Hacker News: layer8

New comment by layer8 in "Apple/macOS removed from official Unix registry"

layer8 — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:48:21 +0000

MacOS 26 is still listed: https://www.opengroup.org//openbrand/register/xy.htm

Was it delisted from a different “product standard”, or is this submission about macOS 27 not being listed?

New comment by layer8 in "C for Rust programmers"

layer8 — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:21:06 +0000

If the code is in a library (and I’d treat code as if being part of a library by default), then the library shouldn’t be deciding that.

New comment by layer8 in "C for Rust programmers"

layer8 — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:16:03 +0000

> Woah, iterating over pointers instead of indexes! […] However, I'm not sure how good an idea that is.

I’d recommend anyone (including the author) wanting to understand C to read K&R’s “The C Programming Language”, which among other things will illustrate how iterating over pointers is idiomatic in C (though not quite in the way the author’s example does it).

The deadlock at the top climate science body

layer8 — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:28:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/inside-deadlock-worlds-top-climate-science-body-2026-10-09/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50031832

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by layer8 in "No Man Is an Island"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 23:29:08 +0000

The article is about how AI affects intellectual communities. In my comment above I was focusing on the software engineering community that the first part of the article was discussing, and which I mistakenly took your comment to be referring to.

It’s probably right that when looking at the total of all intellectual communities, the difference in influence of the web versus AI is more nuanced. Nevertheless, I can see AI being more disruptive there overall in the way the article describes. Though I hope that this will turn out to not be the case.

New comment by layer8 in "Yes, and"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 23:16:04 +0000

Regarding the assembly language (or equivalently, the machine code), I was trying to make the point that yes, you don’t need to understand it to be able to reason about how the source code affects program behavior. (The entire point of a compiler is that you don’t need to understand machine language.) I was also trying to make the point that it isn’t about determinism vs. non-determinism. Nevertheless, there is dramatic difference in the way one can reliably reason about the precise effects of source code versus doing the same for LLM prompts.

New comment by layer8 in "Programming Isn't Special"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 23:04:59 +0000

The first culture is motivated by solving problems as well, namely how to make the program maintainable and easy to understand. Having the code be an ideal representation of what the program does, having it well-typed, modular and high-cohesion/loosely-coupled and all that stuff, is all in service of that purpose. A program that is hard to understand, hard to reason about, hard to extend and change, is a problem, a problem that is disliked by that culture because it continuously affects them in their programming work when extending or changing the program.

With agentic coding, one can argue that this problem doesn’t affect the software developer any more. But one can also argue that it’s just as much a problem for the AI as it is for the human programmer.

It’s not that the first culture isn’t enjoying solving problems, it’s that it’s enjoying solving a different type of problems than the second culture does, which for example doesn’t seem to care the program should be easy to reliably reason about, or maybe doesn’t realize that the shape of the code is important for that.

New comment by layer8 in "No Man Is an Island"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 21:11:39 +0000

But you could still focus on backend stuff and desktop or CLI programs, think and discuss about programming languages and software engineering on the code level in all the non-web related ways with a large community. You could opt-out of most of the web-related things (which is what I did) and still have a wide community to interact with. Whereas AI appears to be dissolving almost all that community. I hope that will turn out to be a false appearance, but the thesis is that it won’t.

New comment by layer8 in "100+ reactions to 100+ solutions"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 20:36:14 +0000

Let mathematicians do the AI-supported research on their own incentive at their own pace? What leaves a bad taste is that OpenAI doesn’t do this because they care about the actual math. Especially when they are leaving the necessary work of properly verifying, understanding, and writing up in an intelligible manner the proofs, up to the math community.

People would be more sympathetic if this was an alien race sharing their math results in not-quite-intelligible-to-us papers, because there at least we could assume that the aliens cared about the math and did their best to transmit their understanding to us.

