Hacker News: p4bl0

New comment by p4bl0 in "Immich 3.0"

p4bl0 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 09:16:44 +0000

I teach a free software development course to my undergrad students. It's really exciting to stumble upon one of the work they did for my class in the wild (it's the first listed bug fix — which is the last of the three pull requests this student got merged in Immich during my course). I feel so proud! :)

New comment by p4bl0 in "A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML"

p4bl0 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:47:38 +0000

This is too oddly written to read in its entirety and I don't get the point. I mostly still do things like it says it worked in 2008. The difference with the "modern" workflow with 1400 packages and a build system is that web pages I put online just work, unlike most modern website which are horribly bug ridden and take ages to load and render.

New comment by p4bl0 in "Obfuscation: Building the Final Boss of Cryptography"

p4bl0 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:50:06 +0000

I really don't understand that some people are still trying to sell blockchain-based electronic voting. But anyway, I just wanted to tell a fun anecdote about the impossibility of making an obfuscater that works for any arbitrary program, or rather, since this is trivial for Quines [1], that it is possible to protect any program from obfuscation by making a simili-Quine of it. Given a program P, it is possible to construct a program Q(P) that takes an additional optional boolean input that defaults to false and which, when this additional input is false (i.e., by default), behaves exactly like the program P, but when called with the additional input set to true, acts as a Quine instead of executing P, thus outputs the source code for Q(P) (which is constructed to includes P's source code). This is guaranteed to work basically because an obfuscater cannot change the behavior of a program without breaking indistinguishability. I remember having a lot of fun working on that as an undergrad a long time ago [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)

[2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2011/497.pdf

LLM Medical Triage: Same Symptoms, Gender-Dependent Urgency

p4bl0 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:13:00 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03641

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716275

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by p4bl0 in "There are no instances in ATProto"

p4bl0 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:53:30 +0000

I think the analogy presented here is broken. RSS doesn't depend on Google Reader at all. Even at its prime, RSS depended less on Google Reader than email depends on Gmail now. In ATProto, AppViews heavily depends on Relays to be useful, and Relays are quite expensive to run. Also, the yellow circles which represent blogs in the RSS illustration are really not of the same nature as the same circles which represent posts on Facebook. Blogs are self-sufficient, for example.

I'm not saying ATProto is bad at all, but I feel like this blog post adds more confusion than it clarifies anything.

New comment by p4bl0 in "Developer gets Half-Life running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95"

p4bl0 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:55:36 +0000

I liked Symbian a lot, but I agree that Maemo was superior! Two after what I told above, in 2010, a few friends of mine had N900 and they seemed great. I was still in my study at the time and I interviewed for a summer internship at Nokia to work on Maemo and it was going great, but at some point during the recruitment process, that part of Nokia was sold (to Intel I think? the MeeGo project was announced a bit later) so they stopped all hiring even of interns and I had to find another internship.

New comment by p4bl0 in "Developer gets Half-Life running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95"

p4bl0 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:21:49 +0000

Oooh! I fondly remember my N95! Pictures and movies it took were great, at least for the time, and it had apps and a lot of stuffs like a browser that were presented as new on the phone space when the first iPhone was released, while I had my N95 for almost a year at this time. Symbian was a really nice system.

New comment by p4bl0 in "OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system"

p4bl0 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:06:16 +0000

This is a good introduction to Dune, but frankly, Dune kinda sucks. I mean, it is very powerful, and works very well, but it's too much of a hassle, especially for beginners. I don't want a language specific build system to require two different files to actually be usable, even on very simple projects… I still use it because it is the de facto standard, but I really preferred ocamlbuild [1], which was actually a tool that just worked without any configuration necessary for simple projects that uses standard tools. Where you would need to write a Makefile and call make, you could just write nothing and call ocamlbuild and it would just work. Dune lost that ability entirely.

[1] https://github.com/ocaml/ocamlbuild/blob/master/manual/manua...

New comment by p4bl0 in "No Let, No Rec, No Problem: A Gentler Introduction to the Y and Z Combinators"

p4bl0 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:21:51 +0000

So it's as confusing as I thought to do it that way. I wasn't sure if I thought so because I'm already familiar with all these concepts or because this introduction is indeed convoluted. Thanks for taking the time to reply!

