HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wavemode

6,558 karma · joined April 19, 2017

submissionscomments
wavemode··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
> Is it legal for US citizens to all put cameras on their cars and set up a network where we can all see where all police are at any given time?

Sure. There's absolutely nothing illegal about monitoring the location and activity of police (unless you broke some other law to do so, like hacking).

Hell, most of them will simply tell you where they are and what they're doing, as they tend to broadcast over unencrypted radio (which is also not illegal to listen to).

wavemode··on Programming is Art
That doesn't really follow. Not every job can be automated with code. And those that can, largely already have been.
wavemode··on Programming is Art
Programming (usually) isn't art, it's design. Design is when you arrange something to serve a particular purpose, not just for aesthetic value. In programming we understand that this purpose is not just to make code that looks nice, but also that functions properly, that is maintainable, that communicates its intent, etc.

And, it goes without saying, programming is just one activity of the many that encompass "software engineering". There are plenty of people whose hobby is programming, but probably far more whose hobby is actually software engineering, and are fine with LLMs handling the programming part.

wavemode··on 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
Same exact thought when this trailer came across my feed. "Oh, who did A24 get to play Holmes, she looks familiar somehow." hahaha
wavemode··on Your intellectual fly is open (2025)
> LLMs write better than most journalists

In my personal experience I strongly disagree. Curious what publications you read wherein this is the case.

wavemode··on Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions
This was a type confusion bug in generated JIT code, not in C++ code.
wavemode··on GPT-6 Astra
Using a harness designed for a specific problem set to solve that specific problem set, means the AI+harness is generally intelligent? How do you figure that?

Or do you mean that, for any given problem, we could theoretically design a harness that allows AI to solve it (not that, one single harness solves everything). In which case I'm still not convinced but I guess could see why one would believe that.

wavemode··on ChatGPT outage – Resolved
I wonder how likely it is that, one of the major providers had an outage, and then the thundering herd of users switching to other providers (and/or openrouter automatically failing people over to other providers) caused the incidents in the other two.
wavemode··on Whistleblower warns Postal Service mail ballot system has catastrophic problems
No, the verification they're doing is on the sending side, not receiving. The state sends people ballots, the USPS intercepts them and sends them back to the state if they find an issue.

IF this cycle of delays lasts long enough, then some people never receive a mail-in ballot, or receive it too late

wavemode··on Just Bury Your Trash
Your state has eliminated metal tab cans? Huh. What do you drink 12oz of pop out of?
wavemode··on I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked
At the same time, I think some people in this comment section are underestimating the likelihood that this was a hack, because they're overestimating how sophisticated such a hack would have to be.

In my mind, if this was a hack, it was probably not a Stuxnet virus or something. These are smart fridges we're talking about - someone probably just logged into them using leaked credentials or a Web app vuln, and turned them off.

wavemode··on Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]
> modern SSD bandwidth is ~5-15GB/s

That's nothing compared to modern memory bandwidth.

wavemode··on Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]
No, you're comparing apples and oranges. All an SSD sequential read is doing is copying data from one place to another. So you should be comparing SSD bandwidth to memory bandwidth, not SSD bandwidth to (time it takes to execute some arbitrary algorithm). Or you should be comparing SSD bandwidth when performing millions of tiny random non-sequential reads and writes, to the algorithm time.

What your comment demonstrates is that it is possible in some cases for I/O to be fast enough to not be a performance bottleneck for certain kinds of programs. But not that I/O is not slow.

wavemode··on Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]
No, I don't think the way you're characterizing this is accurate. I/O is inherently very slow compared to computation. And many programs genuinely don't have any useful computation to do while waiting for I/O - because the result of that I/O operation contains the information needed for the program to even make its next decision.

Such programs are not necessarily impossible to optimize. One common optimization is to use an event loop, allowing just a few threads to handle thousands of concurrent operations. Because while a thread is waiting for I/O in one request or unit of work, in the meantime it moves on to work on processing another request/unit. Another common optimization is batching/grouping of I/O calls.

wavemode··on Indirect Calling of Nested Functions on GCC Without Executable Stack
> why can’t nested functions just be normal functions inside a namespace

Because GCC's nested functions are closures - they can access local variables within the function.

wavemode··on A better SQL in 11 lines of code
I feel the opposite way. I very rarely trust the database system to do the right thing. Any query more complex than a basic lookup by primary key requires me to look at query plans and validate that indexes are in place and are being used. Otherwise we risk the production server grinding to a halt.

