Hacker News: VulgarExigency

New comment by VulgarExigency in "The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++"

VulgarExigency — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:30:30 +0000

My point was not about the safety of the code, it was about the expressiveness, which is also what the comment I replied to was about. If the parameter has an explicit type (instead of no type, as is normal in Ruby, or `void*`, which is the C equivalent), it forces the developer to consider the design of the function, instead taking the path of least resistance because they're inexperienced/incompetent/a large language model/burnt-out to the point where even the thought of opening the file makes them feel the not-anxiety of burnout/.

New comment by VulgarExigency in "The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++"

VulgarExigency — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:45:17 +0000

I can't, as my employer owns the code, not me, but there are several examples in one of the Ruby codebases I unfortunately maintain where I can see this degeneration happen via the git history. A small 8 line method with just two parameters slowly grows in complexity over time, until one day one of the original parameters supports two different shapes, and later on it's not that easy to understand which shape it should have in the specific conditional branch you're trying to fix, and the last person to touch that code left the company 4 years ago.

The fault, of course, ultimately lies with the people who wrote and approved this nonsense, but types, or at least type hints, help to avoid this issue.

New comment by VulgarExigency in "FrontierCode"

VulgarExigency — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:15:43 +0000

What qualifies as a frontier model? From my personal "taste tests", I wouldn't have placed Sonnet or Kimi above Deepseek Pro or MiMo, or Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite above Deepseek Flash, but they're listed in the benchmark.

New comment by VulgarExigency in "FrontierCode"

VulgarExigency — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:00:48 +0000

Any chance of also benchmarking a couple of more affordable Chinese models? (specifically Deepseek and Xiaomi's MiMo)

New comment by VulgarExigency in "OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision"

VulgarExigency — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:32:29 +0000

The endless deluge of AI prose really wears on the soul once you start noticing it.

New comment by VulgarExigency in "The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++"

VulgarExigency — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:27:34 +0000

It seems unlikely that this is the case, as the author appears to be experienced, but the post reads like the author has never had to maintain a "simple" and "beautiful" function that was mangled into incomprehensibility over the years, and where if a more expressive type signature had been written from the start, it would have restricted the damage caused over time.

New comment by VulgarExigency in "Lambda isn't leaking memory, your metrics are lying to you"

VulgarExigency — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:28:36 +0000

Claude write me a post-mortem. Make no mistakes. Add a big image of a hero banner instead of rendering it in HTML for some reason.

I use AI myself (it's essentially non-optional at work right now), and it's not like this is useless information, but god, I'm just so saturated of this writing style.

New comment by VulgarExigency in "Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other"

VulgarExigency — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:29:32 +0000

Programmers aren't documenting for Claude. Claude is documenting for Claude. Programmers are, at best, reading the documentation Claude wrote for itself to ensure there are no glaring mistakes.

New comment by VulgarExigency in "DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent"

VulgarExigency — Sun, 24 May 2026 23:39:45 +0000

That doesn't sound right. Were you using the actual Deepseek provider? The one time I spent 3 dollars on Deepseek in a day, I had 615k output tokens, 96M cache hit input tokens, and 5M cache miss output tokens.

New comment by VulgarExigency in "Meta's 'Digital Companions' Will Talk Sex with Users–Even Children"

VulgarExigency — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 11:50:46 +0000

So because there's porn on the internet, you're OK with Facebook having groomer chatbots?

New comment by VulgarExigency in "The unplanned impact of mathematics (2011)"

VulgarExigency — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 20:45:48 +0000

let he who has never acted blasé towards safety protocols cast the first plutonium sphere

New comment by VulgarExigency in "Gitlab names Bill Staples as new CEO"

VulgarExigency — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 12:20:50 +0000

I made it up

New comment by VulgarExigency in "Gitlab names Bill Staples as new CEO"

VulgarExigency — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 23:09:24 +0000

He's the former CEO of Staples. He's going to have to change his name to Bill Gitlab.

New comment by VulgarExigency in "Two new books on John Calhoun and his rodent experiments"

VulgarExigency — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 20:56:14 +0000

> This is the interesting finding I'd think, by putting the subject in un-natural settings, to see what can happen at extremes.

Interesting, maybe. Deeply unethical, certainly. I'm not against animal experimentation (although I'd never have the stomach for it myself), but it's hard to see what could be learned from these experiments except for how rats behave when placed in these strange prisons.

New comment by VulgarExigency in "If You Double-Park and You’re Rich, Should You Pay a Higher Fine?"

VulgarExigency — Thu, 04 May 2023 10:41:06 +0000

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

New comment by VulgarExigency in "Make your Python functions return something meaningful, typed, and safe"

VulgarExigency — Wed, 03 May 2023 10:38:07 +0000

Why not use a a typed language instead?

New comment by VulgarExigency in "Seagate hit with $300M penalty for selling sanctioned storage to Huawei"

VulgarExigency — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 08:48:12 +0000

The United States has invaded more countries than China while having a significantly higher incarceration rate. If anyone is brutal and aggressive, it's the US.

New comment by VulgarExigency in "CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg"

VulgarExigency — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 08:45:35 +0000

Not that confusing, only the US measures fuel in gallons, isn't it? Everyone else just uses liters.

New comment by VulgarExigency in "Seagate hit with $300M penalty for selling sanctioned storage to Huawei"

VulgarExigency — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 15:19:21 +0000

All 3 things which are demonstrably false, but the american empire seems determined to continue to shoot itself in the foot

New comment by VulgarExigency in "Meta is about to start its next round of layoffs"

VulgarExigency — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 11:05:08 +0000

I worked for a company that had both Slack and Workplace and... Workplace wasn't a Slack replacement at all? It felt like a separate instance of Facebook for our company. How would it act like a Slack replacement?