Hacker News: hgs3

New comment by hgs3 in "AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study"

hgs3 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:41:59 +0000

> what’s left to get to is relatively small

Not necessarily. In many (most?) areas of tech the rate of advancement follows a logarithmic curve. That is to say, the first 90% is achieved quickly but the last 10% takes significantly more time.

New comment by hgs3 in "Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore"

hgs3 — Mon, 25 May 2026 15:05:23 +0000

I blocked AI overview because it starves websites of their own traffic and revenue.

Websites accepted Google scraping their content because it gave them a prominent blue link plus excerpt to drive traffic. Now everyone’s content is blended together and maybe, if they’re lucky, their site is chosen amongst the blend to get a tiny citation link.

New comment by hgs3 in "C constructs that still don't work in C++"

hgs3 — Mon, 25 May 2026 04:43:07 +0000

Not sure if you're aware, but defer is proposed for C2Y [1]. It's already available in Clang behind a compiler flag. It is interesting how the languages continue to diverge.

[1] https://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG14/www/docs/n3734.pdf

New comment by hgs3 in "BBEdit 16"

hgs3 — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:31:55 +0000

I think there is one major difference that separates the two eras: in ye olden days you bought software for a fixed price and while it's understood you might only receive updates for a limited time, you could continue using it so long as you had the ability to run it. For example, you didn't have to upgrade to Windows XP if you were satisfied with Windows 98. With subscriptions, it's a recurring fee to continue accessing the software at all.

New comment by hgs3 in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

hgs3 — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:16:01 +0000

Data is being licensed by AI companies, but negotiations are limited to those with the capital [1][2][3]. You write about "imbalance" but ignore that large firms can cut deals while small creators languish.

You seem to believe advancement only happens in the private sector while ignoring academic institutions and publicly funded research. You've dismissed the possibility of public models entirely.

You fail to consider that when you financially disincentivize individual creators from publicly distributing their work, you starve future models resulting in a world were data is licensed only to those who can afford it anyway.

[1] https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

[2] https://openai.com/index/axel-springer-partnership/

[3] https://openai.com/index/openai-and-reddit-partnership/

New comment by hgs3 in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

hgs3 — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:41:54 +0000

> concrete steps

Start by legally compelling companies that trained on unlicensed data to either (1) license the data, (2) publish their model, or (3) destroy their model.

New comment by hgs3 in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

hgs3 — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:26:40 +0000

If models are trained on the collective whole, they must be owned by the collective whole. If you believe funding creators for the training of private models is too slow, inconvenient, or creates a global disadvantage, then embrace collective ownership.

New comment by hgs3 in "US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds"

hgs3 — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:58:09 +0000

How about forcing businesses to be owned by their employees [1]? Instead of taxing the owning class and being paid UBI peanuts, you become the owning class and reap the rewards directly.

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

New comment by hgs3 in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

hgs3 — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:48:22 +0000

How about requiring AI companies to pay creators for training rights? Alternatively, models trained on the commons must be owned by the commons. Right now these AI companies are trying to have it both ways: it’s The People’s Data for training on comrade but ownership is privatized.

New comment by hgs3 in "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning"

hgs3 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:57:45 +0000

> In my opinion, for open-source projects, scoring the project's AI sloppiness based on the timeline of commits would be a good indicator.

You can’t necessarily judge by timeline. I’ve always developed my projects privately and then squashed to one initial public commit. I’ve got a private repo now with thousands of commits developed over years and I still intend to squash.

New comment by hgs3 in "SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes (2023)"

hgs3 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 18:17:07 +0000

Great read. It would be neat to see a mini operating system under 1 kb of code.

New comment by hgs3 in "We mourn our craft"

hgs3 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 18:03:51 +0000

> We're on the precipice of something incredible.

Only if our socioeconomic model changes.

New comment by hgs3 in "Slop Terrifies Me"

hgs3 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 14:38:59 +0000

Why is slop assumed inevitable? These models are plagiarization and copyright laundering machines. We need a great AI model reset whereby all published works are assumed to opt-out of training and companies pay to train on your data. We've seen what AI can do, now fund the creators.

New comment by hgs3 in "Slop Terrifies Me"

hgs3 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 14:29:44 +0000

> It's called Universal Basic Income.

I'd rather we democratize ownership [1]. Instead of taxing the owning class and being paid UBI peanuts, how about becoming the owning class and reaping the rewards directly?

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

New comment by hgs3 in "We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler"

hgs3 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:42:56 +0000

> As far as I know, there aren't any Rust based C compilers with the same capabilities.

If you trained on a neutral representation like an AST or IR, then the source language shouldn't matter. *

* I'm not familiar with how Anthropic builds their models, but training this way should nullify PL differences.

New comment by hgs3 in "Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload"

hgs3 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 04:12:42 +0000

I miss the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs days. At least there were positive improvements to Windows and Mac in those days.

New comment by hgs3 in "GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building"

hgs3 — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 01:04:20 +0000

> reflects the software engineering philosophies of the 1980s.

It has a microkernel architecture. That's already an improvement over the "modern" monolithic kernels we are stuck with today. Given Big Tech's interest in hardening security and sandboxing you'd think this would get more attention.

New comment by hgs3 in "Swift is a more convenient Rust (2023)"

hgs3 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 05:38:49 +0000

> Apple being the largest sponsor of Objective-C would suggest that you get greater vendor lock-in out of it than Swift

Fun fact, you can use Objective-C on non-Apple platforms [1] and with Cocoa APIs courtesy of the GNUstep project [2].

[1] https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2

[2] https://www.gnustep.org/

New comment by hgs3 in "Data Processing Benchmark Featuring Rust, Go, Swift, Zig, Julia etc."

hgs3 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 05:31:18 +0000

Why is there no C benchmark? The C++ benchmark appears to be "modern C++" which isn't a substitute.

New comment by hgs3 in "Why I Always End Up Going Back to C"

hgs3 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 18:22:10 +0000

I'm being pedantic, but on modern hardware, the ISA is an abstraction over microarchitecture and microcode. It's no longer a 1-to-1 representation of hardware execution. But, as programmers, it's as low as we can go, so the distinction is academic.