Hacker News: fooofw

New comment by fooofw in "Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools"

fooofw — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 21:02:12 +0000

> On a noisy TypeScript repository, it improved F1 by 0.246 and used 12% fewer tokens. The useful predictor was lexical noise, not whether the language had strong static types.

What is "lexical noise", which appears to be a key term in the argument, and why is it not defined? Does it mean that an identifier could show up in, say, a docstring in a non-structured way where a semantic tool would not identify it?

Makes sense to me that LLMs, which are language based, would match better with a tool that searches at a language lever rather than at a deeper structured level.

New comment by fooofw in "More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding"

fooofw — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:26:59 +0000

Wouldn't "the typical person has above average number of legs" or some such be better?

New comment by fooofw in "Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments"

fooofw — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:16:06 +0000

This is not general to all subjects in Danish universities. I studied physics in Denmark and while the majority of my exams after the second year match this description (though not all), my impression is that this is not at all the norm. Students in the humanities in my dorm, for example, seemed to have an overwhelming majority of several-day take-home written exams (with no associated oral defense).

New comment by fooofw in "Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation"

fooofw — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:11:07 +0000

It seems like you're just clutching at strals now

New comment by fooofw in "“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”"

fooofw — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:48:17 +0000

Lethal self defense?

New comment by fooofw in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"

fooofw — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:18:18 +0000

How is it even possible that we've reached a point where "yes, this is obvious and pretty unsurprising" is the default response to spying on an industrial scale.

New comment by fooofw in "C++ says “We have try... finally at home”"

fooofw — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 23:58:06 +0000

I believe this might be slightly imprecise also.

The traceback is actually shown based on the last-thrown exception (that thrown from the finally in this example), but includes the previous "chained exceptions" and prints them first. From CPython docs [1]:

> When raising a new exception while another exception is already being handled, the new exception’s __context__ attribute is automatically set to the handled exception. An exception may be handled when an except or finally clause, or a with statement, is used. [...] The default traceback display code shows these chained exceptions in addition to the traceback for the exception itself. [...] In either case, the exception itself is always shown after any chained exceptions so that the final line of the traceback always shows the last exception that was raised.

So, in practice, you will see both tracebacks. However, if you, say, just catch the exception with a generic "except Exception" or whatever and log it without "__context__", you will miss the firstly thrown exception.

[1]: https://docs.python.org/3.14/library/exceptions.html#excepti...

New comment by fooofw in "Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features"

fooofw — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 22:28:50 +0000

My version of Firefox (146.0 on Debian) has exactly this. If I select a sentence and right-click, I get the menu item "Translate selection to ". In the resulting box, I can change the language pair - but the defaults that I have seen were also reasonable.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation has the text: "A new Translate selection feature has been added starting in Firefox version 128, that enables you to highlight and translate selected text."

Edit: Sorry, I misread the comment to say that there was no such menu item. Edited to reflect this.

New comment by fooofw in "HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)"

fooofw — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:52:30 +0000

I think this project is based on LaTeXML (https://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/LaTeXML/) which is exactly that (except for the SVG part)

New comment by fooofw in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

fooofw — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 18:22:51 +0000

The tokenization can represent uncommon words with multiple tokens. Inputting your example on https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer (GPT-4o) gives me (tokens separated by "|"):

    lower|case|un|se|parated|name

New comment by fooofw in "HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)"

fooofw — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 21:04:40 +0000

It's kind of fun to compare this formulation with the seemingly contradictory official arXiv argument for submitting the TeX source [1]:

> 1. TeX has many advantages that make it ideal as a format for the archives: It is plain text, it is compact, it is freely available for all platforms, it produces extremely high-quality output, and it retains contextual information.

> 2. It is thus more likely to be a good source from which to generate newer formats, e.g., HTML, MathML, various ePub formats, etc. [...]

Not that I disagree with the effort and it surely is a unique challenge to, at scale, convert the Turing complete macro language TeX to something other than PDF. And, at the same time, the task would be monumentally more difficult if only the generated PDFs were available. So both are right at the same time.

[1] https://info.arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex.html#contextual

New comment by fooofw in "HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)"

fooofw — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 20:50:56 +0000

That would (mostly if not always) work in the sense of reproducing the layout of the pages, but would defeat the purpose of preserving the semantic information present in the TeX file (what is a heading, a reference and to what, a specific math environment, etc.) which is AFAIK already mostly dropped on conversion to PDF by the latex compiler.

New comment by fooofw in "You can make PS2 games in JavaScript"

fooofw — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 23:46:29 +0000

Why have you failed though? Is the point to try to deceive people to think that XKCD actually published something else? Why not modify the xkcd one without hinding the fact that you modified it?

New comment by fooofw in "HTTPS by default"

fooofw — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 19:11:00 +0000

What defines private sites, I wonder – beyond "such as local IP addresses like 192.168.0.1, single-label hostnames, and shortlinks like intranet/"?

New comment by fooofw in "To MD - Convert PDFs, Word, HTML and more to Markdown"

fooofw — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 14:19:46 +0000

This made me think of Microsoft's MarkItDown tool/library [1] which seems to have quite the overlap in supported file formats [2,3] and conversion options [4]. I couldn't find any reference to the library on the website, so it may be useful to know about.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

[2] https://tomd.io/#supported-extensions

[3] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/tree/main/packages/m...

[4] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/8a9d8f15936b206...

New comment by fooofw in "Claude Code Checkpoints"

fooofw — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 06:28:10 +0000

Then you've just traded that for lock-in to Cursor, no?

New comment by fooofw in "The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years"

fooofw — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 16:42:44 +0000

pdfjam [1] uses a LaTeX package under the hood, is included with the TeX Live distribution and acts as a wrapper for a LaTeX package. With this, I believe your example would be:

    pdfjam PDF_A.pdf '2-3' PDF_B.pdf '7-23' --outfile joined.pdf

I'll admit that I had to look it up but that only took about 3 minutes (it's an example in the readme).

[1] https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam

New comment by fooofw in "The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years"

fooofw — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 15:52:47 +0000

For reference, here's a version with a linear y-axis: https://imgur.com/a/A2D1puk

New comment by fooofw in "Dropbox Passwords discontinuation"

fooofw — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 11:53:50 +0000

Your parent comment may refer to requesting and waiting for a login link in, say, an email to authenticate - not SSO.

New comment by fooofw in "Password reuse is rampant: nearly half of observed user logins are compromised"

fooofw — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 13:17:16 +0000

Out-of-control single point of failure?