HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

joss82

1,558 karma · joined October 21, 2008

In order, from largest to smallest projects:

https://parseur.com

https://spindoc.ai

https://www.challengelistcreator.com

https://mappacker.com

(You can email me: my nick at gmail.com)

submissionscomments
joss82··on Restoration of Retinal Regenerative Potential (2025)
I am hoping for an AMD treatment and this does not seem to be it, at least not yet: it's targetting a different mechanism. But at least it's great that there seems to be active research in this field.
joss82··on RimWorld's new Waylith Engine and Update 1.7
So apparently they are working on a new game that is not rimworld but using the same engine…
joss82··on Worlds more habitable than Earth?
The odds are massively skewed against the existence of such a world, even given how massively fucking gigantic the universe is. To have a human-habitable world, you need:

- Solid rock

- Gaseous atmosphere

- Atmospheric pressure between 0.6 to 70 (!) (depending on gases mix) atmospheres

- Right temperature: between -20C and +40C

- Mix of gases so that CO2 is not more than 0.1% and oxygen 20% or equivalent

- Something to filter hard UV rays: for example ozone layer

- Something to push larger asteroids away or attract them: a large moon for example

- Enough greenhouse-effect gases but not too much (:'

- Relatively strong magnetic field to deflect high-energy particles, but not too strong otherwise it creates radiations like Jupiter's

- Water

- Carbon

- Iode

- Ton of other stuff like Potassium and Phosphorus

- No cyanide and other supertoxic compounds like tetrachlorides

Those are all requirements, miss one and you will die, quickly or slowly.

And this is just to barely SURVIVE. I'm not even talking about niceties like food or electricity.

joss82··on Fuck Off as a Service (Foaas)
I really like the minimalistic style. Very good and to the point.

https://foaas.io/legend/foass.io/joss82

joss82··on There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
That’s the exact opposite impression of my recent user experiences of software: slower than ever.

Contrary to what initiatives like the tigerbeetle team is doing with tigerstyle, or the 10 nasa coding rules, code created by llms tends to be verbose and slow.

joss82··on Hardware backdoors in some x86 CPUs
This backdoor only appears on decades-old VIA C3 embedded x86 processors
joss82··on Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3
In a good way or a bad way?
joss82··on Launch HN: Parsewise (YC P25) – Reason Across Documents with an API
Hi, Parseur founder here :D

I understand what they are trying to do, but to me it feels like the moment when MongoDB entered the database space, with semi-structured, "flexible" storage format. It has its uses, for prototyping mostly.

But in high-volume, production workloads, giving a structure to the data you extract (what Parseur does through defining the Fields in your Mailbox, basically giving your output data a schema) adds a ton of value, and the larger the dataset, the truer it is.

Usually, you start by defining where you want your data to go, and which structure it should have, before working backwards from here and starting to extract the data. This is the key to automating your document workflow.

joss82··on Unlimited OCR: One-shot long-horizon parsing
I've been working on Parseur for the last 10 years, and OCR has not been solved yet, let me tell you.

OCR still sucks in 2026. Hopefully this might improve the situation but I haven't tested it yet.

joss82··on Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use
There is no mention of the amount of fuel used to transport the fuel in the article. From what I know it’s a tiny fraction: boats are efficient at transporting stuff (slowly)
joss82··on Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use
That is not what I understood from the article. What I understand is:

Fossil fuels are 40% of freight tonnage, but transporting them fuels is responsible for 50% of the total freight fuel consumption.

I assume 99% of freight uses fossil sources as fuel.

joss82··on Claude Fable 5
Yes, this is also my feeling.

It happens for every single Anthropic release. Then I try it on real dev and the result is laughably bad. Except in design where it has been doing a decent job for a while. I am not a designer and my bar is pretty low.

joss82··on The company I work for is losing all of its humanity, I don't know where to go
Thank you for this answer, it saved me hours of experimenting.

And bonus points for bashing MongoDB, of course. Every single project that I worked on where MongoDB was used, also had MongoDB as the single largest constraint and operations time sink.

joss82··on The company I work for is losing all of its humanity, I don't know where to go
Dude. You are marketable as fuck.

Don’t live in the hype. Not everyone is drinking the ai cool-aid bottoms up.

What do you mean by fastapi being a mistake ?

joss82··on He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
Are you building the site from the same json files that are used in the game?

AIs are still computer programs and are not given the resources to render javascript, so they cannot access the game data from the website. And they obviously don't have it in their parameters. BTW Google Gemini Pro just told me that they know the game but did not know the value. Actually, it points out that it is a known trap for AI to confidently give a wrong, hallucinated value. Maybe it had already seen this thread and integrated it in their parameters or fine tuning. I don't know...

