Hacker News Reader

NohatCoderon Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category

It is obvious, yet so many people don't understand it.

There is no secret ingredient, writing a website, or anything really, without a framework is not wildly more difficult than using a framework.

Save for a few cases where all you really want to do is covered by the default configuration, you generally don't end up writing a lot less code with a framework. Worst case, you end up spending most of your time working around the framework.

NohatCoderon How close can pure functional programming get to C?

So it is a port of libdeflate, that is indeed not very clear.

Looking at it again, do you actually have any working correctness check? If you simply ask the AI to test the code for correctness and speed against the benchmark suite, it could easily hyperoptimise for the suite in both regards.

NohatCoderon How close can pure functional programming get to C?

Uh, so the program is almost as fast as libdeflate at compressing at a given level. But the post makes absolutely no attempt at establishing that a given level compresses as well as the corresponding level in libdeflate. In the linked post there is a graph detailing that libdeflate does indeed compress quite a lot better than the original lean-zip at the same level.

Without data on compression levels it is hard to make any useful conclusions.

NohatCoderon There isn't an easy exploit for this PHP vulnerability

This is such a bad take.

1. A proof of concept is not an exploit kit, it simply needs to demonstrate that there is an issue, improving it to be more reliable only serves to help bad actors get to real exploits sooner.

2. Memory corruption bugs are notoriously flakey, crashing the target without getting code execution is generally always a possibility. Sometimes it is random from run to run, sometimes a particular attack pattern simply won't work against a particular target. Failure to find a working pattern does not imply that no such pattern exist.

3. Attacks only get better. This is usually said about cryptography, but applies just as well in this case. Data execution bugs have this tendency to make idiots assert confidently that it is improbable that such a condition would occur without the program crashing. And so the bugs get to live on until someone finds out how to tickle the program in just the right way to make the improbable a lot more likely. Even if existing attacks were as bad as the author implies, it would almost certainly only be a matter of time before someone managed to tweak them to become a whole lot better.

4. A big part of why this gets so much attention is the sheer number of high value targets, so many servers run PHP, and they were pretty much all vulnerable. Usually bugs like these still require that the PHP runtime is configured in a particular way and/or the actual PHP code run a particular function using attacker controlled data. That is still bad, but attackers will need to do a lot of digging to find the vulnerable servers.

NohatCoderon OpenAI withdraws three mathematical results

I can assure you that a lot of mathematicians are spending time on this, but research level maths just don't move that quickly. As of writing this, the initial drop happened 41 hours ago, that is under normal circumstances not a lot time for reading and understanding a proof paper, and it is most certainly not enough time for publishing a rebuttal. One does not claim that someone else's paper is wrong lightly, you sleep on it, you discuss it with colleagues, you discuss it with the author (not sure how that part works in this case) before posting stuff on the internet that you might come to regret.

NohatCoderon Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees

Because, between all of these expenses, it is the one the customer controls. The customer chooses what card to use, but the merchant pays the associated cost.

NohatCoderon Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU

This is the age old problem with proving correctness. You can (sometimes) prove that two programs have identical behaviour. One of the programs can be slightly simpler in that it is only concerned with what the correct result of a given operation is, not how to get there. But this doesn't fundamentally change that the complete specification is almost as complicated as the program itself.

NohatCoderon Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA

Yeah, this very much gives the vibe that the original plan was to design a CPU, then suddenly AI AI AI happened, and they squeezed some matmul units into the design at the last minute in order to please the higher ups.

NohatCoderon Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

As a normal investor it isn't, but once you get to double digit percentages and start getting real influence it is a different story.

NohatCoderon Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

I suspect you are right, but it is getting really difficult to tell the difference between AI and someone who simply don't know what they are writing about.

NohatCoderon Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers

The power density has been steadily increasing over the years, and then going from CPU to GPU makes it even bigger. This wouldn't be such a big issue if they actually took the time to build the infrastructure. But nobody has time, so it is gas turbines and evaporative cooling, and that makes a horrible neighbour.

NohatCoderon Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

Nah, "selling shovels" is mostly a metaphor, the amount of iron that went into mining equipment was insignificant, beyond some local demand peaks. The majority of the business was consumables.

A key thing to understand about the gold rush is that it was not a major economic event, or at least nowhere near as big as the participants thought it would be, hence the tradegy.

The AI gold rush is different in that there actually is a mountain of "shovels" large enough to flood the global market quite severely.

NohatCoderon Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers

I guess we can go the long way round. How often does the bakery use 12 million therms of natural gas?

