HN user

blenderob

1,677 karma

Purveyor of fine blogs!

Posts109
Comments172
View on HN
idiallo.com 6d ago

Deleting Systems You Don't Understand

blenderob
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 1mo ago

Ask HN: How do you feel about posts about GenAI taking over the HN front page?

blenderob
14pts19
terra-incognita.blog 1mo ago

Pixelizing My New Favicon

blenderob
2pts0
shkspr.mobi 1mo ago

PHP – simple way to send HTTP headers before a script ends

blenderob
2pts0
www.seangoedecke.com 1mo ago

Notes on Incidents

blenderob
3pts0
utcc.utoronto.ca 1mo ago

User level WireGuard for UDP based encryption and authentication

blenderob
2pts0
emschwartz.me 1mo ago

Your Clippy Config Should Be Stricter

blenderob
4pts0
susam.net 1mo ago

Childhood Computing

blenderob
254pts126
shkspr.mobi 1mo ago

Which age-gates should be skill-gates and vice-versa?

blenderob
2pts1
afranca.com.br 2mo ago

How to style a Hugo Atom feed with XSL

blenderob
3pts0
shkspr.mobi 2mo ago

GDS weighs in on the NHS's decision to retreat from Open Source

blenderob
3pts0
www.seangoedecke.com 2mo ago

Prompts are technical debt too

blenderob
6pts0
antonz.org 2mo ago

Solod v0.1: Go ergonomics, practical stdlib, native C interop

blenderob
3pts0
www.corsix.org 2mo ago

What even is a pidfd anyway?

blenderob
2pts0
mercurialsolo.github.io 2mo ago

Not your Weights, Not your Brain

blenderob
2pts0
amontalenti.com 2mo ago

Programming in 2026: excitement, dread, and the coming wave

blenderob
6pts0
www.scattered-thoughts.net 2mo ago

Store Tags After Payloads

blenderob
4pts0
shkspr.mobi 2mo ago

Vertically Aligning Roman Numerals in Code

blenderob
2pts0
susam.net 2mo ago

Three Inverse Laws of AI

blenderob
548pts351
news.ycombinator.com 3mo ago

Ask HN: What's your favorite Emacs package?

blenderob
7pts7
antonz.org 3mo ago

Porting Go's io package to C

blenderob
1pts0
shkspr.mobi 4mo ago

Finding the right bottom hole paper

blenderob
4pts0
www.bitsavers.org 4mo ago

Bit Savers

blenderob
1pts0
shkspr.mobi 4mo ago

Adding "Log in with Mastodon" to Auth0

blenderob
4pts0
github.com 4mo ago

HN Skins: Read Hacker News in Style

blenderob
3pts0
www.tomsguide.com 5mo ago

AWS suffered 'at least two outages' caused by AI tools, and now I'm convinced

blenderob
3pts0
shkspr.mobi 5mo ago

AI Is a NAND Maximiser

blenderob
3pts0
github.com 5mo ago

Mozilla Readability

blenderob
2pts0
maxim.usindic.us 5mo ago

How to Make Living as an Artist

blenderob
1pts0
susam.net 5mo ago

Three Inverse Laws of AI and Robotics

blenderob
2pts0

I read several blogs that use British English, including this OP's blog. Some of my favourite blogs in my RSS reader are British English blogs, or at least they use British English spellings and grammar. I find their use of the English language very charming and funny in a unique way.

It surprises me that anyone would feel entitled to ask a blogger to change the variety of English they use. American English is only one of many forms of English. The world is richer for its many varieties of English, and languages, and that diversity makes it more interesting, not less.

I totally understand the general advice of using actual XML DOM library for making DOM. But for my own understanding, I want to ask why the 5 escapes the OP suggests (&, <, >, " and ') aren't good enough? Do you see anyway to exploit it if these 5 are escaped? Someone kind enough to enlighten me?

With each trip generating multiple ledger entries, and Uber as a whole processing 15 million trips per day, it didn’t matter that DynamoDB was great because of high throughput at global scale. The proverbial bean counter should’ve stopped this madness from happening.

At Uber’s scale, DynamoDB became expensive. Hence, we started keeping only 12 weeks of data (i.e., hot data) in DynamoDB and started using Uber’s blobstore, TerraBlob, for older data (i.e., cold data). TerraBlob is similar to AWS S3. For a long-term solution, we wanted to use LSG.

Honest question. Why do people go for this kind of complicated solution? Wouldn't Postgres work? Let's say each trip creates 10 ledger entries. Let's say those are 10 transactions. So 150 million transactions in a day. That's like 2000 TPS. Postgres can handle that, can't it?

If regional replication or global availability is the problem, I've to ask. Why does it matter? For something so critical like ledger, does it hurt to make the user wait a few 100 milliseconds if that means you can have a simple and robust ledger service?

I honestly want to know what others think about this.

Author here. I did not use AI to write this essay.

Maybe you did. Maybe you didn't. It's your word vs. theirs.

But one thing that is undeniable is that your article reads very much like AI-generated text. While reading it, I couldn't help thinking how ironic it is to write about the virtues of simpler devices using something that is obviously an AI-generated article.

