HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

nly

11,508 karma · joined April 14, 2013

submissionscomments
nly··on Through Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart taught us the measure of a man
You're forgetting that later the writers would have been writing with Patrick in mind.

It's entirely conceivable Patrick's performance inspired the writers to reach new heights

Writers and actors feed off one another

nly··on Archive.today links going forward
How do they know the origin didn't detect archive.todays crawler and serve it malware?
nly··on Brotli on Nginx thread pools: ngx_mbrotli vs. ngx_brotli
Crazy to me that the example benchmarks are all scripts that could be precompressed and/or dynamically compressed and then cached

https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_gzip_static_module.h...

https://nextgen.pk/blog/nginx-brotli-compression-static-prec...

nly··on Composite objects and C++26 the std:polymorphic type
Boost polycollection.is better than what you propose

https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/latest/doc/html/poly_collecti...

nly··on Gold is now the top U.S. export
That's why Gold futures have relaunched in London. Keeps spot trading and futures trading in the same timezone
nly··on Gold is now the top U.S. export
Gold futures are now trading in London again as well, which is related

Intercontinental Exchange launches trading in gold futures in London - https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/e5d7ca...

nly··on Last rites for Gentoo's Chromium package
As an ex-Gentoo user, the pain in a was always bundled Vs shared libraries.

Shared libraries breaking ABI could mean recompiling half your operating system

On the other hand, bundled libraries meant insanely long build times and a sense of impurity/uncleanliness

Unfortunately, it looks like projects like ABI tracker are long dead:

https://github.com/lvc/abi-tracker

nly··on Last rites for Gentoo's Chromium package
> Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water.

Pretty rich from a compile-from-source distribution

nly··on Anthropic revenue jumps to $16.8B in third quarter
No sweat. Those bonds are going to be converted into equity and dumped on retail investors when they go public.
nly··on ASML's strong orders ease fears AI spending boom is running out of steam
You can always eat your pets
nly··on I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall
It's not just slumlords though.

Rental yields are so low in the UK compared to the cost of finance, tax and maintenance that being a landlord has become completely unprofitable, which means the rental sector is falling apart.

Pretty much no landlords in the south east of England are cashflow positive on a monthly basis, and if they are they are yielding less than government bonds

nly··on I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall
Stamp duty doesn't tax gains. It's a tax on buyers, not sellers.

It's absolute insanity

nly··on I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall
Wealth is not income.

You can be wealthy and still have poor cashflow, especially as a leveraged property owner

nly··on The role of cat eye narrowing movements in cat–human communication (2020)
Aquariums are perhaps the worst for landlords. They're difficult to move if you abandon them, and can flood entire floors.
nly··on There's little that's "inevitable" about AI
90% of what even the best of the best programmers do can be accelerated by LLMs. It's not just coding, but research and code archaeology, bouncing ideas around, automated testing etc.
nly··on JetBrains reported a net financial loss first time in its tracked history
Perhaps they're concerned they'll lose market share to other IDEs that integrate AI better
nly··on JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025
LLMs at my work have access to Slack chat history, the Wiki, the complete git history, (AI generated) notes from every in person meeting team meeting, JIRA, all code reviews, and all production logs, as well as your personal email (when you run it yourself)

They can typically explain the history of something faster than any human

nly··on JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025
> If an organization is paying $2400/year per developer for tokens

My employer is spending $50,000/yr per employee on tokens, and they're not alone

nly··on Safe Optimistic Lock Coupling
This sort of approach relies on it being safe to read torn updates, which technically is UB in C++

As someone else mentions, it's also difficult for anybody to free memory (which for many purposes is actually fine)

nly··on <input type="password" maxlength="20"> prevents me from logging into Vanguard
My hot take is that almost nobody should be setting _any_ length or complexity requirements on passwords. Instead just enforce the need for at least some kind of second factor, even if it's SMS, TOTP or a magic link by email.

If your password hash database is compromised you're screwed anyway, because dictionary attacks scale horizontally, even with slow hashes designed for passwords 'LickMyLiver123!!' isn't necessarily going to hold up just because it's 16 characters.

The average vocabulary of a 20 year old native English speaker is perhaps ~50,000 words and I bet when you apply some basic grammar rules, and pragmatic search paths like relying on tonnes of people just smashing !'s on the end of their usual password when a minimum length is enforced, those hashes start to fall quickly.

nly··on Magic Switch: Share Apple Magic keyboard/track-pad/mouse between two Macs
Barrier was forked from Synergy many years ago

Deskflow is just the open source version of Synergy (sans branding) released by Symless.

The weird layout bugs are because of the way it all works behind the scenes. Non-control characters are sent as characters (not key codes) over the wire and then mapped back to local key codes on the receiving side.

nly··on Adding Floating-Point Decimals for Fun and Profit
I've worked at 3 separate trading firms, each making millions or billions in profit yearly, that just use doubles for prices and cash quantities internally.

Just before you send something on the wire you just make sure you serialize (part of which is rounding) to the appropriate tick size.

Generally speaking tick sizes (cents, valid trade price increments, whatever) are many orders of magnitude greater than any possible calculation error, so rounding to the nearest tick just works

nly··on How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs
I've lately been using LLMs to do a lot of testing and verification.

An LLM can go and pull files off NFS, and write and run verification scripts in less time than I can even think of a testing strategy or locate the files.

Sometimes they'll do it unprompted

For writing unit tests, which are often repetative and verbose, they are another godsend.

Overall they're freeing up a lot more time for nice things like thoughtful API design, refactoring, system architecture and design work etc.

For exploring massive codebases they are another godsend

nly··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
In the US. The majority of the world doesn't have government subsidies on 30 year mortgages
nly··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
There's a difference between can and must. A LOT of landlords don't maximally squeeze their tenants.

In fact, I'd argue the majority of landlords are shit investors sat on fairly low yields

nly··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
A land tax would effect every single landlord though. Every single landlord would put up rent.

The market will bare it because people have no choice. The choice is homelessness or paying the higher rent.

It's principally the same when mortgage rates rise. Landlords with mortgages put up rent. Only it would be worse, since not all landlords have mortgages.

nly··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
If I own £100K worth of land, and the government announces a 1% annual land tax, it's likely the value of my land will fall by about ~25-33% overnight.

If you think that's morally unobjectionable, fine, but I'd love to know what happens when all the landowners who own rural land that doesn't have a profitable development path attached to it can't pay their tax bills. Have the state seize it all?

Or do they just claim it's of negligible value and avoid the tax?

nly··on How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?
Am I missing something? Max boost went up by only 15% but the base frequency went up 38%

Better thermals maybe? Less throttling?

nly··on I don't like passkeys
I mean, they're basically just client SSL certs, but used for auth instead of transport

It's entirely possible for server side app to tie a client certificate to a user account and offer one click login and it has been since the 90s.

nly··on I don't like passkeys
I mean, if the session token basically never expires it's kind of fine?
Page 1 of 34Next →