Hacker News Reader

WD-42on The era of software quality, or the era of ostriches?

KDE cannot be modified by extensions in the same way GNOME can. This is a fact. The problem is the extension needed to be written. They are trivial to vibe now. You can make them do whatever you want.

WD-42on The era of software quality, or the era of ostriches?

You can do this by vibe coding extensions, and it appears many people are doing this. Ironically this probably makes GNOME the easiest DE to customize at this point.

WD-42on An Update on Orion for Linux and Windows

It’ll be interesting to see the Linux source. It felt pretty close to GNOME Web. Maybe the gnome folks can back port some stuff.

WD-42on Commit description as a thinking tool

Does that make it untrue?

WD-42on Commit description as a thinking tool

I read the linked article, thought the idea was generalizable, and posted that thought. Something wrong with that?

WD-42on Commit description as a thinking tool

Writing is thinking in every situation, not just limited to commit messages. This is a fact that I'm concerned people are forgetting, or worse never understood to begin with.

WD-42on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops

Get the fruit off the tree. I had one blow over and die because it was too heavy in strong wind

WD-42on Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

Synapse basically brought my vps to its knees with like 5 users. I would not call it light.

WD-42on Understanding the Impact of LLM Watermarking on AI Agent Behavior

Synthetic data is used in specific contexts. Slopped up hacker news comments along side natural ones is where watermarking will be used to delimitate them. Not all synthetic data is good.

WD-42on Understanding the Impact of LLM Watermarking on AI Agent Behavior

If the goal of training is to improve weights, training on output of the existing weights won’t improve anything, in fact the opposite may happen.

WD-42on Understanding the Impact of LLM Watermarking on AI Agent Behavior

Why can’t it be both?

WD-42on Understanding the Impact of LLM Watermarking on AI Agent Behavior

Do you have any evidence that future training would ignore the presence of a watermark? Seems like a pretty valuable signal to me.

WD-42on How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?

That's the problem, I have no idea. The fact that disabling MCR fixes it should point to something, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what.

WD-42on How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?

Yea I’ve done endless googling around the issue and it seems to be a not uncommon issue with ddr5 but there’s no way I’m buying new parts now so I’ve come to peace with it.

WD-42on How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?

Yea I’m just bummed because it’s a real expensive time to be swapping memory parts around. Like I said, things seem to just work without memory context restore so I’m fine with just paying the cost when I reboot once a week or whatever. I feel like the fact that disabling MCR fixes it should narrow down the issue to some part, I’m just not sure which.

WD-42on How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?

Yes and yes, it’s crucial ram. Nothing exotic.

WD-42on How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?

I have the complete opposite experience. Got a 9550x with 64gb ddr5 and a fairly high end mobo about two year ago. Just running the memory at stock speed. About 50% of the time I’d reboot and one or both of the sticks would only be detected as 2gb. Would need to do a hard shutdown to get it back.

I eventually gave up and turned off memory context restore and now I just deal with the minute plus (!) time to Post.

Not sure if amd memory controllers are just garbo or what but I’m going back to intel next chance I get.

WD-42on Asking authors about their own papers

This could be renamed "Asking authors about their own pull requests" and the outcome would be exactly the same.

WD-42on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible

It feels particularly bad for a local arts faire. Like maybe ask one of the local artists if they could design a poster instead of defaulting to the plagiarism machine? If I saw this ai poster for a local crafts faire I’d immediately dismiss it.

WD-42on Vinix – A modern operating system written in V

First time I heard about V was because of the Volt desktop chat app: https://volt-app.com/ which seemed attractive at the time. Turns out it was completely closed source and read secrets from local browser's cookie storage without any kind of warning. I've never nope'd out of a program so fast.

There are others in this comment section claiming this language is scam. Seems about right. The entire Vinix page is slop, too.

WD-42on Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust

Where do you work? Sounds nice!

WD-42on Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust

This is extremely depressing, I think I'm coming around to the realization that you may be right and I've been naive my entire career.

WD-42on Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust

> People never really read documentation before.

The heck you talking about? How do you think we wrote software for the last 50 years?

WD-42on Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249269

I put the "humanized" output through Pangram and it still comes out as 100% AI generated.

WD-42on PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

I’d have written a shorter comment, but I didn’t have the time.

WD-42on PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

So the slop kiddies both don’t understand what they are doing, and they ruin the party for everyone else. Nice.

WD-42on ImpactGate: A merge gate that scores the structural decay AI adds

Kind of ironic that this thing purports to “gate” slop, yet the entire project is slop, including the README and even the authors comments here. I hate this timeline.

WD-42on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27

It would be interesting to learn what over engineered solution to fuzzy string matching is being used here to exhibit this behavior, so we never make the same mistake.

WD-42on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

The only people that would care are already using adblockers and not seeing these ads anyway.

WD-42on Libraries Run Rust Inside Python (With PyO3)

It’s time to start figuring out how to block domains on hacker news. This slop is getting out of control. Who can read this? The first few sentences already induced a migraine.