HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

arnorhs

2,032 karma · joined October 27, 2008

https://twitter.com/arnorhs

https://arnorhs.dev

meet.hn/city/is-Reykjavik

submissionscomments
arnorhs··on DeepInfer: High-performance inference framework for DeepSeek models
even if they are far ahead, where does the revenue come from? current market size is like 20-40 billion annually.. even if it grows to 2x it's still a long time until that would justify the valuation.

but perhaps you are thinking that starlink is the key? sure probably a bigger market - but any market it accesses is bound to eventually prefer ground lines.

so the only way to justify the valuation is if the AI side of the business becomes the most dominant AI business

arnorhs··on Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand
as somebody who does now do 95% of my coding without typing, I wonder the same thing. I've also seen that thrown around and I keep wondering who these people are who are spending so much time and/or effort on boilerplate to the point where they see that as the biggest benefit (??)
arnorhs··on Screens Aren't Destroying Young Minds. I Should Know
If one's mind has been "destroyed", would you know?

It's hard to imagine that the past problems he listed were not at least partially due to his excessive device use.

We don't have great emperical evidence to point to a specific thing between screen time, social media, gambling, counter culture etc on the causes of the reverse Flynn effect and mental health epidemic in general, but we do know that anecdotal evidence does not improve our data one way or the other.

arnorhs··on Pi Durable
I'm glad you pointed this out. This is my main question as well.
arnorhs··on Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking
Yeah Gemini has been consistently better than open ai's chat in icelandic, but I would still say it's far from passable as natural sounding. Lots of grammar errors and the pronunciation sounds like a non native speaker.
arnorhs··on Making Startups Powerful
This depends on what you are building and what your goals are. What pg is referring to is how to build transformative companies, unicorns if you will.

There's plenty of businesses where you are simply optimizing a funnel, and driving more revenue at all costs is fully aligned with the goals of the company

arnorhs··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
The real reason is that it is not in the ai companies' best interest for the ais to be fair and truthful. They stand to gain from having the most dangerous or most deceiving ai, and this the most valuable
arnorhs··on Claude, change the "Add to Cart" button to blue
agreed to some extent. I think this parody still highlights what I feel is often the experience. It might not happen on a simple task such as changing a button color, but on more complicated things, this can definitely be exactly what it feels like.
arnorhs··on Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]
I believe this is referencing a meme on the primeagen's standup podcast, where Casey is referred to as legendary while he feels undeserving of this title.

Titles aside, his talk is really insightful and it is super interesting to do a deep dive on these old computer/programming topics as the modern concepts were being discovered

arnorhs··on Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role
This article is highly AI generated. The first paragraph is probably not AI generated, but the rest is definitely.

I also double checked on gptzero me and it 100% agrees with me.

I'm curious to know though whether or not the "author" used Gemini. I've been using Gemini a lot in the past year, and the writing sounds exactly like Gemini. But it's possible that all the models sound the same.

Edit: I'd like to add that I still liked the article and agree with it, and in general I find Gemini's writing style to be quite enjoyable.

arnorhs··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
how would that work exactly?
arnorhs··on Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues
it's amazing from a historical perspective that there are HNers around now who don't know who DHH is, when he was such a prevailing voice in the HN scene back in the day.

He is the author of rails and there are so many founders who were inspired by 37 signals and their takes on things back in the day.

The golden years of HN.

arnorhs··on Quickly rewrite Git repository history
Personality have needed for the following reasons (when wanting to preserve history): removing personal info, removing sensitive keys/passwords that were accidently committed a long time ago, splitting a repo. There's lots of use cases
arnorhs··on Tracking unique visitors without cookies
Same thing I was thinking. I personally don't track unique visitors on my blog, just random sessions where you can't identify unique users, which allows me to not show a banner. If I were to use this technique I'd have to show a banner
arnorhs··on FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model
I'm curious to see how it deals with dual languages - ie. not switching between them, but using two languages in the same sentence like the google keyboard supports out of the box.

my biggest issue is that i make up a lot of words as i type and the google dictionary for icelandic is .. well it can never be fully complete because of the way the language works, so dictionary words are always a mess.

arnorhs··on Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
I think you might be on to something there
arnorhs··on Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
This post is good, and it's a great example of taking a problem and solving it with the appropriate tech with the right amount of depth. It really helps to have full domain knowledge of your customers as well.

However, I do not like how it is framed as "simple html is better than react" - because you could just as well have told the same story as a react developer.

(Nb. I could go on forever about the complexities and intricacies of storing things session based on a server vs browser based and etc - and lots of other things that were skimmed over in this article, but that would be too long)

All of those things that are simple in html are also simple in react.

It's literally the same code - there's nothing preventing you from using browser based html validation in react - all the same code that gets complicated in react (overly complicated validation logic) also ends up being complicated in astro - they have their own thing around schema validation etc and integrating it within an astro site means you have to integrate their client router etc etc.. so it's very easy to go overly-complicated there as well.

