Hacker News: circuit10

New comment by circuit10 in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

circuit10 — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:54:34 +0000

What if the compiler is able to use that to determine that a whole code path is dead, and then significantly improve the surrounding function because of that?

Compilers optimise in multiple passes and removing things earlier can expose optimisation opportunities later that can affect other parts of the code too

New comment by circuit10 in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

circuit10 — Wed, 20 May 2026 11:01:10 +0000

This series was a good explanation for me of why treating UB this way is genuinely useful: https://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should...

Being able to assume certain things don't happen is powerful when you're writing optimisations, not doing that would have a real performance cost

New comment by circuit10 in "Docker images are MB; a full game engine compiles to 35MB WASM"

circuit10 — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:01:36 +0000

Seems like the anti-clickbait title editing removed the “hundreds of”? This confused me because I thought “oh, they’ve stripped down a Docker image to only 1 megabyte, and then a full game engine adds 34MB more” (I missed the WASM on the first read)

New comment by circuit10 in "Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users"

circuit10 — Sat, 09 May 2026 11:33:31 +0000

When I had a jailbroken iPhone my bank app (HSBC) would detect it and show a warning but let you continue anyway at your own risk, which I thought was a reasonable compromise

New comment by circuit10 in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

circuit10 — Wed, 06 May 2026 08:05:52 +0000

I think the disk space and bandwidth are what make consent needed, because it’s implied that the browser may download small pieces of data but the user would not expect such a large file be downloaded so it should check with them

New comment by circuit10 in "iOS 27 is adding a 'Create a Pass' button to Apple Wallet"

circuit10 — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:41:50 +0000

It works fine if scanned by a machine though (ticket gate, self checkout etc.)

I've used a third party app for this for a UK weekly pass train ticket you could only buy physically, but if you buy it on a train rather than at a station they can't print you a ticket with a magnetic strip and they have to give you one with a barcode (technically an Aztec code), which you can then scan onto your phone and use at the gate. But I kept the original ticket with me too and would use that if a person asked to inspect it

New comment by circuit10 in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

circuit10 — Tue, 05 May 2026 13:53:10 +0000

This is not a reasonable size for something that's "just another part of Chrome", this blows up the file size by many times

New comment by circuit10 in "Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac"

circuit10 — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:10:34 +0000

I was replying to the hypothetical situation in the comment of saying "Awesome Notepad, a Notepad++ fork"

New comment by circuit10 in "Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac"

circuit10 — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:54:06 +0000

Can you really demand someone not have any references to your product? Surely people are allowed to refer to it to explain their fork's relation to the original, otherwise it would also be illegal to compare your product against competitors in advertising or to review anything

I guess it depends on whether it's likely to confuse people?

New comment by circuit10 in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

circuit10 — Sun, 03 May 2026 14:04:03 +0000

Do you mean Ctrl + scroll wheel? I use that feature quite a lot, I like my font size small but it can be difficult to see for other people so being able to quickly scale it up is really useful

New comment by circuit10 in "VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage"

circuit10 — Sat, 02 May 2026 22:25:46 +0000

Having a tool involved isn't the same as being entirely generated by a tool

For example, without any AI, if I generate a lookup table for the sine function in my code, that table may not be copyrightable because it was machine-generated, but it doesn't somehow make the rest of the code not copyrightable either

"Co-authored by" doesn't imply it was entirely machine-generated

New comment by circuit10 in "Apple accidentally left Claude.md files Apple Support app"

circuit10 — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:43:57 +0000

The point is Amazon is adding an “Alexa+” mode that uses LLMs. The plain voice recognition + keyword matching or however the old version works is more reliable (I assume, I didn’t use the new mode much because it immediately failed at what I wanted)

New comment by circuit10 in "Apple accidentally left Claude.md files Apple Support app"

circuit10 — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:21:08 +0000

No matter how good the LLM features are, I just want to turn my lights on and off and check the time. A perfect LLM could maybe perform on par with a simple deterministic command system for these tasks, but not better. All an LLM does is introduce the possibility that a command that worked fine yesterday will randomly not work

Also, one of my first interactions with this Alexa+ thing was “how long is it until 8:45am”, one of only a few commands I use it for to work out how much sleep I’m getting, and it proceeded to ask me what the current time was… I immediately turned it off after that

New comment by circuit10 in "Show HN: VidStudio, a browser based video editor that doesn't upload your files"

circuit10 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:49:04 +0000

You can just the post the code somewhere, it doesn’t have to be good and you don’t have to do anything else with it

Apart from ensuring there’s not anything confidential in the code like API keys (which you shouldn’t have anyway, unless it’s just in comments) it won’t take any extra work unless you want to put effort into that side of things

New comment by circuit10 in "Show HN: VidStudio, a browser based video editor that doesn't upload your files"

circuit10 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:40:18 +0000

You can have multiple WASM modules communicating with each other (though you would probably need extra interop code?), or statically link them into a single module, the concepts work mostly the same

New comment by circuit10 in "WebUSB Extension for Firefox"

circuit10 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:18:48 +0000

You can ship an offline, standalone HTML file you can open in your browser too (this might not happen often but my point is it's not inherent to the technology)

New comment by circuit10 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

circuit10 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:26:01 +0000

Is it possible that a jailbreak is found that could allow a “kexec” kind of thing to load a new OS? Of course it would be a huge amount of work even if theoretically possible

New comment by circuit10 in "Solod – A subset of Go that translates to C"

circuit10 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:04:27 +0000

At that point it’s not really a decompiler any more but a transpiler (high level language -> other high level language)

New comment by circuit10 in "Solod – A subset of Go that translates to C"

circuit10 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:47:44 +0000

I once used Ghidra to decompile a hand-written ARM assembly floating point library and compile the result to a different architecture, and it was significantly faster than GCC’s built in methods…

But in general this kind of thing is very unreliable for any non-trivial code without a lot of manual work, so a better approach could be to compile to WebAssembly which can be translated into C

New comment by circuit10 in "Apple removes iPhone vibe coding app from app store"

circuit10 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:12:32 +0000

I don't think it matters if you can fork or exec, they're still running custom code