Hacker News: GGByron

New comment by GGByron in "If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?"

GGByron — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:15:33 +0000

None of these articles explain what "vibecoding" is, and on general principles I refuse to look it up.

New comment by GGByron in "Twenty Eighth International Obfuscated C Code Contest"

GGByron — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:48:50 +0000

> "C is a particularly good language for it"

A particularly good language for writing bad code? Quite the euphemism.

New comment by GGByron in "Censorship is quietly deciding which games you can buy"

GGByron — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:36:36 +0000

"Censorship is quietly deciding which games you can buy"

What an asinine sentence.

New comment by GGByron in "Twenty Eighth International Obfuscated C Code Contest"

GGByron — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 23:53:20 +0000

I can't imagine a better argument against using c. Isn't that the obvious, serious takeaway?

New comment by GGByron in "Apple's Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA"

GGByron — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 15:24:33 +0000

> "Are you sure that anyone but the big boys want to make a browser in the EU?"

Surely that's the point - a collusive oligopoly making end runs around the "free market". Just look at all the other replies, rich with apologia.

New comment by GGByron in "Rules of good writing (2007)"

GGByron — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 05:51:53 +0000

"My brain seems to naturally work in cause->effect order"

You must be Jesus. Most brains observe events first and use that information to reason about their causes.

New comment by GGByron in "Rules of good writing (2007)"

GGByron — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 05:10:46 +0000

"I think many speakers would still start with "He was hit by a ball", not "A ball hit him." We're not interested in assigning agency to the ball here, we're interested in the effects on the boy."

And you don't favor the shorter message?

New comment by GGByron in "Rules of good writing (2007)"

GGByron — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 04:17:53 +0000

"The main technique is keeping things simple."

Orwell also knew to avoid clichés, and lo, he made a much stronger argument for simplicity in his essays. "Keep it simple" means nothing by itself and Adams does not explain the concepts he hints at or even call them by their proper names.

None of the above would seem obnoxious had he actually cited Orwell.

New comment by GGByron in "What does it mean that MP3 is free?"

GGByron — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 04:25:44 +0000

I'm sure that's also an option but I'm looking at their website right now and it says I can own this warmed-over text editor outright for 179$. What a bargain.

New comment by GGByron in "Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything"

GGByron — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 03:04:38 +0000

I've not followed the literature very closely for some time - what problem are they trying to solve in the first place? They write "for documents to be effectively used in RAG pipelines, they must be split into smaller, semantically meaningful chunks". Segmenting each page by paragraphs doesn't seem like a particularly hard vision problem, nor do I see why an OCR system would need to incorporate an LLM (which seem more like a demonstration of overfitting than a "language model" in any literal sense, going by ChatGPT). Perhaps I'm just out of the loop.

Finally, I must point out that statements in the vein of "Why [product] 2.0 Changes Everything" are more often than not a load of humbug.

New comment by GGByron in "What does it mean that MP3 is free?"

GGByron — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 01:40:50 +0000

Large hard drives and fast internet do not render obsolete the principle of frequency domain compression. MP3 and JPG will probably remain in service for a very long time.

But of course, if people weren't habituated to this bogus conception of obsolescence, how on earth would Microsoft manage to sell them a word processor for $179.00?

New comment by GGByron in "Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed"

GGByron — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 01:08:07 +0000

"Pay less attention, otherwise you might become apathetic." Granted, mass media is generally slop (this article being no exception), but that's all the more reason one should observe and think carefully.

New comment by GGByron in "DARPA solicitation for the Active Social Engineering Defense program (2017)"

GGByron — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:46:01 +0000

Doesn't that seem a bit too complacent? Personally I've always thought the opposite - malcontents have more to gain and less to lose by criticizing or opposing the status quo.

New comment by GGByron in "Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers"

GGByron — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:24:58 +0000

Excuse my ignorance, but what exactly are these stupid checkboxes supposed to accomplish? Surely they do not represent a serious obstacle.