Hacker News: majewsky

New comment by majewsky in "German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews"

majewsky — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:45:14 +0000

If the system cannot adjust its answers to the role it's currently serving, then it would evidently be significantly less intelligent than a human.

New comment by majewsky in "Changing how we develop Ladybird"

majewsky — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:46:46 +0000

Of course the degree doesn't help with that. What helps is accountability. When a bridge collapses, and it turns out the engineer who drew the plans made a mistake, they can be and often are held criminally liable.

When's the last time you saw a software engineer prosecuted for criminal negligence after a design error took down Cloudflare or whatever? Attitudes in software development will not change until that becomes a viable scenario that people anticipate when making design and implementation decisions.

New comment by majewsky in "Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March"

majewsky — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:55:28 +0000

Also, regardless of what you think of LLMs, it makes tech support for Linux a whole lot more accessible to the average person. There is going to be less of an expectation now that you need to have a Linux guru on speed dial for the occasional weird edge case situation.

New comment by majewsky in "Vulnerability research is cooked"

majewsky — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:36:40 +0000

That's assuming that each fix can only introduce at most one additional defect, which is obviously untrue.

New comment by majewsky in "Copilot edited an ad into my PR"

majewsky — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:41:34 +0000

Well, about the free-software part, anyway.

New comment by majewsky in "Stop picking my Go version for me"

majewsky — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 08:54:15 +0000

> But in my cause we're still on 1.24.13 which was released by the Go team less than two months ago.

Yes, and then one week later the entire 1.24 branch entered EOL: https://endoflife.date/go

New comment by majewsky in "A Faster Alternative to Jq"

majewsky — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:58:16 +0000

I still saw the same bug just now (Firefox on macOS).

New comment by majewsky in "Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy"

majewsky — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:03:48 +0000

> It is very unclear whether the output of an AI tool is subject to copyright.

At least for those here under the jurisdiction of the US Copyright Office, the answer is rather clear. Copyright only applies to the part of a work that was contributed by a human.

See https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

For example, on page 3 there (PDF page 11): "In February 2022, the Copyright Office’s Review Board issued a final decision affirming the refusal to register a work claimed to be generated with no human involvement. [...] Since [a guidance on the matter] was issued, the Office has registered hundreds of works that incorporate AI-generated material, with the registration covering the human author’s contribution to the work."

(I'm not saying that to mean "therefore this is how it works everywhere". Indeed, I'm less familiar with my own country's jurisprudence here in Germany, but the US Copyright Office has been on my radar from reading tech news.)

New comment by majewsky in "You Just Reveived"

majewsky — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:56:20 +0000

Not exactly the same, but "sb." and "sth." are common abbreviations in dictionaries, e.g. "to meet sb." or "to pick sth. up". To those familiar with this convention, "s.o." can generally be inferred from context.

New comment by majewsky in "iPhone 17e"

majewsky — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 10:10:45 +0000

This does not square with especially Apple's unending obsession to make phones as thin as possible. Which is doubly stupid when it makes them so fragile that the first thing you do after taking it out of the box is to wrap it in a thick rubber shell.

New comment by majewsky in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

majewsky — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:42:28 +0000

> Klopilot

I like "Copy-lot".

New comment by majewsky in "Why Go Can't Try"

majewsky — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:59:05 +0000

The problem with the zero value business is that it also makes adding these QoL things in libraries difficult or outright impossible. Case in point, I tried building a library for refinement types, so you can have a newtype like,

  type AccountName string

except you write it like (abridged)

  type AccountName refined.Scalar[AccountName, string]

  func (AccountName) IsValid(value string) bool {
    return accountNameRegexp.MatchString(value)
  }

and that enforces an invariant through the type system. In this case, any instance of type AccountName needs to hold a string conforming to a certain regular expression. (Another classical example would be "type DiceRoll int" that is restricted to values 1..6.)

But then you run into the problem with the zero value, where the language allows you to say

  var name AccountName // initialized to zero value, i.e. empty string

and now you have an illegal instance floating around (assuming for the sake of argument that the empty string is not a legal account name). You can only really guard against that at runtime, by panic()ing on access to a zero-valued AccountName. Arguably, this could be guarded against with test coverage, but the more insidious variant is

  type AccountInfo struct {
    ID int64 `json:"id"`
    Name AccountName `json:"name"`
  }

When you json.Unmarshal() into that, and the payload does not contain any mention of the "name" field, then AccountName is zero-valued and does not have any chance of noticing. The only at least somewhat feasible solution that I could see was to have a library function that goes over freshly unmarshaled payloads and looks for any zero-valued instances of any refined.Scalar type. But that gets ugly real quick [1], and once again, it requires the developer to remember to do this.

[1] https://github.com/majewsky/gg/blob/refinement-types-4/refin...

So yeah, I do agree that zero values are one of the language's biggest mistakes. But I also agree that this is easier to see with 20 years of hindsight and progress in what is considered mainstream for programming languages. Go was very much trying to be a "better C", and by that metric, consistent zero-valued initialization is better than having fresh variables be uninitialized.

New comment by majewsky in "RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs"

majewsky — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:40:20 +0000

Because they are only allowed to review what the LLM has come up with.

New comment by majewsky in "LLM=True"

majewsky — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:53:33 +0000

> Claude is now forbidden from using `gradlew` directly, and can only use a helper script we made. It clears, recompiles, publishes locally, tests, ... all with a few extra flags. And when a test fails, the stack trace is printed.

I think my question at this point is what about this is specific to LLMs. Humans should not be forced to wade through reams of garbage output either.

New comment by majewsky in "Using go fix to modernize Go code"

majewsky — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:01:18 +0000

We've finally figured out how to spread ossification from network protocols to programming languages! \o/

New comment by majewsky in "Russia's economy has entered the death zone"

majewsky — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:48:03 +0000

> "I have said many times that the Russian and Ukrainian people are one nation, in fact. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours [...] But you know we have an old parable, an old rule: wherever a Russian soldier steps, it is ours."

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/27/putin-confirms-...

New comment by majewsky in "I’m joining OpenAI"

majewsky — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:25:41 +0000

76k gross per year in Germany is basically the same as that. 100k gross comes out to about 5.5k net per month. The big question is how much is already covered once you're down to the net pay.

New comment by majewsky in "Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you"

majewsky — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:18:26 +0000

Doesn't matter in touristy places though, because you don't rely on repeat customers.

New comment by majewsky in "Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you"

majewsky — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:16:50 +0000

(I'm German. This is my personal stance.)

Charging a tip for to-go items is preposterous. When dining in, I will indeed tip, usually by rounding up to the next 5 or 10 euro increment for a group meal, or to the next 1 or 2 euro increment for single meals (e.g. during lunch hours near the office). But this is only if the service is actually good. If a restaurant makes me wait more than 30 minutes for a quick lunch, they will be paid exactly the amount posted on the menu.

New comment by majewsky in "Claude Opus 4.6"

majewsky — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 01:39:13 +0000

> He doesn't give hard data

And why is that? Should they not be interested in sharing the numbers to shut up their critics, esp. now that AI detractors seem to be growing mindshare among investors?