HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

AceJohnny2

15,621 karma · joined September 20, 2011

submissionscomments
AceJohnny2··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
For a while I named by smartphone "Exocortex" as a tongue-in-cheek recognition of the cognition I offloaded to it...

It's not so funny anymore.

AceJohnny2··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
In cstross's Accelerando (2005) [1], there is an autonomous group of shell corporations all-but-DDOSing Delaware by spawning new companies and dynamically changing corporate structure.

Back then, I believe, Stross had already conceptualized "corporations as slow AI", (which is a separate concept from above).

[1] which you can read for free online https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

AceJohnny2··on Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
As a former XMPP believer, I will say that the extremely fragmented capability state of the XMPP ecosystem, whatever people may claim, is the exact proof that vindicates Signal's position.
AceJohnny2··on Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
"Federation freezes the technology" https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
AceJohnny2··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
I mean, humans have been doing just that for a long time.
AceJohnny2··on iPhone Duo
I mean, they haven't announced the non-Pro iPhone 18 yet, so keep the hope alive!
AceJohnny2··on Show HN: Syq – copy files between machines fast (better than rsync)
> There is some info on the optimizations in the docs, but I agree that a more complete technical explanation of all the things syq does could be useful

First, thank you for taking the feedback :)

To be clear, I'm focusing on the first thing you should be telling users. It seems that, as a CLI program, the target audience of this tool is fairly technical users who are likely already familiar with SSH, rsync, and everything. As demonstrated in this thread, your first communication task is to convince them why it's worth their time to use your tool, considering they're probably satisfied with the pre-existing ones (or a replacement would already exist!).

My point is, explaining why it's better/faster than rsync shouldn't be buried in the docs. It should be a paragraph on the front page.

Hope this helps, and keep it up. HN is a rough audience to go public on ^^;

AceJohnny2··on Show HN: Syq – copy files between machines fast (better than rsync)
Thank you for showing this. I'll echo what some others say: if you're claiming to be faster than rsync, you should demonstrate why front-and-center. There have been decades of documentation on how rsync optimizes transfers, so it's a lot to live up to.

As an aside, It's perhaps an indictment of our networking landscape that multiple parallel connections between 2 specific machines would accelerate a transfer. I would've expected a single TCP connection to be able to saturate a line. Or perhaps the parallel connections seeks to amortize the per-file setup overhead?

AceJohnny2··on Coyote v. Acme (1990)
it was the first Miyazaki I saw, in college, and it blew me away. I still occasionally listen to Joe Hisaichi's soundtrack.
AceJohnny2··on Coyote v. Acme (1990)
ooh good call, I should fix that.
AceJohnny2··on Coyote v. Acme (1990)
Princess Mononoke & Spirited Away (and also Kiki's Delivery Service because it was a package. Not that it's bad, but not as important to me as the other two)

Into the Spider-Verse, for breaking away from the 3D animation movie style

AceJohnny2··on Coyote v. Acme (1990)
As marketing goes, I appreciated the Reddit AMA [1] where "Coyote" responds in-character and only via signs.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1w58qjb/hi_reddit_i...

My favourite is his answer to being compared to an actual coyote catching an actual road-runner: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1w58qjb/comment/p7d...

AceJohnny2··on Coyote v. Acme (1990)
Thanks for reminding me to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit again. It's one of, like, 5 DVD/Blu-Rays I own, because of how excellent it is.
AceJohnny2··on No Man's Sky Cosmos
I tried it a few years ago, following all the "It's actually good now!" stories.

But a few hours into the tutorial, at a point of yet another "go gather 20 wolf Pel^H^H Ores from that other planet and bring it back", and I lost interest.

The inner gameplay loop didn't work for me, and I need that hook.

Have there since been improvements to that inner loop?

In contrast, Destiny 2 keeps hooking me back in because its inner loop, the gunplay and abilities, and variety of builds, really works for me.

AceJohnny2··on iPhone Duo
You are, I'm afraid, in the minority.

Apple produces a "small" phone (S or Mini series) only every few years because that's enough to saturate that market.