The Pangram report doesn't help your case either: https://www.pangram.com/history/f733dac6-a23f-480e-b18a-6794... (100% AI Generated)

Is This Project Accelerating or Dying > git log --format='%ad' --date=format:'%Y-%m' | sort | uniq -c

If the commit frequency goes down, does it really mean that the project is dying? Maybe it is just becoming stable?

it doesn't have to be files. it could be in memory on the browser.

How'd that work? If it's in memory, the extensions would vanish everytime I shutdown Chrome? I'll have to reinstall all my extensions again everytime I restart Chrome?

Have you seen any browser that keeps extension in memory? Where they ask the user to reinstall their extensions everytime they start the browser?

but the language of "your computer" implies files on your computer, as it would be what people commonly call it. Merely just the extension is not enough.

But the language of "your computer" also implies software on your computer including but not limited to Chrome extensions.

An encouragement to be mindful of language, and therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed 'thoughtful' [0] forum.

I don't understand how HN's news guidelines apply to a blogger writing an article on their own blog. The controversial language was found in the article. It wasn't found in the thread you're replying to.

Am I reading this right that people can (and do??) use images as a complete replacement for source code files?

Images are not replacements of source code files. Images are used in addition to source code files. Source code is checked in. Images are created and shipped. The image lets you debug things live if you've got to. You can introspect, live debug, live patch and do all the shenanigans. But if you're making fixes, you'd make the changes in source code, check it in, build a new image and ship that.

There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X.

That reason is buying stars, agent swarms, and astroturing.

No project gathers 200K stars genuinely in 3 months. There are far more useful and popular projects that need 10 years to get 200K stars. When you see a project like this get 200K stars in just 3 months, you know something is very fishy.

Look at the graph - https://api.star-history.com/svg?repos=facebook/react,opencl...

React and Linux got their 200K stars slowly but surely over 10 years. OpenClaw got their 200K stars in like 3 months! Is this any meaningful comparison?

Getting 200K stars today doesn't mean much because today stars can be bought. There's a big shady thriving business of selling stars. Stars today can be generated using swarm of thoughtless agents. What's the use of counting these stars when they don't mean anything anymore?

I understand what the author means, but I think that in any human-2-human interaction, we are all entitled to at least basic courtesy.

Correct. The article does not disagree with you.

(edit: I totally misunderstood the parent comment and wrote this reply. I've apologized for it in comment below. I could delete this comment but I am leaving it here so that others don't get confused when they see the replies below it.)

or that anyone should have more power just because they are active in the project.

So you are saying that although I create a project to solve my problems but as soon as I make it open source (so that others can also benefit) my power on the project will become equal to the power every random person on earth has on my project?

If making my project reduces my power on the project, why would I ever open source anything?

Good thing that open source world does not work like that. When I make my project open source, I still have full power on my project and I decide what goes in it and what is rejected. I have no reason to not use the powers I have on the project.

If it ever became like you say that as the creator of an open source project, my powers will be equal to the powers of every random user, I'd stop making anything open source.

First Proof 6 months ago

It's possible but unlikely given the short timeline

Yep. "possible but unlikely" was my take too. As another person commented, this isn't really a benchmark, and as long as that's clear, it seems fair. My only fear is that some submissions may be AI-assisted rather than fully AI-generated, with crucial insights coming from experienced mathematicians. That's still a real achievement even if it's human + AI collaboration. But I fear that the nuance would be lost on news media and they'll publish news about the dawn of fully autonomous math reasoning.

First Proof 6 months ago

The goalposts have been on wheels basically since the field was born. Look up "AI effect". I've stopped caring what HN comments have to say about whether something is or isn't AI. If its useful to me, I'm gonna use it.

First Proof 6 months ago

I.e. a solution is known, but is guaranteed to not be in the training set for any AI.

Not a mathematician and obviously you guys understand this better than I do. One thing I can't understand is how they're going to judge if a solution was AI written or human written. I mean, a human could also potentially solve the problem and pass it off as AI? You might say why would a human want to do that? Normal mathematicians might not want to do that. But mathematicians hired by Anthropic or OpenAI might want to do that to pass it off as AI achievements?

First Proof 6 months ago

February 13 seems right to me. I mean it's not like LLMs need to manually write out a 10 page proof. But a longer deadline can give human mathematicians time to solve the problem and write out a proof. A close deadline advantages the LLM and disadvantages humans which should be the goal if we want to see if LLMs are able to solve these.

First Proof 6 months ago

Can someone explain how this would work?

the answers are known to the authors of the questions but will remain encrypted for a short time.

Ok. But humans may be able to solve the problems too. What prevents Anthropic or OpenAI from hiring mathematicians, have them write the proof and pass it off as LLM written? I'm not saying that's what they'll do. But shouldn't the paper say something about how they're going to validate that this doesn't happen?

Honest question here. Not trying to start a flame here. Honestly confused how this is going to test what it wants to test. Or maybe I'm just plain confused. Someone help me understand this?

By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie.

Alas, gone are the days when engineers too required specialized equipment like a desktop computer on the desk that you couldn't move with you. Every evening, you left it at office and went home to live a 100% home life. Alas, gone are those days.