Hacker News: lifthrasiir

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Yet another way to invoke functions without parentheses"

lifthrasiir — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:56:49 +0000

In fact that line in question does come from an IOCCC winner: https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/1985/shapiro...

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Port of the TypeScript compiler, checker and lsp to Rust, by LLM"

lifthrasiir — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 01:34:36 +0000

Presumably because Rust is more suitable than Go in agentic coding? (I'm not sure, but that seems the purported answer.)

New comment by lifthrasiir in "America.gov"

lifthrasiir — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:16:58 +0000

It is actually hardcoded and also reachable by "play the block game": https://america.gov/_astro/block-game-poem.Khrmh8AU.js

New comment by lifthrasiir in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

lifthrasiir — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 09:27:45 +0000

The former also conveys that you are rude, which is not what you usually want.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8"

lifthrasiir — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 09:09:24 +0000

I was about to immediately suggest UCS-X, and then pleased that the author offers a fair comparison to UCS-X and many other alternatives. Great. Too bad UCS-X is possibly more memorable name.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Countries 15x10 Pixel Flags"

lifthrasiir — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 03:48:00 +0000

I recently had a misfortune to draw every country flag with a limited palette of shapes (axis-aligned rectangle and triangle, ellipses, {a/b} regular polygons) and operations (union, subtraction). [1] It is really annoying to be as faithful as possible; you have to deal with varying aspect ratios and under- or unspecified construction methods and colors, and at some point you have to decide how to modify the flag to fit the target resolution and aspect ratio without being too different. Also you would eventually have to face the flag of Bhutan [2]... (I haven't yet drawn it.)

[1] https://github.com/lifthrasiir/unison/blob/gh-pages/font/fla...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Bhutan

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Can I use my Outputs to train an AI model?"

lifthrasiir — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:21:36 +0000

Apart from the usual hypocrisy,

> Safety controls may be lost – models trained on Claude's Outputs won't have our safety measures, potentially leading to harmful or dangerous AI systems. We also have no visibility into deployment, meaning we cannot monitor how these distilled models are used or prevent misuse.

So was that why your models caused three real-world security incidents?

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Log is non-monotonic in PHP and Lua"

lifthrasiir — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:37:18 +0000

I'm on a mobile right now so I can't give the exact paper link but you can learn about the CORE-MATH project [1].

[1] https://core-math.gitlabpages.inria.fr/

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Log is non-monotonic in PHP and Lua"

lifthrasiir — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:32:13 +0000

The dilemma is hypothetical (because we now know the exact precision requirement for those functions over all 64-bit doubles) but let's assume that we don't know that and also we happen to use decimals instead. What if, some f(x) is known to be, say, 123.4999...9997 with 1,000 fractional digits? You have to calculate at least 1,000 decimal digits of f(x) in order to correctly round, before that we only know it's between 123.4999...999 and 123.5000...001. There seems no mathematical theory that specially prevents this annoying possibility, hence the dilemma.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals"

lifthrasiir — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 10:38:53 +0000

Common sense testing only tells about the presence of common sense, that's it. It is clear from recent events that LLMs do definitely possess some sort of intelligence even though it might have been polarized to certain domains.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals"

lifthrasiir — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:02:30 +0000

It is a project-wide concern, so the stake is obviously high.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals"

lifthrasiir — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:12:49 +0000

They learned English or gave up.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals"

lifthrasiir — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 07:59:55 +0000

All of which have been challenged though. As the stake is high, any such reason (for or against LLMs, to be fair) has to be backed with Wikipedia-level evidences at the very least.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "I regret migrating to Codeberg"

lifthrasiir — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:28:38 +0000

The OP said the Mandela effect [1] which is definitely about the past event. Anyhow, I'm okay with Codeberg's decision (I'm not even its stakeholder, so what can I say about that anyway) but it has to be honest about the intent. If its definition of "F/OSS" has changed, do say so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect

New comment by lifthrasiir in "I regret migrating to Codeberg"

lifthrasiir — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:01:01 +0000

Many influential F/OSS projects started with a small number of users (and contributors), and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Codeberg effectively says that it only welcome mature enough projects that it feels worthy to host, and that's selfish. That's not a direct problem by itself but still a good reason to get criticized.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "I regret migrating to Codeberg"

lifthrasiir — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:49:21 +0000

Do yourself a favor and look at the actual HN thread [1] when Codeberg was widely discussed for the first time. It is crystal clear that Codeberg was seen as a direct alternative to GitHub at that time, and even the founder's quoted statement gave a nod to that I think?

> [...] But as developers of free software we fell into a trap – we poured invaluable source code, documentation and last not least a huge and steady stream of data about our personalities, interests and social networks into proprietary platforms. [...]

(And no one knew Codeberg had a right to determine which source code and documentation is invaluable.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795930

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Everyone should know SIMD"

lifthrasiir — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:18:35 +0000

I think an even better advice is that everyone should know array programming, because you generally need that mindset for SIMD optimizations as (packed) SIMD-specific techniques are surprisingly rare. And array programming gives you a generally performant code even without SIMD because it is much easier to auto-vectorize.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Why malloc always does more than I asked for?"

lifthrasiir — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:48:21 +0000

In the other words, free() is a flawed API. :-)

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects"

lifthrasiir — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:15:28 +0000

This follows what SourceHut did in 2022 [1], but I think SourceHut did much better job to announce that (as of this writing).

[1] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects"

lifthrasiir — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:12:00 +0000

Apparently in early this month.