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ghc

4,084 karma · joined February 19, 2011

Co-founder, Sentenai Inc. https://sentenai.com

Sentenai helps test and maintenance organizations transform messy operational data into better decisions, by digitizing all phases of T&E.

Co-founder, Hyperplane Venture Capital http://hyperplane.vc

Hyperplane is a deep capital reserve venture fund that invests in early-stage hard technology startups. We actively lead seed rounds, writing checks up to $1.5MM.

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ghc··on Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton
Not quite:

> But what happens when sales numbers don't meet projections? The book is discounted. Then, at the publisher's discretion, the bookstore will receive a directive to rip the covers off the books, recycle the remainder of the book to be "pulped" or turned into other forms of paper, such as notebook paper and toilet paper. The bookstore is expected to mail the book covers to the publisher as evidence that the book has been destroyed.

https://www.offthebeatenshelf.com/blog/pulp-fiction-is-real

ghc··on Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton
"Once great literature—now great litter."
ghc··on The Kuycon P20 – 28" 4500x3000px 3:2 monitor
I got one of those about 6 months ago. It’s great. No complaints whatsoever.
ghc··on After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
I've been using Haskell for 20 years. I've been running a company built on Haskell for 10. I have a very large legacy Haskell codebase. I've invested in several companies built on Haskell. Your anecdote is about your own lack of familiarity, nothing more.

Yes, companies can get into trouble with Haskell compile times, memory use, etc., but enforcing disciplined coding rules and advances in tooling solved the majority of the problems by 2016.

We use LLMs to assist in writing Haskell and have for several years. We keep track of compile times to catch regressions and on our largest code base an agent-driven change takes an average of 96 seconds (as of this month) to compile. Agents looking to do quick compile checks during code writing can run with flags that make the compilation run in less than 5 seconds. In all cases, running out test suites takes a lot longer than compile times.

The only time this isn't true is when you compile from cold start, as you would when using multiple work trees...which is the expected behavior when vibe coding features. So yes, I believe the issues they're running into have a lot to do with vibe coding. Check out all their integrations...Haskell's probably a poor match for what they do, but vibe coding integrations is probably what they need to do to get new customers.

ghc··on After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
I was puzzled by this article at first, but when you put it that way it makes more sense. The author also had a presentation awhile back about why Haskell is a terrible language for startups to adopt. I imagine that in the current venture environment vibe coding is being pushed heavily by investors since companies are effectively in an arms race where feature development cost is moving towards zero and investors don't care about individual companies because they have a portfolio of bets.
ghc··on US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
It's people over 65. Cell phone ownership is pretty much universal, but only 78% of people 65+ own a smartphone. I don't think that's really surprising at all. I wouldn't expect an 80 year old to adopt a smartphone when their cognition, fine motor control, and/or vision is going. And who needs one in a nursing home? I bet if they broke it down further you'd find that the non-ownership skews towards people who were already elderly ~15 years ago.
ghc··on B-52 bomber crashes shortly after takeoff at California's Edwards Air Force Base
Tragic. Most of the crew onboard were almost certainly aerospace engineers tasked with collecting sensor data.
ghc··on Nailing jelly to a wall: is it possible? (2005)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, in New England jam seems more popular than jelly. The FDA regulates the labels...jelly is made from fruit juice, while jam is made from fruit chunks. The only jelly I routinely see is concord grape jelly. Jams are usually apricot, raspberry, or strawberry.

Given the number of small batch jams available at various farmers markets, my guess would be that for smaller farms, making jam is more practical than jelly.

ghc··on Why TUIs Are Back
> Reviewing code is important, but it's only 50% of the learning process, at best

I don't know about everyone else, but the code I reviewed as a Junior was high quality code I was expected to learn from. That's entirely different from doing code review on whatever CC outputs.

ghc··on Tangled – We need a federation of forges
BitTorrent also enabled search engines to be built easily, which created discoverability. Unfortunately it's a much harder problem for git repos, especially when competing with GitHub search.
ghc··on Tangled – We need a federation of forges
Oh, that's pretty cool! Now I can't decide whether that approach or one based on AT is better...
ghc··on We need a federation of forges
Is there really nothing like BitTorrent for git, or have we just not heard about it because of GitHub's network effects? It feels like this problem was solved long ago for binaries.
ghc··on Before GitHub
Things Fall Apart

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned

ghc··on ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
Except ASML licensed the technology from the US Government, after the government labs built the first EUV fab in 2001. Not to take anything away from ASML...all the US companies that also licensed the tech failed to commercialize it, but the US Government blocked Canon and other Japanese companies from acquiring the technology. The entire reason ASML has the technology and nobody in Japan does is geopolitical.
ghc··on ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
Optics and photoresist materials too. The partnership developed the first EUV lithography in 2001: https://www.llnl.gov/article/27641/euvl-partnership-makes-it...
ghc··on ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
Let's not forget the really big gamble (inventing EUV) was made in the 1990s by US national labs: Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Lawrence Berkeley.
ghc··on ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
I mean, your brain has an order of magnitude more neurons than there are people on the planet. I think humans are just incapable of wrapping our heads around the sheer number of tiny things that fit in small macroscopic spaces.
ghc··on ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
Why would a machine need to make anything? Is a robot arm not a machine? How about a trash compactor? Are the 6 types of simple machines not machines?
ghc··on A type-safe, realtime collaborative Graph Database in a CRDT
> the relational model can subsume "graph" queries, but for all the reasons Codd laid out back in the 60s... network (aka connected graph) databases cannot do the latter.