Personally I'd love a more explicit form of SQL that allowed specifying things like "select via scan" or "select via index lookup". (I don't think this HN submission is that - I'm just saying generally.)

wavemode··on EVE Online moves to Python 3
Knowing game codebases, I'm guessing their test coverage was not fantastic. Agents weren't gonna get it done.
wavemode··on Small Models Have Arrived
Both you and the parent commenter seem to be misunderstanding the point the Bitter Lesson paper makes.

The Bitter Lesson is about general-purpose algorithms vs. specialized algorithms. Historically, chess engines were programmed to look at a chess position and use positional understanding (imparted by the human programmers) to decide what the best move is. But eventually, the chess engines that actually became stronger than humans were instead programmed to just check every possible move and countermove and see which ones lead to a win. (I'm oversimplifying, but you get the point.) So even before Stockfish contained a neural network, it was considered an example of the success of the Bitter Lesson.

As it applies to AI agents, the Bitter Lesson would predict that the best possible agent would simply possess A) a way to do anything it wants, B) a way to evaluate whether what it did was correct, and C) a ton of compute. Then just turn it loose on your task. (The fact that the "brain" of the agent is an LLM is kind of irrelevant - you could also imagine the brain just being a program that generates random syntactically-correct code. What the LLM achieves is that, the random generator would take millions of years whereas the LLM is much more efficient at creating plausibly-working code. This is analogous to a chess engine's pruning heuristics.)

The hard part here is B. We've seen some great agentic successes when rewriting an existing project in a new language, since the agent can just use the project's prior test suite as its evaluator. But when developing a new project, you're still figuring out the finer details of how everything is supposed to work. As the old saying goes - writing a spec that perfectly describes how a program should work, is equivalent effort to just writing the program.

wavemode··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
Stock ticker: "BIGCO'; DROP TABLE TRANSACTIONS"
wavemode··on Show HN: Voronoi Go
To be fair, a game of this only takes a few minutes. Probably best as a "learn by doing" type of thing.
wavemode··on AWS Acquires DuckLabs
> Out of all the big orgs, Amazon is probably the one that has the least regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive

I'm curious what you mean by this. I would have said the exact opposite - AWS tends to keep projects around for a very long time. They haven't acquired very many open-source projects, but the few that they have are all still running as far as I know.

wavemode··on Felony Bench
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act explicitly contains "knowingly" and/or "intentionally" qualifications. By definition, you can't accidentally violate the CFAA.
wavemode··on Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
I think "deleted" is still always going to have to be a package state, realistically. A package could contain spam, abuse, copyright infringement and/or illegal content.

I don't mind malware being lumped in to that - the place to look up code for historical or analysis reasons ought to be version control, not crates.io

wavemode··on The Amazon tax
I don't think parent commenter is complaining about the length. "a lot of words to describe..." is a rhetorical device. Their comment is basically saying "you wrote this whole article complaining about Amazon, but what they're doing is common and systemic."
wavemode··on Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
Parent commenter never said it was Spirit. (I kind of doubt that they ever operated in Brazil.) Just that this is the kind of data they would be worried about being sold.
wavemode··on AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
While I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, it is very similar to whenever anyone complains about things where they work. "Well, why don't you just raise it with management?" You're assuming that management

1) Understands the problem ("what are comments?")

2) Accepts that it is a problem ("how can more comments be a bad thing?")

3) Cares enough to solve the problem ("is this issue really a priority to solve right now? just accept the PR and we'll go back and fix if needed some other time cough never cough")

4) Believes you (this can take many forms, but the most common is, subconsciously, "this other engineer says it's not a problem, so I'll just assume it's not since that's easier")

All of these logistical, political and social factors are "the ocean"

wavemode··on Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure"
LLMs are not the only form of AI.
wavemode··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
The principal side effect is that you eat less.

Eating less can have positive effects (losing weight), but can also make you feel like shit (in a wide variety of ways), as your body is running on less energy intake than it has been accustomed to.

Depending on your activity level and the makeup of your diet, eating less can also lead to muscle loss and nutrient deficiencies.

wavemode··on Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking
His argument is that the government is going to start forcing tech companies to install backdoors in their tech, now that (hypothetically) they can't use hacking anymore.
wavemode··on Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking
This "going dark" scenario would require new legislation. With secure enclaves, modern smartphones can't be cracked open in the manner that the FBI wanted in the 2016 case. So there's no such thing as "court order tech company to crack phone" anymore. It would have to be "outlaw tech companies from producing phones that they can't crack open", which is very different and does not fall under any existing US statute.
← PreviousPage 4 of 34Next →