Hacker News: Sharlin

New comment by Sharlin in "Excessive nil pointer checks in Go"

Sharlin — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 09:09:01 +0000

Fortunately we have type systems to encode many contracts at compile time, including stuff like optionality. Certainly no modern language would still repeat Hoare’s "billion dollar mistake"? Right? …Oh.

New comment by Sharlin in "The ability to regrow body parts is dormant in mammals, not lost"

Sharlin — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 19:49:03 +0000

Yep, the unfortunate flipside of "let's use stem cells to rebuild stuff" is always "let's use stem cells to give us cancer". Technology might help alleviate the cancer part compared to blind evolution, hopefully.

New comment by Sharlin in "Can you see three trees?"

Sharlin — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 10:33:55 +0000

I just reflected a bit on the fact that there’s essentially nothing but foliage and slivers of sky visible from the windows of the apartment I currently live in, unless you’re right next to a window getting a particularly wide view. Perks of living right at the edge of a neighborhood originally built literally in the middle of forest.

New comment by Sharlin in "Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You"

Sharlin — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 10:00:51 +0000

Great article. Small nitpick though: while I understand that P3 deserves specific mention because it’s so ubiquitous now, it’s not like Apple invented the idea of wide-gamut displays. Adobe RGB, commonly used by wide-gamut computer monitors, in particular is noteworthy in the context of this article because it extends further into the blue-cyan-green than P3,

New comment by Sharlin in "Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28"

Sharlin — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:47:03 +0000

In many cases, NonMaxU64 and NonMinI64 (aka SymmetricI64) would be much more useful though. But Rust is aiming to eventually add a more general way to create types with user-defined ranges, such as the "pattern types" feature currently being prototyped.

New comment by Sharlin in "Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28"

Sharlin — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:40:33 +0000

Given that this specific style is the result of being reinforced over and over again via RLHF, "inadvertently" isn't really the word I'd use.

New comment by Sharlin in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

Sharlin — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:51:58 +0000

On desktop (Firefox) at least if I navigate to another folder, the URL changes but the browser back button doesn't change the view back to inbox. On mobile (iOS Safari), if I open an email, then try to navigate back, it takes me all the way back to the login page. The app also seems to use old-fashioned #anchor-based URLs rather than the navigation API.

(Hilariously, I found a feedback link but it points to a 404.)

New comment by Sharlin in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

Sharlin — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:37:37 +0000

The Outlook web app breaks browser navigation, I thought we had that figured out in SPAs like, more than a decade ago. But it does load almost-instantly (less than a second) so that's nice at least.

New comment by Sharlin in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

Sharlin — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:33:24 +0000

It's Copilot all the way down.

New comment by Sharlin in "Taxonomy of the Occlupanida (parasitoids on bread bag tags)"

Sharlin — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 05:48:27 +0000

I’m pretty sure we have bread in plastic bags in Europe too. At least here in the less civilized regions. In these parts they’re usually the plastic-clad aluminum wire sort though.

New comment by Sharlin in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

Sharlin — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:35:30 +0000

I would counter that:

a) it seems likely to me that in the end, few normal people know what to do with the ability to create their own software for their private use,

b) getting bespoke software working on the platforms that the majority of people actually use (Android and iOS) is somewhere between hard and impossible, and

c) large corporations have a de facto grip on AI as well, local models require you to have the knowhow and beefy hardware to run them, and they’re not magic software machines like Claude.

All in all, it seems rathet optimistic that AIs could do much if anything to help consumers against corporations. But I concede that it is a viewpoint that’s at least less selfish than most.

New comment by Sharlin in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

Sharlin — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:05:29 +0000

Honestly, what are the positive viewpoints of generative AI in the end? Are there others major ones than the following?

* My vibe coding machine goes brrrrt and that's all I care about

* My college essay cheating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about

* My custom waifu/porn-generating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about

* The concept of AI is drawing all the investor money and that's all I care about

The common factor being self-centeredness and/or being part of a small ingroup that benefits, possibly at the expense of others.

New comment by Sharlin in "U.S. pulling ocean sensors a 'shock' for Canadian research as El Niño nears"

Sharlin — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:35:49 +0000

Astronaut meme: it was never about cost savings

New comment by Sharlin in "CrankGPT"

Sharlin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:41:07 +0000

I'm pretty sure I've seen this in Black Mirror.

New comment by Sharlin in "Asciline – real-time ASCII video rendering engine"

Sharlin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:18:41 +0000

It’s not cross-platform if the platform is the browser… Lot of vibed nonsense in the README in general.

New comment by Sharlin in "Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026"

Sharlin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:09:10 +0000

Except if you pay them for a support contract. So there is a way, and it's actually a pretty obvious way.

New comment by Sharlin in "Perlisisms (1982)"

Sharlin — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:29:06 +0000

To be fair, I don't think anyone is claiming that the process is anywhere close to formal. The word "vibe" implies anything except formality.

What Perlis probably meant that formal methods are useless unless you already have a formal specification. The formalization process itself is by necessity informal.

New comment by Sharlin in "The adder at the heart of Intel's 8087 floating-point chip"

Sharlin — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:29:03 +0000

(It's an old, old joke.)

New comment by Sharlin in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

Sharlin — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 22:13:20 +0000

There was a time when stuff like "Unreal Engine, trending on ArtStation, 8K resolution" actually worked when prompting image gen models because such labels actually correlated with higher-quality images in the web-crawled training datasets available back then.

New comment by Sharlin in "There Is Life Before Main in Rust"

Sharlin — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:50:05 +0000

Editors (as in, the human kind) are not co-writers either.