HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wavemode

6,395 karma · joined April 19, 2017

submissionscomments
wavemode··on Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped
No, but it should only last 10 years or so. Copyright in general is good as it provides economic incentive to produce new creative works. But copyright lasting or exceeding the length of people's lifetimes has done more harm than good to society. By that time, you have long since passed over from incentivizing creators, into enabling rent-seeking corporations.
wavemode··on Show HN: Scala Tutorials – interactive Scala 3 lessons in the browser
Kotlin seems to have eaten Scala's lunch, for many organizations in the "JVM-but-not-Java" camp.

Also, non-backwards-compatible language changes fragmented the Scala ecosystem. Combined with the general trend of functional programming hype somewhat dying down in recent years.

wavemode··on New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study
It will have the opposite effect, if people who get the vaccine start behaving as though they are 100% protected (which, many people will).
wavemode··on Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?
hello fellow Robert Fitzgerald-ian

I think it's fitting that a story that was originally an ancient poem, should sound ancient and poetic.

wavemode··on It's not empowering to hand off the details
Correct
wavemode··on It's not empowering to hand off the details
You're confusing translation and interpretation. A compiler is merely translating your code into a lower-level form. (There is a degree of heuristic-based interpretation that goes into generating good code, but the code's observable behavior is not allowed to change.)

But an LLM has to interpret your words and make judgment calls about the logical details, which is a very different thing. An LLM sufficiently intelligent to make acceptable judgment calls in all situations (acceptable enough to ship to production without human review of those details) would likely be indistinguishable from AGI.

wavemode··on Turn And Face The Strange
> We’re launching a new iteration of Sprites, and focusing the company on them and the problem they solve. And I’m tagging in Scott Johnston as CEO.

Hard for me to see this as anything other than fly.io committing suicide. AI sandboxes are a crowded product space, basically a complete commodity at this point, and the new CEO will likely focus on profit to the detriment of creative vision.

Happy to be proven wrong though.

wavemode··on Claude Opus 5
I don't mean that to say that anyone outside the US is suspicious. Just that parent commenter might be from one of a set of countries that tend to be flagged as suspicious. (But I did not want to directly ask him where he lives.)
wavemode··on Claude Opus 5
Are you outside the US? And/or are you using VPN? Those are the two things that come to my mind that can cause overzealous security monitoring to flag someone.

Another explanation could be the content itself. Does your game have anything at all to do with computer hacking or sexual content? Is there graphic violent language? People commonly report being unable to use AI to work on such things due to guardrails.

wavemode··on Fil-C: Garbage In, Memory Safety Out [video]
A computer spends the vast majority of its time and memory in userspace, so this tradeoff isn't as bad as it sounds.
wavemode··on OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened
I'm not skeptical that this attack happened, I'm skeptical that the model's prompt was truly just "solve this benchmark" and nothing more.

I'm also trying to figure out why OpenAI put out a press release about this. In what way is this not admitting to a federal crime?

wavemode··on Clarity didn't work, trying mysterianism (2012)
It stands to reason that the people who took the earring off were less happy and made worse decisions than the people who kept it on for the rest of their lives.

So then ask yourself: why did they take it off? Pondering the implications of that question is the entire point of this short story.

wavemode··on Ten Steps Towards Happiness (2015)
That quote is from a play, and was written by a character who is a revolutionary and an anarchist.

In a meta-sense, I don't think G.B. Shaw intended this quote to be taken as an absolute truth by the audience.

And, even taking the quote itself at face value (pretending the fictional character who wrote it was a real person), I think it's referring mostly to political progress. Indeed, most times that political institutions have been upended, it was by people who were not happy with the status quo. But I think that's a different sort of unhappiness from the unhappiness of not being satisfied with your life.

wavemode··on Korg PS-3300 is back
£11,000 is a lot of money, but in the context of instruments is pretty reasonable.
wavemode··on Minikotlin
> One pass, all the way down to bytecode

> hands off to two of its own IRs before writing WASM-GC by hand

So it's not "one pass" lol. Do you know what a pass is?

