Hacker News: atiedebee

New comment by atiedebee in "C++ float-to-int conversion can be undefined behavior"

atiedebee — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:48:26 +0000

I thought C++ was designed to fit all sorts of applications. There is many GUI libraries for C++ for example, and the language has all the capabilities to add abstractions for making these sorts of libraries easy to work with. I think you could argue that C was made for low level code, since the working group seems to be focussing on making the core of the language more usable instead of allowing for abstractions that make libraries easier to work with (I think we can all agree that the C interface of gtk is not that great to work with, though I do commend their efforts).

Sorry for rambling so much, I hope I got my point across.

New comment by atiedebee in "Command Line Interface Guidelines"

atiedebee — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 06:45:01 +0000

> The concise help text should only include:

> - A description of what your program does.

> - One or two example invocations.

> - Descriptions of flags, unless there are lots of them.

> - An instruction to pass the --help flag for more information.

I disagree with this. The first 3 points should all unconditionally be in the man page of the program. In my ideal scenario, the jq short help message would omit everything after the "Usage" section except for the message to run the command with --help.

New comment by atiedebee in "Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU"

atiedebee — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 05:25:31 +0000

What is the `tlul` part? Just a typo? I don't see it in your expansions.

New comment by atiedebee in "Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming"

atiedebee — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 10:27:06 +0000

But the goal isn't to catalogue all human knowledge. Having an article for every living person would be "cataloguing all human knowledge" but it would also be a meaningless endeavour. Some knowledge is worth preserving in an encyclopedia, other knowledge isn't. That is why they have their notability guidelines.

New comment by atiedebee in "Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming"

atiedebee — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 10:14:50 +0000

Right before the statement in Wikipedia being an ideological playground:

> Our best hypothesis is quite simple: some of the mods just don't like Odin as a language and don't want it on Wikipedia as any form of "advertisement".

It doesn't directly say "political bias", but it certainly is implied (not as in national politics, more like ideological)

New comment by atiedebee in "Google's AI buildout drove 37% increase in electricity use in 2025"

atiedebee — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 10:12:15 +0000

> But the tech giant says it kept operational carbon emissions down by continuing to purchase massive amounts of clean energy.

I never got this line of reasoning. If you are using 37% energy and you buy it from providers of clean energy, doesn't that mean that someone else won't be able to use that energy and will have to use fossil fuels anyways? It's the equivalent of "reducing" a country's emissions by forcing companies to move to a country where they ARE allowed to pollute and just importing the produce from there.

New comment by atiedebee in "FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder"

atiedebee — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 09:54:16 +0000

They have hardware decoders for JPEG? I have never heard of this and it seems overkill considering how simple it is to decode.

New comment by atiedebee in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

atiedebee — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 17:14:51 +0000

By cheating you gain a certificate that says you can do things which you cannot. The difference between cheating in university and forging a degree is the time it takes.

When going to a doctor, you wouldn't want them to have cheated for their exams during training. You expect them to be well equipped to practice medicine and to ensure you get correct diagnoses and care. When hiring a programmer or software engineer, you should expect them to be able to provide you a proper, well architected application given the requirements.

New comment by atiedebee in "Hellishly Slow Level 13 Deflate Compression"

atiedebee — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 15:24:55 +0000

Except that brotli uses Huffman coding. It's main claim to fame is using higher order statistics to select a Huffman table and its built-in dictionary.

This class of compression programs sees larger differences due to the way the data is modelled instead of the specific entropy coder used.

New comment by atiedebee in "Overfitted a 900KB Transformer to Compress a 100MB CSV into 7MB"

atiedebee — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:59:02 +0000

Which slice? The large text compression benchmark uses enwik8 for a "smaller" input that is easily reproducible. The predictability of enwik9 can vary significantly depending on where in the file you are, as shown by Matt Mahoney https://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/textdata.html

New comment by atiedebee in "PivCo-Huffman “merge” operations"

atiedebee — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 08:20:57 +0000

It depends on the format. Brotli switches the Huffman codes used based on the previously decoded bytes, but gzip and bzip2 for example use the same Huffman codes for a bigger block of data. But even then, there might be some more details that you'd need to work out, like the decoding of LZ offsets.

New comment by atiedebee in "The Green Side of the Lua"

atiedebee — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:22:57 +0000

I imagine you would want to test "idiomatic" code for these comparisons. It doesn't make much sense to compile with C++ and write everything in C.

New comment by atiedebee in "Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)"

atiedebee — Tue, 26 May 2026 07:43:01 +0000

Another interesting one is the ZPAQ compression program[1]. It is one of the top performers on the large text compression benchmark[2] and uses the bytecode to specify how to model the data.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZPAQ

[2]: https://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

New comment by atiedebee in "Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs"

atiedebee — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:03:52 +0000

I hope the brakes in my car don't need developers

New comment by atiedebee in "Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw""

atiedebee — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:43:14 +0000

Does HN randomly charge you money for using these phrases?

New comment by atiedebee in "Show HN: I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++"

atiedebee — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:00:54 +0000

I made a program with some inline assembly and tried O3 with clang once. Because the assembly was in a loop, the compiler probably didn't have enough information on the actual code and decided to fully unroll all 16 iterations, making performance drop by 25% because the cache locality was completely destroyed. What I'm trying to say, is that loop unrolling is definitely not a guarantee for faster code in exchange for binary size

New comment by atiedebee in "What 81,000 people want from AI"

atiedebee — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:26:08 +0000

> I don't know about survival bias. LLMs are well suited to this task of taking in this cloud of soft data like a description of symptoms and spitting out a potential diagnosis.

And it will do so confidently and incorrectly. A single description of symptoms from a patient is very unlikely to be enough. This is why doctors are there to ask follow-up questions and do examinations. Symptoms alone can describe a dozen different illnesses.

New comment by atiedebee in "JPEG Compression"

atiedebee — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:05:32 +0000

A lot of them are better in many areas. JPEG is just good enough (tm)

New comment by atiedebee in "An ode to bzip"

atiedebee — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:09:23 +0000

bzip3 is very different from bzip2. It is not even made by the same person and is not nearly as ubiquitous.

New comment by atiedebee in "TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool"

atiedebee — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:05:52 +0000

> I know this position is wrong, but it feels hard to spend my time on something that someone else might not have spent the time to create

I don't think that position is wrong. I felt similarly when tutoring a high-school student recently. They didn't do any work themselves, they were forced by their parent to come to me two days before a test. I offered to help, but when I realized that the student didn't care enough to study by themselves, I basically lost all motivation to help them.

It feels the same with AI-generated content. If the "creator" didn't care to spend time on it, why should I spend mine?