Gemini Fast confidently gives me a wrong value. But very quickly! I'll attach the entire Gemini response as a sub-reply.

joss82··on Scientists Figured Out How Eels Reproduce (2022)
They swabbed them and sequenced their DNA.
joss82··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2025)
Parseur | Front-end dev with design appetite | REMOTE [GMT:GMT+6]

Parseur is a B2B Saas that automates document-processing workflows.

We are a 100% office-less, fully remote team of 5 looking for the 6th full-time (or 80%) team member.

We're looking for an excellent front-end dev who ideally knows React. And it would be nice if you could also design and know your way around CSS.

More info here: https://parseur.com/jobs

joss82··on Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?
You are not alone.

After falling in love and hacking away with Claude for a few weeks, I'm now in the hangover phase, and barely using any AI at all.

AI works well to build boilerplate code and solve easy problems, while confidently driving full-speed into the wall as soon as complexity increases.

I also noticed that it makes me subtly lazier and dumber. I started thinking like a manager, at a higher-level, believing I could ignore the details. It turns out I cannot, and details came back to bite me quickly.

So, no AI for me right now, but I'm keeping an eye out for the next gens.

joss82··on Claude Code Unleashed
Terragon is amazing. I actually ordered a second laptop to be able to work on several Claude Code PRs at the same time, but with this I don't even need the extra laptop! I've been trying it for 24 hours and it's a nice boost to my productivity, on top of Claude Code's own boost. Yeah!
joss82··on It’s not mold, it’s calcium lactate (2018)
You missed the joke ;)
joss82··on Germany's Water Consumption Down 17% Following Nuclear Reactor Shutdowns
Solar and wind cannot replace base load power. Especially not in Germany. They have to rely on peaker plants even more, and those are burning gas, emitting CO2. And they built more coal power plant units, like Datteln 4: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datteln_Power_Station
joss82··on Germany's Water Consumption Down 17% Following Nuclear Reactor Shutdowns
If it’s cooled in an “open cycle”, it means that the water vapor is released in the atmosphere, via these huge aero refrigerators towers. It will eventually fall back down as rain or snow. Water is not a scarce resource in Germany. Shutting down those plans was an ecological and economical disaster bordering on high treason.
joss82··on Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
Interesting concept. Let's run the numbers...

The largest Q-Max-class gas tanker is 345 meters long [1]. Let's say you manage to fit 3 giant Siemens wind turbines on it, with 100m long blades [2]. It's a bit cramped but let's say you have extenders on the side to make room for all 3 of them. And also let's say you found a way to prevent the ship from tipping over when the wind is strong. By deploying floaters on the side or whatever. Not unsurmountable.

Each of those wind turbine has a rated power of 14.7 MW [2]. Let's say that you found a place where the wind blows super strong (but not too strong) and steady all the time. It's possible, since you are a mobile ship, after all. Let's say that you have a way for the ship to keep in the same place despite the strong and steady wind pushing you constantly. Using engines is going to lower your efficiency, so let's say we found another way.

So, now your ship is generating 45MW constantly. According to ChatGPT, this is 32 kg of hydrogen per second, taking hydrolysis losses into account.

Tanker capacity is 18 620 000 kg of liquid hydrogen. It will take 581 000 seconds to fill up. 9697 minutes, 161 hours, or 6.7 days. Much shorter than I thought... Did I miss something?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-Max [2] https://www.offshorewind.biz/2024/04/22/first-siemens-gamesa...

joss82··on A Texas "moth man" photographed 550 species in his own yard
Texas yard is the size of a small country
joss82··on Money and Happiness: Extended Evidence Against Satiation
Yes, you are right that playing a game with infinite ammo and health is boring.

However, this never happens in the real world: You buy a nice car, then a nice house, then go to nice vacations, eat better, healthier food.

Then you realize that there are layers of nicer everything above what you consider "nice". Build a more ambitious company, and end up building rockets to explore the solar system and make humanity multi-planetary, cure illnesses, extend knowledge or education or peace.

joss82··on Llama3 Performance Cost Benchmark
I spent the last few days testing Llama3 on different GPUs, to find the cheapest cost per token. Spoiler: it's the Nvidia L4, surprisingly.
joss82··on Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
It's a bit like trying to know if a geometric series is going to converge to 0 or diverge towards infinity.

If a blunder is a 0, then avoiding blunders is super important.

For example if you are in finance or accounting, commiting fraud makes you lose your license and set your business value to zero.

joss82··on Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
This only works where the number of moves is finite, and you can only iterate in lockstep with your opponent: tennis and chess are good examples.

If you are a startup, you don't have to wait for your competitors to play before making a move, you can (and must, to survive) make as many moves as you possibly can, to get ahead.

A blunder is not as bad as not making enough great moves.

joss82··on DiskClick: Ever wanted to hear old hard drive sounds
Haha
joss82··on Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday
Neural Networks: from zero to hero

https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html

Page 1 of 13Next →