NohatCoderon Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers

You "suspect", but your suspicion comes with a unit of energy, which simply does not make sense in the context. The rest of us are talking about effect.

NohatCoderon Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers

First thing missing from this "article" is a number indicating how many people don't want AI datacentres anywhere. You can't claim that someone is a NIMBY if their stance is that the damned thing shouldn't be built anywhere.

NohatCoderon Jelly UI: Soft-body physics for native HTML form controls

I would say that this is a joke, someone made a wobbly UI, isn't that funny. But I get a bit worried when trying to gauge much work went into this that is not required for the joke. It looks like the author actually expect people to pick up this thing and use it, and that is kind of scary.

NohatCoderon Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

Yeah, one needs to understand that "unsafe" does not mark which parts of the code are actually unsafe, it simply marks parts where the compiler ignores parts of its rule set. But the implications can crop up anywhere, there is no guarantee that a resulting use-after-free or similar can only happen inside the unsafe blocks.

In short, if you use an unsafe block, then potentially any part of your code is unsafe.

NohatCoderon Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

There is no such thing as a complete test suite, there will always be some possible bug that it doesn't catch.

In particular, if you put an LLM in an automated loop of "this test fails, please fix it", there is a pretty good chance that it will simply special case all of the tests, possibly in some contrived way that makes it not at all obvious when you read the code.

NohatCoderon Ask HN: Im a back end dev, how do you go from designing the UI with AI?

If usage of the basics become "bloat" and "a nightmare to maintain", then you haven't learned how to use them.

NohatCoderon Ask HN: Im a back end dev, how do you go from designing the UI with AI?

Have you actually learned to write HTML and CSS without any kit/framework?

I generally don't find that the frameworks help nearly as much as people think they do, and if you haven't learned the basics they easily get in the way of doing so.

NohatCoderon I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

"~10k reads+writes per month"

It is the same story over and over again. Your AWS bill is "low" because the actual resources you use are a tiny fraction of what a modern computer can deliver.

This is probably fine for your case, but you could run the same load on any toaster, and without a meaningfully demanding task it is hard to tell them apart.

NohatCoderon I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

Don’t forget that people involved in information technology procurement will pay very large sums of the company’s money to not understand anything.

FTFY

NohatCoderon Afroman found not liable in defamation case

No, treating people with hostility and escalating the situation only makes it more likely that someone will snap and attack a cop.

People generally do not shoot at cops, because whether or not they hit the target doing so is pretty much signing their own death sentence. All cops have to do to protect themselves is to not provoke people to fight-or-flight reactions.

NohatCoderon Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web

The whole WASM thing just went sideways from the start. It feels like the property of being practically unreadable and unwritable for humans was a design criterium, it is certainly the primary "feature" enabled by the stack approach.

Then there is the single array of memory that makes modern memory allocators not really work, resulting in every WASM compiler scrounging up something that mashes the assumptions of the source language into a single array.

NohatCoderon AVX-512: First Impressions on Performance and Programmability

I assume that the image would at least fit in L3.

NohatCoderon Fire Shuts GTA 6 Developer Rockstar North, Following Report of Explosion

I don't think this is likely to impact development much, they can rent office space elsewhere if needed.

NohatCoderon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://nohatcoder.dk/

I don't post often, but I think what is there is quite worthwhile. It is whatever I want to write, but topics are typically maths, game theory and cryptography. There are also a few browser games.

The site itself might also be of note to some people as an example of an extremely light hand crafted website.

NohatCoderon AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

Yeah, and I doubt that this is the last price hike. But I don't think this actually has a whole lot to do with ram prices. The thing is, AI cloud providers have generally been running at a massive loss, if you do the napkin maths, the procurement cost of these machines is equivalent to approximately a year of rent at these rates, for normal servers at AWS it is approximately a month.

NohatCoderon Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

The nature of these AIs is generally such that you can always throw more computation at the problem. Bigger models is obvious, but as I hinted earlier a lot of the current research goes more towards making various subqueries than making the models even bigger. In any case, for now the predominant factor determining how much compute a given prompt costs is how much compute someone decided to spend. So obviously if you pay for the "good" models there will be a lot more compute behind it than if you prompt a free model.

NohatCoderon Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

Lots of things to consider here, but mostly that is not the kind of prompt you would use for coding. Serious vibe coders will ingest an entire codebase into the model, and then use some system that automates iterating.

Basic "ask a question" prompts indeed probably do not cost all that much, but they are also not particularly relevant in any heavy professional use.