Hacker News: cpeterso

New comment by cpeterso in "How close can pure functional programming get to C?"

cpeterso — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 02:37:52 +0000

Early Rust had a ‘pure’ function annotation, too, but it was removed as unnecessary as the borrow checker evolved and became central to Rust’s safety story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940624

New comment by cpeterso in "Why is AI generated language so hard to understand?"

cpeterso — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 22:41:32 +0000

Maybe new models training on the previous generation’s synthetic output is compounding the effect? LLM Ouroboros.

I find Claude’s writing unbearable. That ChatGPT offers personalization options (Base style, warmth, enthusiasm) and Claude doesn’t suggests Anthropic doesn’t recognize this as a problem. Plus, people sharing ChatGPT writing won’t all have the same voice.

Neurastheniacc: LLM-based C->WASM compiler you didn't need

cpeterso — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 19:20:47 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/vivshaw/neurastheniacc

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50144358

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by cpeterso in "Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran"

cpeterso — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:54:41 +0000

Google published a short video this week about how they used Gemini 4 Argon to migrate a Fortran code base to Rust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biOWEPYyS5c

Optimizing a 200k-line Python codebase overnight with Gemini 4 Argon

cpeterso — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:52:15 +0000

Article URL: https://developers.googleblog.com/optimizing-a-200000-line-python-codebase-overnight-with-gemini-4-argon/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50109327

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Microsoft: Introducing Xbox Labs

cpeterso — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 05:03:01 +0000

Article URL: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/10/13/introducing-xbox-labs/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082598

Points: 11

# Comments: 1

New comment by cpeterso in "My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps"

cpeterso — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:13:34 +0000

It would be cool to leverage that Street View driving capability to build a multiplayer Gumball Rally/Cannonball Run cross-country car race. Are there continuous routes recorded from New York City to Long Beach? Which is fastest? How long would that virtual drive take in Street View?

Browsers situationship: When browsers agree but the spec doesn't

cpeterso — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 05:52:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.atbrakhi.dev/blog/browsers-situationship

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49826722

Points: 15

# Comments: 6

Automatically Retrofitting JIT Compilers

cpeterso — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:49:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/yk-meta-tracing-jit-compiler/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49788831

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by cpeterso in "What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?"

cpeterso — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 23:48:45 +0000

You’re right. I looked it up: getting the number of files in a directory in FAT and FAT32 file systems is O(n). I had assumed the count would be recorded in an inode-like structure but instead the file system must scan a directory table to count the non-null entries.

New comment by cpeterso in "We must pace the frontier"

cpeterso — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 18:48:30 +0000

> Iran and Houthi rebels used Anthropic's Claude AI to target US warships and build hypersonic missiles — Houthi rebels also used the bot to code ballistic missile guidance systems

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

New comment by cpeterso in "What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?"

cpeterso — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 01:33:39 +0000

Raymond’s selectRandomFromIterator algorithm requires iterating over all the files. It seems like querying the file system for the number of files in a directory should be an O(1) operation. Then you just select random number N between [1, number of files] and iterate to the Nth file.

Why does Raymond assume counting the files is an O(n) operation?

New comment by cpeterso in "I have a theory that software drives people insane"

cpeterso — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:19:40 +0000

Joel Spolsky's "Fire And Motion" blog post (2002) describes the challenge of tech churn well: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features.

A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came with by Looking at Specification Gaming

cpeterso — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:59:51 +0000

Article URL: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2026/08/05/a-stupid-idea-for-ai-alignment-we-came-up-with-by-looking-at-the-list-of-specification-gaming-behaviours/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49637395

Points: 95

# Comments: 63

New comment by cpeterso in "The Two Abstractions of System Design: Hide or Reduce"

cpeterso — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 19:05:38 +0000

Modularity abstraction = drawing boxes around the messy parts

Modeling abstraction = drawing lines between the boxes

New comment by cpeterso in "AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems"

cpeterso — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:12:03 +0000

Mozilla's Firefox AGENTS.md begins with:

  Limit the amount of comments you put in the code to a strict minimum. You should almost never add comments, except sometimes on non-trivial code, function definitions if the arguments aren't self-explanatory, and class definitions and their members.

  Do not remove existing comments unless they are directly related to what you are changing.

https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/AGENTS.md

New comment by cpeterso in "Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS"

cpeterso — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:19:18 +0000

Firefox on iOS is blocking third-party ads, not first-party ads.

New comment by cpeterso in "“I just chose words carefully”"

cpeterso — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 02:42:08 +0000

“Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.

“And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.

“So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.

New comment by cpeterso in "“I just chose words carefully”"

cpeterso — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 02:37:18 +0000

In a recent interview on Conan O'Brien's podcast, Gillian Anderson said X-Files creator Chris Carter wrote his scripts visually so they didn't have any widows (the last line of a paragraph carried over to the top of the next page):

Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.

And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.

So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.

New comment by cpeterso in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

cpeterso — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:50:37 +0000

Send fair to me: someone’s got to test Mouse Keys! :)