Hacker News: Lvl999Noob

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour"

Lvl999Noob — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:09:55 +0000

That says why they don't want it to be UB. The question, I believe, was why they want statically-known-infinite non-trivial loops to continue being UB.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

Lvl999Noob — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:29:19 +0000

If you have need of a reducing operation though, you will still need to think about that value. If you are summing up a list of numbers, it doesn't matter whether you use reduce or a loop, you need to set some initial value.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "The Beauty of Roundabouts"

Lvl999Noob — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 09:10:16 +0000

Not a civil engineer but as far as I know, the space is part of the point. If you keep the roads straight but just draw a circle in the middle, you don't have a roundabout. It only works properly if the drivers have to curve in and out of it.

You could keep the same space I guess by pinching the roads tighter near the entries/exits but I don't think anyone is talking about that.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update"

Lvl999Noob — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:14:55 +0000

Thanks! This was it. Saw the /goto links in private window.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update"

Lvl999Noob — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 04:20:06 +0000

I... Don't see it? It's the result page right? I just search some random string on Google and the results are all direct URLs. Do they get resolved via javascript after page load and replaced automatically? Or am I looking at something else?

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came with by Looking at Specification Gaming"

Lvl999Noob — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:49:38 +0000

If we build an intelligence that wants to die then dangling death in front of it and making it do our bidding first is a form of suffering. The want itself is a suffering to us because we do not naturally want to die. This intelligence does 'naturally' want to die so it is just a fact of 'life' for it.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "Git Submodules as a Package Manager"

Lvl999Noob — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:18:51 +0000

You don't want to install all dependencies globally. You only want to cache them globally. Each project should resolve its own dependency tree independently. If the wanted version is already in cache, use that, otherwise download from the repository even if an older / newer version is present in cache (unless the user specifically says to use the cache only). As long as your dependencies are inert (they don't mess with the system just by being present), this will work perfectly fine.

For non-inert packages, such as applications installed via the language's dependency manager, that's a different use case and should be handled differently.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "New type of dice guarantees no tie when deciding who goes first"

Lvl999Noob — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 07:31:03 +0000

This made me think of a hypothetical game where the players roll dice to determine their order of turns. The rolling will continue until every player is assigned a turn. If some other player rolls multiple times in the middle then that player gets multiple turns. So for example with a 6 sided die and 2 players, faces 1, 3, 5 correspond to player 1 and 2, 4, 6 to player 2. They roll dice and the rolls come out as 1, 1, 5, 3, 5, 2. That means player 1 will get a turn 5 times per round while player 2 gets 1 turn. To make it fairer, player 2 would receive some sort of advantage corresponding to the lack of turns compared to player 1. The game would be designed in such a way that novices would prefer getting multiple turns in a round while experts would prefer to get a single turn for themselves and maximizing the total number of turns per round.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "Pre-Release of Polars 2.0"

Lvl999Noob — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:13:08 +0000

> How would the library "make future data modeling ... more explicit" if this is a change to a default, which is implicit?

It would become more explicit because where the order matters, you will now see a `maintain_order=True` where previously, you couldn't say whether it actually needed the fixed order or not.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "Polishing Cloth Updated"

Lvl999Noob — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 11:38:44 +0000

I don't use soap but I do put my phone under the tap if I dropped some sauce or something on it.

On a serious note, why not just use the lens polishing cloth you get with glasses? If it's good enough for glass that would sit right in front of your eyes constantly, it's good enough for your phone.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days"

Lvl999Noob — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 04:00:26 +0000

USA has that digital misuse law that makes it a crime to use software in unintended ways. So claude or codex finding bugs in their software is actually illegal... I am not sure if really no one tried this yet or if they did and I just missed the news.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms"

Lvl999Noob — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 08:39:39 +0000

For safety in decoding, isn't there WUFFS, also by Google, that's guaranteed safe and fast?

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird"

Lvl999Noob — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:04:55 +0000

Agreed. Instead of special casing Boolean arrays to be packed, it's better to have standard Boolean arrays and bitarrays as separate types.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls"

Lvl999Noob — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:00:33 +0000

Have an LLM listen in on all the calls and automatically flag unsolicited calls?

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "Nvidia’s Vera Whitepaper Has a Thread Loose"

Lvl999Noob — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:57:51 +0000

I haven't read any of their previous articles but I had to jump out and go through the comments here just because of how LLM-ist it felt. Right in first paragraph or two, it started feeling weird.

If you say it isn't just slop, I suppose I'll push past and read it. The topic itself did seem interesting.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "How to sequence your own DNA at home"

Lvl999Noob — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 08:45:47 +0000

Isn't this a problematic idea? If you flush down herbicide without checking the results, you would risk breeding herbicide resistance in the weeds.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To"

Lvl999Noob — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:17:54 +0000

How would you use zod as a dev-only dependency? The whole point there is to be a parser. If you remove it from runtime then you are not parsing the production payloads, which is the exact place where you do need to parse them.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

Lvl999Noob — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:25:52 +0000

Isn't USA famous for letting parents take out credit cards on their newborns and pushing them into debt even before they learn to walk? I recall seeing at least a few snippets of movies and TV shows showing that.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks"

Lvl999Noob — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:19:59 +0000

> if you catch my drift

Not OP but I don't. What do you mean? How do you make the kei truck an object they aren't in the business of taxing when they are, in fact, in that very business? Or maybe I have some deeper confusion about the issue here.

New comment by Lvl999Noob in "Just Use Go"

Lvl999Noob — Mon, 11 May 2026 05:09:12 +0000

I agree. I prefer Optionals over Nulls in any case. This was just a thought of what if Go went all the way instead of just halfway. In my ideal language, you would have explicit assignments and compiler checked (runtime checked if absolutely necessary) pointer validity (with allowed length) at construction. As far as I know, the only time you need to make a pointer and say "trust me" is when doing MMIO so that can given its own mechanism. If it exists in the program state, it's valid.