Not that it matters - this AI is claiming "one pass" as though that's a good thing, but it's usually not. One-pass compilers can't typecheck forward references.

wavemode··on The privacy problems hidden in your period tracker
I disagree. The article very clearly makes it sound like there is some reason RudderStack ought to be listed by name in the privacy policy of the Stardust app. When in reality, it would make no more sense to list them by name, than it would make sense to list AWS or CloudFlare or any other technical infrastructure through which customer data passes.

> Mozilla uncovered numerous privacy problems across various apps, but Stardust was the only one found sharing detailed reproductive health data with another company.

> The report found that Stardust sends users' health information to a data management company called RudderStack, which isn't named in its privacy policy. That data includes pregnancy status, birth control, moods, alcohol consumption and specific symptoms like tender breasts and stomach cramps.

> Companies often share data with outside services to process information and analyse user behaviour. There's nothing unlawful going on, and there's no reason to think RudderStack (or any company mentioned in this story) is doing something nefarious.

> However, experts say it's inherently risky when your data spreads to more places. It creates another opportunity for security breaches or legal requests for information. Besides, you may just be uncomfortable with another company seeing your health data.

> A Stardust spokesperson says the company only uses RudderStack as a "technical pipeline" to route data into its own analytics systems, and the app doesn't share anything that could allow RudderStack to identify your name or contact information. "Additionally, RudderStack is contractually prohibited from selling or using it for its own purposes," and RudderStack doesn't store the data long-term, the spokesperson says.

> "People deserve better," says Shoshana Wodinsky, a privacy research analyst who conducted Mozilla's tests. At the very least, she says, you should know what's happening.

wavemode··on OnePlus halts operations in USA and Europe
Yep. This is a common problem for pocket devices with USB-C ports. Those suckers collect dust and grime if you don't cover them up.

I usually use the pointy end of a plastic flosser.

wavemode··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
There's definitely one code change that's needed - you need to override the Allocator being used by standard library containers (or, live without standard library containers) and by any third-party dependencies you have. That feature is not even stable, let alone idiomatic.
wavemode··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
> This only works for very specific use cases, like a fixed server size where you know exactly how much memory you want to allocate to a process.

So, like, the JVM with its "initial heap size" setting? After reserving that space from the OS on startup, pieces of the space are then handed out by the JVM's internal allocator, where and when needed.

If initial heap size and max heap size are the same, that initial one is the only malloc() call that ever happens. Not as common for desktop software, but a common best practice when deploying JVM applications to servers.

(I think we're perhaps tripping over two different meanings of "allocate" - you can "allocate" in the sense of calling malloc(), and you can "allocate" a piece of that reserved memory to a particular scope/function/object without actually calling malloc.)

> Allocating memory as needed isn’t a Rust-specific idiom.

I never said that.

wavemode··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
I would say the exact opposite, actually - Zig is a language specifically suited for TigerBeetle's all-at-once approach to memory management, and the approach more commonly used in Rust (allocate wherever and whenever) is non-idiomatic in Zig.

> only works for very specific use cases.

It's not clear to me what you mean by this.

wavemode··on [dead]
how the hell do I get past level 6 of the Casper game?
wavemode··on Amber the programming language compiled to Bash/Ksh/Zsh
Well, you can "source" a script, so its effects persist in your current shell session. That's a feature of the script and your shell sharing the same language.
wavemode··on Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot
Do you have a link to this chat?
wavemode··on Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
Apple isn't bringing this lawsuit for the cash. For publicity reasons this will go to trial.
wavemode··on Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
Elaborate?
wavemode··on AI 2040: Plan A
I actually think self-driving is one of the easier paths of development. The main thing holding it back right now is regulation and liability.

But, if you could wave a wand and eliminate all legal and liability hurdles to self-driving, automobile deaths would plummet. They're way safer than the average human driver. The technology is definitely capable, our society just isn't ready for it.

wavemode··on Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
I mean, you've linked to a function performing md5 hashing. That's pretty much exactly what I would expect such code to look like.

Case in point: https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/common/...

wavemode··on Notes on Software Quality
I don't think you're supposed to be eating the toothpaste.
wavemode··on Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 Explained
You make it sound as though this is a proposal for legislation in the US...
wavemode··on EVE Online's Carbon engine is now open source: Fenris Creations explains why
What is it about the giant battles that was not fun?
← PreviousPage 5 of 34Next →