Except network databases have little in common with graph databases...they're much more closely related to hierarchical databases.

I would say that Graph databases are now a strict superset of relational databases, not the other way around. In a graph database a node's named edge can naturally point to a node of any type or having any property schema. Doing this in a relational model requires one of several approaches that could only be classified as fighting against the model (or torturing it, as my PI liked to say).

ghc··on Do you even need a database?
Oh you're right! I was looking at the last documentation update timestamp, but the original release was 2006. That makes a lot more sense than Itanium support in 2021.
ghc··on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
how does this compare to gpt-oss-120b? It seems weird to leave it out.
ghc··on Do you even need a database?
> Oracle® Database Platform Guide 10g Release 2 (10.2) for Microsoft Windows Itanium (64-Bit)

Well, I guess that at least confirms Oracle on Itanium (!?) still supported RAW 5 years ago.

I'm guessing everyone's on ASM by now though, if they're still upgrading. I ran into a company not long ago with a huge oracle cluster that still employed physical database admins and logical database admins as separate roles...I would bet they're still paying millions for an out of date version of Oracle and using RAW.

ghc··on Elevated errors on Claude.ai, API, Claude Code
It seems like Claude has taken Github's place in terms of developer reaction to it being unavailable. It's like everyone forgot how they did things 18 months ago.
ghc··on Do you even need a database?
I'm so old I remember working on databases that were designed to use RAW, not files. I'm betting some databases still do, but probably only for mainframe systems nowadays.
ghc··on Fuck the cloud (2009)
It took me way too long to get that.
ghc··on If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
Here's my take on what he was getting at:

Build vs. buy is an eternal question in enterprises. I remember many in-house data teams trying to build tools for "digital transformation" and cloud migration about 10 years ago. The challenge was, building those tools was more expensive than those enterprises could budget for (IT as cost center), so a startup like Snowflake would easily outcompete in-house solutions with their custom, cloud-based tech stack that was necessarily complex because it needed to serve the needs of thousands of customers.

If he's right, the build vs. buy equation has shifted more towards build, at least as far as enterprise software is concerned. IT is still a cost center, but in theory an internal team can now handle more requests for custom tools without looking to outside vendors. Essentially the cost of building in-house might be collapsing and therefore enterprise software startups will be serving fewer customers (who would all pay you more because if solving the problem was cheap they'd do it).

If you had to build a stack for dozens of customers paying huge amounts of money, how would that stack differ from the stack you'd build to serve thousands of customers? Certainly it wouldn't need to be as scalable! And that's probably what he's getting at. I think what you'd do instead, to capture those higher price point customers, is solve their problems more specifically, in a higher value manner.

Many companies already do this, investing far more in field engineers than they do in their tech stack, since customization is essential.

ghc··on The Harvard Library Passport
Oh, that actually tracks. I should have checked his bio.
ghc··on The Harvard Library Passport
So you're basically telling me to get off HN (and the internet), where lazy writing co-authored by LLMs is increasingly becoming the norm. Great.
ghc··on The Harvard Library Passport
The writing style seems a little unnatural, but the odd grammatical error convinced me that it wasn't the result of someone asking an LLM to review the libraries and write the reviews in the voice of an intellectual who went to Harvard.

What a world we live in, that suspecting an LLM guided by a specific prompt would be my first instinct.

ghc··on The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
As straw men go, this is an attractive one, but...

When I was fresh out of undergrad, joining a new lab, I followed a similar arc. I made mistakes, I took the wrong lessons from grad student code that came before mine, I used the wrong plotting libraries, I hijacked python's module import logic to embed a new language in its bytecode. These were all avoidable mistakes and I didn't learn anything except that I should have asked for help. Others in my lab, who were less self-reliant, asked for and got help avoiding the kinds of mistakes I confidently made.

With 15 more years of experience, I can see in hindsight that I should have asked for help more frequently because I spent more time learning what not to do than learning the right things.

If I had Claude Code, would I have made the same mistakes? Absolutely not! Would I have asked it to summarize research papers for me and to essentially think for me? Absolutely not!

My mother, an English professor, levies similar accusations about the students of today, and how they let models think for them. It's genuinely concerning, of course, but I can't help but think that this phenomenon occurs because learning institutions have not adjusted to the new technology.

If the goal is to produce scientists, PIs are going to need to stop complaining and figure out how to produce scientists who learn the skills that I did even when LLMs are available. Frankly I don't see how LLMs are different from asking other lab members for help, except that LLMs have infinite patience and don't have their own research that needs doing.

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