AceJohnny2··on Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap
The fact that it's news that a human beat an AI, post-AlphaGo, demonstrates the current norm.
AceJohnny2··on GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
To reinforce your point, by default on macOS you can't use Tab to select different options in a dialog box. You have to enable that in System Settings -> Keyboard -> "Keyboard navigation" which is off by default.
AceJohnny2··on Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2
Didn't Apple help define the Aarch64 instruction set?
AceJohnny2··on VMs won't contain cyber-capable agents
This is off-topic, but I am reminded of the sci-fi novel Eternity by Greg Bear, in which the protagonist Olmy downloads a copy of an alien Jart mind into his nanowear to study it. Turns out this was a trojan horse, and the Jart escapes the confines of the sandbox.
AceJohnny2··on Tim Curry has died
It is a popular story and I love it, but Tim Curry himself has denied it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/movies/muppet-treasure-is...

> Curry emphatically denied that interpretation. “I saw the Muppets as actors with distinct personalities,” he said. “It’s astonishing how quickly you see them as people.”

AceJohnny2··on Hyperspace
Links are not CoW
AceJohnny2··on Hyperspace
While the idea of data-deduplication does apply everywhere, this specifically depends on the APFS CoW data feature, so it's not applicable outside of macOS (or APFS Volumes)
AceJohnny2··on Assembly Hall of Shame
There are two aspects to compute performance: latency and throughput.

There has been a ton of work to improve throughput, but that's often come at the cost of latency, because a great technique to improve throughput is batching, to avoid the per-task overhead cost.

We've also added many layers of abstraction.

A seminal example is Dan Luu's "computer latency" table (2017) https://danluu.com/input-lag/, which measures the time between a keypress and visible changes on the screen, and wherein an Apple IIe has latency 5x lower than a Lenovo X1 Carbon on Windows.

From some perspective, you could say that the Lenovo on Windows example is an impressive feat of engineering, considering all the subsystems involved (USB, interrupt dispatcher, input layer, windowing system, double-buffering...)

This throughput-over-latency tradeoff can be seen across the entire computer landscape design.

AceJohnny2··on Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
Fun fact: the Jeff Dean Facts was started by Kenton Varda (kentonv around here [1]), as a joke inside Google. He has expressed regret that it eclipsed Sanjay Ghemawat, with whom Jeff Dean basically did pair-programming with.

[1] also known for open-sourcing ProtoBufs v2, creating CapnProto and Sandstorm, and commenting on the recent Cloudflare OS post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182996

AceJohnny2··on Pigeons: SSH Anywhere, Built on Iroh
Mentioned in Brendan O'Brien's talk "Iroh: syncing terabytes of data, peer-to-peer" at 2026 Local-First Conf.

https://youtu.be/QLr-0RgMNzo

https://www.localfirstconf.com/

AceJohnny2··on Apple is getting this wrong
Granted, Apple does do this weird thing where you're invited to use your personal iCloud (/Apple) account for work-related things (I suspect because they're just bad at supporting multiple accounts simultaneously). As part of the deal, your iCloud account gets upgraded during your employment.

But they're also quite explicit and repeat the directive (including during the exit interview) about removing Apple files from your account when you leave, and logging out of iCloud from the Apple devices you leave behind.

Also:

> At some point, LE asks MA to sign out off LE's iMessage account

You can sign out remotely, so this would've been stupid of everyone involved.

Then again, this whole situation demonstrates a level of stupidity from supposedly competent people that I wish I could say was unbelievable. Add "Making a public post about a topic under litigation" under that category too.

AceJohnny2··on Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights
Grok
AceJohnny2··on DKIM2 and DMARCbis Have Landed
I suspect SPF is used because it's cheaper than performing cryptographic checks for each email. A (cached) DNS lookup and IP check on a connection is comparatively cheaper.
AceJohnny2··on DKIM2 and DMARCbis Have Landed
> Aw hell. How many things do I have to set up just so that I can send e-mails from my own domain?

... said every spammer.

I'm sorry for your pain, and I'm in the same boat.

But it's important to understand that any sufficiently large, distributed-agent system (like federated email), will see the rise of parasites that will pump resources and diminish the value of the system.

What we're seeing here is an "immune" response to those parasites. We all pay for it.

I think this is an important lesson for anyone designing a distributed-agent system [1]. How do you design it so as to keep the bad actors out, or at least so their impact is negligeable?

[1] imma make my own email system! With blackjack, and hookers! oh wait...

AceJohnny2··on How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
Tangential, but about this:

> I am creating a RAIDZ1 (RAID 5) zpool. That means 1 drive redundancy in-case of failure

A friend once told me that RAID5 has a high latency cost, because every Write requires a Read to update the stripes across all drives, and while this made sense when drives were expensive, nowadays you might as well do a RAID10 instead, and trade space for latency.

Is this still true with ZFS RAIDZ1?

← PreviousPage 2 of 34Next →