Hacker News: lifthrasiir

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Optimal Strategy for Connect 4"

lifthrasiir — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 11:29:22 +0000

> [I]t made me think he had a whole production team behind him.

He has a program instead: https://github.com/2swap/swaptube/blob/1a0d5369d523536d48e4/... [1].

[1] Note that this commit ID is visible from the video itself: https://youtu.be/KaljD3Q3ct0?t=1002

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Rubysyn: Clarifying Ruby's Syntax and Semantics"

lifthrasiir — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:33:25 +0000

S-expression is a standard representation for syntax-free semantics. For example, PLT Redex [1] is a DSL for programming language semantics and built on top of Racket which uses S-expressions.

[1] https://redex.racket-lang.org/

New comment by lifthrasiir in "GitHub has DMCA'd nearly all forks of the official Claude-code repo"

lifthrasiir — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 11:21:15 +0000

A common misunderstanding AFAIK. It is true that Claude, not being a person, can't be assigned a copyright by itself, but a person that interacts with Claude generally can. The famous monkey selfie case [1] was different mainly because the human "photographer" had absolutely no role in the creation of work. Most LLM uses don't fall into such ambiguity.

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

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Herbie: Automatically improve imprecise floating point formulas"

lifthrasiir — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 07:44:43 +0000

That does make sense, because a half of all available fp numbers are less than 1 in their magnitude. In particular there should be a plenty of numbers x such that |x| << 1 so x + 1 ~= 1; in fact, the proportion should be just shy of 50%.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming"

lifthrasiir — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 07:24:51 +0000

Or so one says. (Not necessarily saying that it was a bad decision.)

New comment by lifthrasiir in "JPEG Compression"

lifthrasiir — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:05:50 +0000

Ah, in that case you would be more annoyed to learn that lossy WebP and lossless WebP are completely distinct. They only share the container format and their type codes are different.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "JPEG Compression"

lifthrasiir — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:54:13 +0000

It is not that trivial, because there are tons of existing JPEG files and lossy recompression costs quality. (PNG does get replaced primarily because lossless WebP is kinda a superset of what PNG internally does.)

New comment by lifthrasiir in "SSH has no Host header"

lifthrasiir — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:40:03 +0000

Oops, I think I mixed up two sentences in the middle. A fixed comment is available. But I also probably misinterpreted what you were saying:

> they could pay a small extra for a dedicated IPv4 address.

Did you mean that the dedicated IPv4 address to connect via SSH? Then my objection doesn't apply.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "SSH has no Host header"

lifthrasiir — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:18:06 +0000

They could buy a dedicated IPv4 address, but that address still has to be tunneled through [EDIT:] IPv6 networks if that dev has no access to [EDIT:] IPv4 networks. Thus DX still suffers. [ADDENDUM: I mistakenly swapped "IPv4" and "IPv6" there. See comments.]

New comment by lifthrasiir in "What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic (1991) [pdf]"

lifthrasiir — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 04:12:53 +0000

(1991). This article is also available in HTML: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.h...

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

lifthrasiir — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:48:42 +0000

> We've had machine translation for a while and I don't think anybody particularly thinks of it as a bad thing?

Not all, but some machine translators can be comically (if not horrifically) bad sometimes. Search Twitter-become-X for examples. Native writers can't pick a working machine translator unless they are explicitly allowed to do so themselves.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

lifthrasiir — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:45:23 +0000

> So was mine when I started arguing with strangers on the internet. It's better now.

That takes (much) time, though. I took about a decade to be comfortable about that.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

lifthrasiir — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:18:41 +0000

Worthy to continue the discourse. Everyone claims that one doesn't discriminate a badly written English text from a good one, but only because they haven't actually encountered such text after all. There surely exists a threshold for "badness" and an outright ban of LLMs means that you are not even given a chance to lower that badness. That is a discrimination, you like or not.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

lifthrasiir — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:58:52 +0000

Others will understand, but won't regard that as worthy. That's a difference.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Number Research Inc"

lifthrasiir — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 06:13:29 +0000

10^10000 - 1 is the largest allowed number.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Number Research Inc"

lifthrasiir — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 06:07:12 +0000

It seems that someone sequentially ran up to around 131k (at the moment), I can't get any lower new number. Also please restore the input when a database error occurs...

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Why does C have the best file API"

lifthrasiir — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 06:05:27 +0000

No defined binary encoding, no guarantee about concurrent modifications, performance trade-offs (mmap is NOT always faster than sequential reads!) and more.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Show HN: SplatHash – A lightweight alternative to BlurHash and ThumbHash"

lifthrasiir — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:38:38 +0000

These things are called Low-Quality Image Placeholders (LQIP) and frequently used for front-end performance engineering.

New comment by lifthrasiir in "Show HN: SplatHash – A lightweight alternative to BlurHash and ThumbHash"

lifthrasiir — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:37:32 +0000

Interesting, but my testing suggests that SplatHash is very weak at preserving global features, at least for synthetic images [1]. Both BlurHash and ThumbHash were able to preserve most of them, at the expense of worse (but still non-zero) local feature reproduction, but SplatHash simply discarded all global features! I guess you need to store both local features (Gaussian splats) and global features (cosine bases) for the best result. The currently unused padding bit might be useful for that...

[1] I used my own avatars and icons as a test set. For example, https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/323836?s=400&v=4

New comment by lifthrasiir in "AI uBlock Blacklist"

lifthrasiir — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 08:59:33 +0000

I mean, I know it is probably tongue in cheek but that never-asked-question was particularly out of place. Massively generated AI contents are usually not THAT thoughtful anyway.