The comparison is also with an off-shore team doing development for you with probably incomplete knowledge and the way projects are structured they have an incentive to create the solution as fast as possible, in as little time as possible, with the biggest amount of complexity as possible.

The last point is devious - it's not necessarily that the contractor does this by design, but the incentive structure makes it so something that's overly complicated actually benefits them, so they don't have a direct incentive to go with something simple.

Anyways, a simple solution, directly addressing the problem at hand is always better - no matter what stack you pick.

(I'd like to say that I don't have anything against Astro's form validation, I was just trying to highlight how there's more to it than "native html browser validation")

arnorhs··on Claude Opus 4.8
Yes, modest but tangible improvement - same modesty does not apply to the cost: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/capabilities/coding#cod...
arnorhs··on Men who stare at walls
this sure seems like meditation.

it could probably work as well to close your eyes instead of staring at a wall.

i've always found meditation types revolving around focusing on one thing (candle, wall etc), or nothing (empty mind) to be really hard. my mind just wanders and i end up super anxious, frustrated, and exhausted - resulting in me giving up pretty quickly

What I've found is that focusing on "everything" - ie sitting still and trying to observe your surroundings, your body, all sounds simultaneously seems to work much better. It's easier to get to a calm state this way.

Also, doing this while walking can also work - but perhaps easier to accidentally start thinking about something else

arnorhs··on Show HN submissions tripled and now mostly have the same vibe-coded look
i wonder if you could use a bayesian classifier, like the first anti-spam measures used, to automatically classify these submissions.

Kind of off-topic - but why is there always so much focus amongst AI-bros on how good or whether or not LLMs are good at building UI? My shallow assumptions were that the reason is because that's what LLMs are particularly bad at.

But lately I've kind of gotten the sense that a lot of people seem to mostly be building UI stuff with LLMs. Weird.

arnorhs··on Laws of Software Engineering
Since the site is down, you can use the archive.org link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260421113202/https://lawsofsof...

arnorhs··on Laws of Software Engineering
are you saying performance is 90-99% caching? If so that is so obviously untrue.

If you are saying you _can_ fix 90-99% of performance bottlenecks eventually with caching, that may be true, but doesn't sound as nice

arnorhs··on Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it
There's something that is written between the lines here.

EU is often portrayed as overly bureaucratic, slow moving. The way this app was developed seems more in the line of "move fast, break things".

I don't know if that says something about the EU, or about the EU-naysayers, but I thought it was worth pointing out.

arnorhs··on Fast and Easy Levenshtein distance using a Trie (2011)
That's an interesting story, but I'm really at a loss for how this relates to the post you are commenting on.
arnorhs··on Git commands I run before reading any code
The author is talking about the case where you have coherent commits, probably from multiple PRs/merges, that get merged into a main branch as a single commit.

Yeah, I can imagine it being annoying that sqashing in that case wipes the author attribution, when not everybody is doing PRs against the main branch.

However, calling all squash-merge workflows "stupid" without any nuance.. well that's "stupid" :)

arnorhs··on 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)
Does orange peel not produce any CO2 / methane when left like this? I'm assuming there is some negative carbon footprint before this becomes a positive?

The ecological win definitely looks nice on paper, but whenever people talk about compost the carbon footprint / gas emissions is always at the front of people's minds, and I don't really see that discussed in the article.

The article does say

> Especially since, in addition to the double-win of dealing with waste and revitalising barren landscapes, richer woodlands also sequester greater amounts of carbon from the atmosphere – meaning little plots of regenerated land like this could ultimately help save the planet.

How long will it take for it to cross the CO2-neutral mark? Maybe a silly question, definitely not my area of expertese.

arnorhs··on Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
The way I understood it, the original article is saying the _only_ remaining differentiator is taste and the comment you replied to is saying "wrong, there are also other things, such as effort".

I don't necessarily interpret the comment you replied to as saying that "taste is not important", which seems like what you are replying to, just that it's not the only remaining thing.

I agree that taste gets you far. And I agree with all the examples of good taste that you brought up.

But even with impeccable taste, you still need to learn, try things, have ideas, change your mind etc.. putting all of that in the bucket of "taste" is stretching it..

However, having good taste when putting in the effort, gets your further than with effort alone. In fact, effort alone gets you nowhere, and taste alone gets you nowhere. Once you marry the two you get somewhere.

arnorhs··on Are We Idiocracy Yet?
> It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.

you seem pretty convinced that intelligence plays an important role in natural selection. I'd argue that decisiveness, confidence, looks, social skills all play a more important role. (I'm not saying that's a good thing)

I'm interested in understanding your point of view, can you elaborate on what you mean by "There is no joke in that"?

arnorhs··on Is BGP safe yet?
ISP's often have different infrastructure for different sets of customers (regional, mobile/landline differences etc) - often due to legacy M&As etc..
arnorhs··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
Which EU grant did you receive? Ie. from which fund?

edit: nm, rtfm, it was on the landing page: Horizon Europe programme

Page 1 of 20Next →