Hacker News: stabbles

New comment by stabbles in "Nano Banana 2 Lite"

stabbles — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 20:50:28 +0000

So the image model's benchmark is to generate an image with the corresponding SVG sources.

New comment by stabbles in "I hate compilers"

stabbles — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:21:04 +0000

Nix hashes the build inputs, for which deterministic builds are not required, only desirable.

New comment by stabbles in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

stabbles — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:36:30 +0000

Speeding up C/C++ compiler bootstrapping, starting at a single binary of <1KB. Currently it gets to GCC 4.7 in 2-3 minutes on x86_64 and aarch64: https://github.com/haampie/shpack

New comment by stabbles in "Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end"

stabbles — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:14:53 +0000

This begs for a modern version of https://csszengarden.com/, where the CSS is generated by different LLMs and prompts.

New comment by stabbles in "Moving beyond fork() + exec()"

stabbles — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:04:31 +0000

Isn't that covered by O_CLOEXEC?

New comment by stabbles in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

stabbles — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:24:00 +0000

A medicine for those who anthropomorphize LLMs is to run the LLMs deterministically (without randomness and memory files).

It feels very unnatural to get the same conversation verbatim at a different point in time.

New comment by stabbles in "You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)"

stabbles — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:11:54 +0000

David Hume pointed this out in 1740, and his advise still applies:

    A reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treatise_of_Human_Nature/Book...

New comment by stabbles in "You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)"

stabbles — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:09:16 +0000

I think this is fair criticism. It's hard to read this blog cause its premise is based on an "appeal to nature" fallacy.

New comment by stabbles in "Italians and Dutch share the same gestural instinct for teaching"

stabbles — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:42:00 +0000

The Dutch version of this is to wave at the cheek.

New comment by stabbles in "Staged publishing and new install-time controls for npm"

stabbles — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:25:06 +0000

Is one day enough to find vulnerabilities? Who keeps an eye on new releases? Otherwise the problem continues to exist, just delayed by one day.

New comment by stabbles in "Linux security mailing list 'almost unmanageable'"

stabbles — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:03:19 +0000

Isn't it mostly the medium that's problematic? With an issue tracker it's easier to close as duplicate

New comment by stabbles in "Content-defined chunking added to Bazel"

stabbles — Sun, 17 May 2026 11:56:54 +0000

Isn't that rather difficult given the `.tar.gz` layers?

New comment by stabbles in "They Said It Would Cost $54M. We Said "No Thanks.""

stabbles — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:22:26 +0000

You can look at a histogram of number of words per sentence, and you'll find immediately that it's written by an AI.

    When?
    Today.
    Minutes.
    Four years.
    $54 million.
    Collect feedback.
    Delivered faster.
    Not days.
    Not weeks.
    It's free.
    ...
    No $19 million in upfront costs.
    They're now doing meaningful work.
    Let me put that in context.
    That's a 95% cost reduction.
    But think about what that represents.
    And we can show you how.

New comment by stabbles in "Debian must ship reproducible packages"

stabbles — Mon, 11 May 2026 08:48:00 +0000

This comment is misinformed. Non-deterministic builds would also result in one tarball redistributed to all distro users. The ROP exploits don't work because of ASLR.

New comment by stabbles in "GNU IFUNC is the real culprit behind CVE-2024-3094"

stabbles — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:12:42 +0000

Yeah, that suggestion made me roll my eyes. It's the wrong granularity, there's no build system support, it's inconvenient (executable wrappers? require the user to understand all transitive deps?).

It also fails to mention glibc-hwcaps, which would've been a cleaner solution in the context.

New comment by stabbles in "GitHub Is Down"

stabbles — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:15:29 +0000

I noticed the same https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940213. My working hypothesis is that, given that a filter was always required (prs and issues are likely rows in the same database with a bool property to distinguish them), someone thought it'd be good to use the search API uniformly. But search is on the derivative of the underlying data, in contrast to the specific APIs for listing issues and prs.

New comment by stabbles in "GitHub Is Down"

stabbles — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:12:08 +0000

What are you referring to when you say it's "fundamentally computationally inefficient"? It's pretty efficient because it's content-addressed, plus optimizations to reduce storage and data transfer with packfiles.

New comment by stabbles in "Zugzwang"

stabbles — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:17:08 +0000

If chess is solved and white wins, black is always in Zugzwang. We might not know.

New comment by stabbles in "Zugzwang"

stabbles — Sat, 02 May 2026 17:30:35 +0000

It's not necessarily an illusion. If chess is solved and it turns out white wins with perfect play, black's first move is zugzwang.

New comment by stabbles in "Ti-84 Evo"

stabbles — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:27:07 +0000

This made me double check if it wasn't someone's vibe code scam website.