA512 or a proper CSPRNG.

But saying PRNGs are bad because there is recoverability is like saying salt is bad because it isn't sweet. PRNGs are not meant for non-recoverability and salt isn't meant to be sweet.

> That doesn't fix the problem of "my quota reset (or reporting job) gets shifted by 1 hr when daylight saving time changes".

How hard is to convert the UTC time to user's local time and perform quota reset?

I mean you should be doing this anyway. Even if you store everything in PST or EST or CST, you never know when you'll get customers from another part of the world and then you'll have to do this anyway. So why not do this already?

> Who hurt you?

Nobody hurt them. Please don't do this kind of childish rebuttals. It looks really silly on HN. If you don't want to use UTC, that's one thing. You do you. But there are reasons for sane professionals (who weren't hurt by anybody) to expect their coworkers to use UTC when possible. Because using local timezone leads to some problems including the one in TFA.

I admire the effort to fix things too. But this is exactly how we end up with 15 competing standards (https://xkcd.com/927/), each a little different, and no one can tell which library or package can parse which format any more.

I'm also not convinced that the small usability benefits of these alternative formats outweigh the burden of stumbling across them in different projects and then having to remember which parser works with which format.

If I had to choose between living with one canonical, well-established format like JSON and a jumble of 15 incompatible formats, I’d choose the single, well-established one every time.

Your parent comment (hnlmorg) already knows that "ML" in MAML is a misnomer. They are explaining why your grandparent comment (AdieuToLogic) does not explain very well why XML is a markup language but MAML isn't.

Your GP comment says that XML has markup in the name so that's a hint that XML is a markup language. Well... so does MAML. But we all agree that MAML is not a markup language. So we can't just say that XML is a markup language because the hint is in the name. By that logic, MAML would be a markup language too but it isn't. We need a stronger argument to explain why XML is a markup language and MAML is not. Like XML can markup content but MAML cannot markup anything. That was your parent comment's point.

This whole subthread has become an example of arguing for the sake of arguing. The messages in this subthread are correct on their own but missing the point of the parent comments.

> I, the user, can already control the content width by resizing my browser, thank you very much.

But I, the user, do not. And I will not. Because there are a bazillion websites that I want to browse in a maximized browser window. So limiting the content width help people like me who cannot/would not resize my browser.

All my immigrant friends are skilled workers who earn more than an average citizen, contribute more taxes and pay exorbitant fees for visa, health surcharge and NIC. I am sure there are immigrants in low paying jobs too. Perhaps we need to talk about different types of immigrants rather than clubbing them all into one "immigrant" category and reinforcing the same tired tropes about immigrants.

Do you know how much money the immigrants pay as taxes, health surcharge and National Insurance contributions in exchange for the right to live and work in the UK? Don't forget that the taxes, health surcharge and NI contributions of the immigrations are literally funding the NHS! I think it is fair to expect the contributors to get treatment when they are contributing so much to it.

Appreciate the response. But ...

> Since OP mentions logging, it’s worth noting that for instrumentation and observability we’ve embraced OpenTelemetry and have an instrumentation.ts convention

That makes it sound as though the answer to a clumsy logging facility is simply to add another heavy layer of complexity. Surely not every application needs OpenTelemetry. Why can’t logger().info() just work in a sensible way? This can't be such a hard problem, can it? Every other language and framework does it!

Sorry. That reference went totally over my head. My apologies!

Just so that the discussion does not become overly biased in one direction, I'd like to share that I'm over 40 and still feel highly motivated to pursue intellectual interests, and take on hobby projects. The hours I can put in is definitely far less than I could when I was single and young but the motivation is still there and I still manage to complete a few hobby projects (software ones and otherwise) each year.

Not everyone is a soda connoisseur like you. I get it, some people refuse to drink anything but the original cola. But not everyone is like that. Some of us have a reduced ability to distinguish differences in taste, myself included. To me, the diet and regular versions taste exactly the same, whether my eyes are open or shut.

This thread is not about the differences in the taste between the real cola and diet cola. Many many healthy people with no health problems have the diet version!

> So first, people who don't have a problem with sugar or their health, they don't drink artificially sweetened drinks.

What a bogus claim! Plenty of people drink artificially sweetened drinks because they don't want to enjoy a soda but not add calories to their daily consumption! Which world do you live in? Have you even been to cinema lately? I bet every other person orders a diet soda before entering the theatre. I know because I see it happen all the time all around me!

That control codes are documented in a standard is orthogonal to the HTTP standard.

A terminal program should follow the terminal standard by all means. But a web service advertising one Content-Type but delivering another Content-Type is a violation of the web standards.

> https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GL10...

Any chance the original link can be replaced with this? This is definitely way more informative than the clickbait article.

Thanks for clarifying. You're right! The output isn't actually text/plain. As someone who values standards, it is annoying to see control-code garbage when the content type claims to be text/plain. But wttr.in seems more like a fun novelty than a serious service and I suspect they don't pay much attention to standards. Still, I'm not sure that excuses saying one thing in the headers and delivering something else in the body.

But you've got a fair point. So thanks!

I didn't assume either that the LLM is to guess the weather. I said that using LLM for parsing the Met Office's data is maybe not such a good idea if you can do it deterministically.

> IMHO you should not emit ANSII escape sequences until you at least call isatty, preferably also consult termcap.

How exactly do you propose that wttr.in, which is not actually a process running on your machine (but a remote server), call isatty() on your machine?

Or are you suggesting that curl should check isatty() and strip out the control codes? But that would be overstepping curl's responsibilities, wouldn't it? Its job is to faithfully output the response, garbage or not.

Yes, absolutely. I certainly don't need an LLM to do something like that.

When I ask for the weather, I want to know exactly what the Met Office says the weather is. Not what an LLM guesses the Met Office might have said, with a non-zero chance of introducing a hallucination.

This habit of inserting LLMs into otherwise deterministic tasks is frustrating. Why take something that can be solved accurately and deterministically (like parsing the Met Office's data) and make it probabilistic, error-prone, and unpredictable with an LLM?

LLMs are appropriate for problems we cannot solve deterministically and accurately. They are not appropriate for problems we can already solve deterministically and accurately.

> Not only would you contact the author first

They did. They claim that the author was not keen on fixing the problems.

> There’s also some pervasive view that handcrafted human code is somehow of superior quality which… uh…

That's completely orthogonal to the issue here. Nice bait, but I'm not biting!

Whether handcrafted or vibecoded, a service is being shipped here to actual users with lives and consequences. The developer of the service is making money. The developer owes it to themselves and their users to conduct a basic security audit. Otherwise it is gross negligence!

This maybe an unpopular take but I think there's a place for kindness, and there's a place for naming-and-shaming, and I think this is the case for the latter! Unless we name-and-shame utter and wilful negligence like this, our industry is headed for rock bottom.

Any service making money by collecting user data owe it to themselves and to their users to to conduct at least a basic security audit of its product. Anything less borders on criminal negligence. I don't think such a blatant failure to uphold users' trust deserves kindness.

The announcement on X: https://x.com/lindayax/status/1942957094811951197

> Think about all those times your program isn't building and `make clean` fixes it.

I don't think that's a good example. I've worked with more than 20 different build tools by now, and I cannot recall a single instance where the problem actually came down to cache invalidation. Every time I dug into it, the real cause was something else: a mistake in the build script, an incorrectly declared dependency, or something similar.

So when you say "think about all those times", not a single such time comes to my mind!