New comment by layer8 in "Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:55:32 +0000

Much less than they used to, and continuing to wind down: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... (scroll down to “Imports of petroleum oils from main partners”)

New comment by layer8 in "Yes, and"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:49:42 +0000

Just to address this point:

> famously C standard leaves some things undefined and up to implementation.

And the language specification lets you reason about when the code will invoke undefined behavior and when not. You can ensure that you’re on safe ground by reasoning about the code in accordance with the language specification. With LLMs, such rigorous reasoning is not possible. The very fact that the C language specification does define when UB occurs is what lets you reason about it.

> I think you're wrong, the compilers are already unpredictable (or chaotic, better to say than nondeterministic, as someone pointed out).

I made the point in the root comment that the compiler may be non-deterministic and that this doesn’t matter for the argument. Because the point isn’t about determinism, it’s about being able to reason with high precision about the program’s behavior based on the source code.

New comment by layer8 in "Yes, and"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:46:33 +0000

Maybe read my comment again. I was making a point that the exact machine code output by the compiler isn’t relevant to the argument.

New comment by layer8 in "Yes, and"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:40:01 +0000

> Assuming that you truly understand and own every line of the LLM's output, the model is almost working like a macro.

I don’t have to review the output of a macro invocation once I’ve convinced myself that the macro’s definition is correct, similar to how I don’t have to review a compiler’s output. That’s the difference we are concerned with here.

For comparison, consider the statement “Assuming that you truly understand and own every byte of the compiler's output, […]”. The point of a compiler is that we can depend on it without having to impose such an assumption.

New comment by layer8 in "Show HN: Let your AI agents paint big arrows, boxes and text on your screen"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:02:18 +0000

“Slop” has been a verb for a long time: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slop#Verb

New comment by layer8 in "Yes, and"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 13:43:55 +0000

My working experience is different.

New comment by layer8 in "Yes, and"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 13:40:26 +0000

Not in full generality, of course, because you can formulate an LLM as a program, so LLM behavior is a subset of program behavior. But we generally strive for writing programs such that we can reliably reason about their behavior. We don’t always succeed (it’s the topic of software engineering how we can succeed), but it’s close enough, and enabling that is what programming languages with precise semantics are designed for. With LLMs, on the other hand, there is no path to such reliable reasoning on their behavior.

New comment by layer8 in "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?"

layer8 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 13:25:50 +0000

Self-hosted email is the biggest one for me. And in general having a server that’s accessible from everywhere and is never down.

New comment by layer8 in "Yes, and"

layer8 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:46:51 +0000

> Is Coding → Prompting like Assembly → High Level Coding? […] I do not agree with this simile. Compilers are, for the most part, deterministic in a way that current AI tools are not.

It’s not quite about the determinism. It’s about being able to reason about the relationship between source code and compiled program with formal precision. You can predict which changes in the source code will lead to which exact changes in the behavior of the compiled program. The same isn’t the case about changes to an LLM prompt and the LLM’s output.

You could make an AI deterministic by fixing its source of randomness. That still wouldn’t allow you to reason about how its output will change when (for example) you add or remove a word in the prompt. The only way to find out is to run the LLM (= have the prompt run through the model and observe what comes out).

That is the fundamental difference. Changes to source code have predictable and reason-able outcomes. You generally don’t have to compile the code and test it to know how precisely the change will affect the behavior of the compiled program according to the semantics of the programming language. That’s the case even if the compiler uses some probabilistic heuristics for trade-offs in code generation, and hence isn’t deterministic on the machine code level.

To repeat, the difference is how you can reason about a compiler’s behavior versus an LLM’s behavior. Programming languages are designed such that you can reason about it. With LLMs it’s always an experiment.

Mars's oddest cloud may be even odder than we thought

layer8 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 19:25:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Mars_Express/Mars_s_oddest_cloud_may_be_even_odder_than_we_thought

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50010762

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is available for preorder for $5,999

layer8 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 06:56:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theverge.com/tech/1006915/microsoft-surface-rtx-spark-dev-box-preorder

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50002579

Points: 1

# Comments: 0