majewsky · HackerTrans

majewsky

15,655 karmajoined 11 jaar geleden

This process emits code when Premium Cola is present on standard input.

https://xyrillian.de (podcasts and blog) https://github.com/majewsky Mastodon: https://digitalcourage.social/@xyrill

What I say is often colored by my work experience, but opinions are always my own and not those of my employer.

Submissions

Show HN: Holo (minimalistic configuration management; v3.0.0 out now)

holocm.org

2 pointsby majewsky5 jaar geleden1 comments

Ask HN: I was invited to speak at a computer museum. What should I tell them?

9 pointsby majewsky6 jaar geleden4 comments

Ask HN: Are React-like UI frameworks a fad or a genuine step forward?

8 pointsby majewsky6 jaar geleden2 comments

Map proposal for German long-distance train network

old.reddit.com

1 pointsby majewsky6 jaar geleden0 comments

Understanding Neurotypicality (2006)

web.archive.org

3 pointsby majewsky7 jaar geleden0 comments

Invisible Sound Design in the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (10 Min Video)

youtube.com

1 pointsby majewsky7 jaar geleden0 comments

Kubernetes 2.0 Milestone

github.com

2 pointsby majewsky7 jaar geleden0 comments

Ask HN: Favorite Manpage/Documentation Quotes?

1 pointsby majewsky7 jaar geleden0 comments

Ask HN: Which LDAP server doesn't require a degree to run?

17 pointsby majewsky7 jaar geleden14 comments

Ask HN: Favorite quotes from manpages/documentation?

3 pointsby majewsky7 jaar geleden0 comments

Ask HN: Best password manager(s) for mere mortals?

4 pointsby majewsky8 jaar geleden3 comments

Ask HN: What's the next big tech hype?

2 pointsby majewsky8 jaar geleden6 comments

Show HN: Libpackagebuild – generate Debian/Pacman/RPM packages from your Go app

github.com

1 pointsby majewsky8 jaar geleden1 comments

[video, 3 min] Bitcoin, as explained by AI

youtube.com

1 pointsby majewsky8 jaar geleden0 comments

Notes on API design in Go

blog.bethselamin.de

2 pointsby majewsky8 jaar geleden0 comments

Ask HN: Which parts of everyday life are more complex than people expect?

24 pointsby majewsky8 jaar geleden22 comments

GDPR ahoy

blog.bethselamin.de

3 pointsby majewsky8 jaar geleden0 comments

WIPP Exhibit: Message to 12,000 A.D

web.archive.org

1 pointsby majewsky8 jaar geleden0 comments

The Problem with Facebook [video, 7 min] (2014)

youtube.com

2 pointsby majewsky8 jaar geleden0 comments

Stephen Colbert's “Go Fund Yourself”

youtube.com

9 pointsby majewsky9 jaar geleden1 comments

comments

23 uur geledendiscuss

Access to a well-established set of tools for operating on unstructured text (coreutils, grep, sed, awk, etc.).

23 uur geledendiscuss

> It is literally, the absence of a desire to participate.

I agree with this position, and yet I would argue that, by taking the time to write out this comment, you are acting inconsistenly with your own statement.

I have old repos with "master" and new repos with "main". If someone were to approach me about one of the old repos and ask about the default branch, I would immediately change it to "main" without any hesitation, because it is all but certain that trying to get into an argument will waste more of my time than just doing the change would.

eergisterendiscuss

> If your revenue is 25 billion

It isn't. They had a one-month period around February that, if every month ran like taht, would constitute a yearly revenue of 25 billion. The fact that they appear to not have published a new annualized revenue number since then suggests that the trend is not upwards, which would make sense with the growing number of companies that are asking questions about ROI on AI expenses and cutting their token spend.

4 dagen geledendiscuss

The fact that one of the orgs that you're a member of is flipping the switch is not newsworthy.

13 dagen geledendiscuss

> But to force these beliefs on others through laws is crossing a line you will regret at some point in your life.

Where did they argue for a policy solution?

18 dagen geledendiscuss

If this is a thing you need to beware of, you should more importantly beware of using a version of Go that's been outdated for over 1.5 years and EOL for nearly a year.

Context: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/70000 fixed in 1.23.3 (released 2024-11-06), EOL for 1.23.x was 2025-08-06

vorige maanddiscuss

Go and try to create 40000 VMs on Hetzner. The cloud may look infinitely big, until it suddenly isn't.

vorige maanddiscuss

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.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

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.

4 maanden geledendiscuss

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.

4 maanden geledendiscuss

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

4 maanden geledendiscuss

Well, about the free-software part, anyway.

4 maanden geledendiscuss

> 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

4 maanden geledendiscuss

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

5 maanden geledendiscuss

> 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.)

5 maanden geledendiscuss

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.

5 maanden geledendiscuss

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.

5 maanden geledendiscuss

> Klopilot

I like "Copy-lot".

5 maanden geledendiscuss

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.

5 maanden geledendiscuss

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