Hacker News: debugnik

New comment by debugnik in "C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake"

debugnik — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:07:09 +0000

I don't think of the stdint types as being less native than the keyword integer types. C# for example makes keyword types aliases to System.* types, not the other way around.

New comment by debugnik in "C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake"

debugnik — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 19:52:06 +0000

long can't be smaller than int, so a 64-bit int leaves short as the only type between char and long long, and you need to pick whether it's 16 bits or 32.

Then again, we'd still have stdint around. And ultimately this doesn't matter because most code isn't portable anyway.

New comment by debugnik in "What even is an OS now?"

debugnik — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:49:16 +0000

I didn't intend to argue either way, but I feel that adding "and search" to the argument made above doesn't really weaken it. The full claim is that regular users weren't really interested in using power-user apps, so they won't be interested with a chat-bot UI either.

I do personally think that we'll see regular users interested in new, different workflows than the automation ones we associate with power users, and the image generation use case you mention is a good example. Chat-bots do seem to be owning those rather than entirely new apps.

New comment by debugnik in "What even is an OS now?"

debugnik — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 13:56:29 +0000

The use cases described above aren't really multiple applications though. They're just using a search method to get the right fact or factoid. I consider that the scope of a single "app".

Most of those websites have been complements for Google Search rather than standalone services whether they like it or not, and if chat bots replace Google Search, they'll replace the entire ecosystem.

New comment by debugnik in "What even is an OS now?"

debugnik — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 07:32:34 +0000

Sounds like it's replaced Google Search for her, not much else.

New comment by debugnik in "Too AI; Didn't Read"

debugnik — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:00:23 +0000

I've been seeing "AI;DR" used sparingly for months, perhaps years now.

New comment by debugnik in "GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks"

debugnik — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 17:03:26 +0000

> I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.

Stalling in the hope that reporters won't escalate, instead of allocating a tiny bit of their billions in profit to hiring for this, is malicious in my book.

New comment by debugnik in "Pirate Face Rescues LLM Models from Deletion"

debugnik — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 18:32:28 +0000

You can add an existing HTTP download as a "web seed" to a torrent, so they don't actually need to do anything for people to share it as a torrent.

New comment by debugnik in "Dropbox's Jan 1st 2027 terms of service"

debugnik — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 08:57:49 +0000

I don't think that's the reason. From the linked site:

> The European Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) Platform is discontinued as of 20 July 2025

New comment by debugnik in "Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse"

debugnik — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 07:14:48 +0000

I'm not sure how you thought that comparing them to HN, Twitter and a fringe branch of Christianity would make them sound less insular and clique.

New comment by debugnik in "EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'"

debugnik — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:56:14 +0000

Does it really count as non-aligned if the observer states are very much aligned?

New comment by debugnik in "Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing"

debugnik — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 10:37:48 +0000

The outrage about Gemini Nano in Chrome was the surprise extra 4GB download plus their attempt to expose it as a non-standard browser API, IIRC.

New comment by debugnik in "WangNet – 1.8 MB, zero-dependency Numberwang adjudication in 11 languages"

debugnik — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 22:23:34 +0000

I can confirm this is the first episode, which I just watched since I had no idea about Numberwang until a minute ago. So I guess a true Numberwang fan would know that.

New comment by debugnik in "LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'"

debugnik — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:22:03 +0000

I assume that part was for entertainment, this wouldn't fly in court. But they also show the dark patterns used to make you consent to it, and how certain features seem unaffected by these choices or send one last request when revoking consent.

New comment by debugnik in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

debugnik — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 03:49:19 +0000

Except most people that get actually good at a field do so through their day job. By removing mathematician as a viable job, most can't afford to spend the necessary hours to become a good mathematician at all. We're going back to only rich people or those with a rich patron having a chance of developing themselves.

New comment by debugnik in "Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft"

debugnik — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:56:54 +0000

We thought your Rust.NET comment was somewhat in jest. No, Microsoft isn't porting Rust to .NET, they barely try to support anything other than C# on it nowadays, but the article mentions an internal adapter for MSVC codegen.

The project linked above has been posted to HN in the past a few times though.

New comment by debugnik in "No Man's Sky Cosmos"

debugnik — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:16:54 +0000

I think Minecraft gets it right by using procedural generation to add depth to the existing content rather than making different content.

There's a fixed set of biomes and notable geographical features designed by the devs, so there's no incentive to keep finding unseen ones, but each world gets its own layout and landmarks, so you get to explore the details of that specific generation for days without carrying over your knowledge of the previous one.

In the long term it might get repetitive too, but it does at the same rate as one gets tired of any other game I think.

New comment by debugnik in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

debugnik — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:38:28 +0000

I assume the fear was an uninterrupted burn until the gas depletes, as in the Darvaza gas crater but atmosphere-wide.

New comment by debugnik in "LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby"

debugnik — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:24:54 +0000

Windows downloads the driver first, then the driver itself uses an AddSoftware directive to install a companion app. Which is ok when the app is a GPU control panel or similar, but here it was clearly abused.

New comment by debugnik in "Mistral raises €3B"

debugnik — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:18:35 +0000

Keeping up with competition is part of trying to stay in the frontier. If they stop training the profit disappears in a few months.