New comment by p4bl0 in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

p4bl0 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 06:14:00 +0000

Thanks for putting it this way. I have to admit I was really astonished by the question as I feel like HN is very much pro-AI at least in the sense that there is more AI promotion on HN than there is AI acceptance among people in the real world. It's been months if not years since most of the posts are about genAI, and in a largely favorable way. It's actually quite fascinating that for some people it feels like the opposite.

New comment by p4bl0 in "No Let, No Rec, No Problem: A Gentler Introduction to the Y and Z Combinators"

p4bl0 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 05:58:09 +0000

I feel like introducing lambda calculus (using JS syntax) would be less cumbersome and convoluted than referring to "the challenge" without really justifying it and deferring to respect the rules for so long. But maybe some people entirely unfamiliar with these concepts find this approach easier?

Signal Without Smartphone

p4bl0 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:50:00 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/almet/signal-without-smartphone

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48395507

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by p4bl0 in "sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library"

p4bl0 — Sun, 24 May 2026 06:45:42 +0000

I agree with that. I'm just stating that it's contradictory with the project's own principles.

> Program directly against syscalls

It's the very first one of the listed principles. In the paragraph after this title it even says it "must" be the case in italic to insist on it, and there's a footnote to define what they mean, which is very clear in that pthreads should be out according to this principle.

New comment by p4bl0 in "sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library"

p4bl0 — Sat, 23 May 2026 07:46:39 +0000

First, thanks for sharing this link, it was an interesting read! A few remarks below.

I had a hard time reading the wc code in the article. First I had to go to the GitHub to understand that "da" stands for dynamic array, and then understand that what the author calls wc is not at all the wc linux commands, which by default gives you the number of lines, words, and characters in a file, not the count of occurrences of each word in the file, which is what the proposed code does.

Also, since I had to read the GitHub README, another remark: it says that sp_io uses pthreads rather than fork and exec. Both of those approach (but especially pthreads) are contradictory to the explicit goals of programming against lowest level interfaces. I believe the lowest level syscall is clone3 [1], which gives you more fine grained control on what is shared between the parent and child processes, allowing to implement fork or threads.

[1] https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/manpages-dev/clone3.2.en....

New comment by p4bl0 in "Rational quantum mechanics: Testing quantum theory with quantum computers"

p4bl0 — Thu, 21 May 2026 06:26:05 +0000

The author of this paper holds that quantum computers will never be able to go above the limit of a thousand qubits.

> Hence, insofar as a classical computer will never factor a 2,048-bit RSA integer, RaQM (rational quantum mechanics) predicts that a quantum computer will not either. This predicted breakdown of QM could be testable in less than 5 y.

People here who know about quantum computing, what do you think of this work?

Rational quantum mechanics: Testing quantum theory with quantum computers

p4bl0 — Thu, 21 May 2026 06:22:35 +0000

Article URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2523350123

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48218629

Points: 4

# Comments: 3

New comment by p4bl0 in "Apparently Google hates us now"

p4bl0 — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:08:21 +0000

The same thing happened with my blog a few weeks ago. It was well referenced for years and suddenly almost all of my entries are not indexed anymore. The Search Console indicates that the URLs were crawled but are currently not indexed, and contrary to technical problems, there nothing I can do to fix it, I just have to accept that most of my articles cannot be found via Google anymore.

EDIT: I don't actually think it is related, but now that I think of it, the timing corresponds with when I started setting up TDMRep to forbid using my content to train LLMs.

New comment by p4bl0 in "Infomaniak transitions to a foundation model to protect user data privacy"

p4bl0 — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:30:35 +0000

I moved my domains and mailboxes from Gandi to Infomaniak when Gandi went from "no bullshit" to full shit hole after TWS bought them. The service is top quality and their customers service was really helpful in transferring my third-level .name domain which has always been a hassle. This news makes me even more glad I chose Infomaniak.

New comment by p4bl0 in "Google changes its search box"

p4bl0 — Wed, 20 May 2026 07:10:36 +0000

> The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind.

I fondly remember the good old times when the goal was to help you find stuff…

New comment by p4bl0 in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

p4bl0 — Tue, 12 May 2026 06:57:35 +0000

Not just for LLMs, but in general if code is produced automatically by a tool and isn't going to be a hundred percent proofread and tested by humans who could have written it manually, it's always better to use the safest possible language so that the compiler can catch most of the errors. So yeah, Rust or OCaml are good candidates. Performance is also a good point but it's a secondary issue in my opinion.