Hacker News Reader

twoodfinon Why I wrote the BEAM book (2025)

My recollection is that M:N ("green") threads were pulled out because in the absence of a runtime that can guarantee a thread is never blocked, you essentially have to reintroduce all the complexity of an OS scheduler without the benefits of OS-wide context.

"Project Loom" spent much of its time (AFAICT) figuring out how to make every Java system-level API non-blocking without breaking backward compatibility. The only one they didn't get to for the initial release was Java's "interesting" built-in `synchronized` object monitor construct.

bcantrill has strong opinions on M:N and have always been curious what he thinks about Loom.

twoodfinon Fossil CO2 emissions decrease in 2026

Sure, if you’re willing to trample on civil rights & use extraordinary social pressure to deride previously mundane activities as equivalent to murder!

twoodfinon Silicon Valley Promises AI Will Cure Disease. Drugmaker CEOs Aren't Buying It

Probably in fantasy land here, but wondering if there’s a golden path wherein AI can usefully accelerate the development of quantum computers, which themselves give AI the fast feedback loop it needs to rapidly experiment in chemical and biological domains.

twoodfinon Agent memory needs its OpenTelemetry moment

Agree about the mechanics.

It’s a bad thing if you valued the thoughtful, insightful, well-structured technical writing that used to be behind many highly-upvoted hn links.

twoodfinon Agent memory needs its OpenTelemetry moment

Multiple barely coherent LLM-authored technical rambles with catchy titles have been hitting the hn front page daily for the better part of a year.

twoodfinon Making any integer with four 2s (2025)

Given the problems ITA solved, thinking about the question that way makes perfect sense.

twoodfinon Yes, You Can Pass a Nuclear Missile Driving on Interstate 80 Through Wyoming

Sure, but the legal techniques of subterfuge developed under those treaties were designed to be effective against satellite and other intelligence in combination with treaty inspections. That those inspections have at least temporarily stopped is no reason to stop playing three-card monte with the missiles. These are big missiles, on which decades of information was collected by Russia, treaty-directed and otherwise.

twoodfinon Yes, You Can Pass a Nuclear Missile Driving on Interstate 80 Through Wyoming

I may be misremembering this, but the desire to move missiles around may be downstream of the START and New START arms limitation treaties.

These give the US and Russian governments what are supposed to be adequate inspection regimes to count the number of active missiles, but of course make no requirement on the signatories to make it easy to locate all the missiles at any given moment.

So there’s a strong strategic incentive to shuffle them around between treaty-mandated inspections.

twoodfinon The Stacks Project, Formalized in Lean

“… built in from the start” is also hackneyed, and doesn’t fit the dictionary metaphor.

twoodfinon Goodbye from Salon

There’s still a supply of opinion & analysis writing that people will pay for, but Salon and similar online publications got disintermediated for it by Substack.

twoodfinon GPT-6 Astra covertly underperforms on safety research

Right: The humans are training the models on much more than the particulars of the tasks being trained.

twoodfinon GPT-6 Astra covertly underperforms on safety research

One potential explanation is that covert underperformance may have been incentivized during RL grading. We identified a grader that preferred covert underperformance to either explicit refusal or full compliance on our evaluation. It’s not clear whether this RL grader is the root cause of the safety underperformance behavior.

Whether a “misaligned” grader is the root cause or not, that it’s considered a plausible theory to explain serious deceptive behavior is worrisome.

Humans naturally expose all sorts of cognitive biases and character flaws when grading others’ or their own work. If major questions of alignment can be influenced by those subtle, human quirks magnified across the entire RLHF process, …

twoodfinon BYD sold more EVs last month than the US did all quarter

The iPhone analogy is nonsensical. Apple produces iPhones at immense profit.

BYD’s margins are sub-4%.

twoodfinon Moving our warehouse off DuckDB

I have lost count of the number of idiotic takes like that from M2s or M3s who have no idea how things work but instead focus on keywords they can latch onto that seems to be in the intersection of all issues.

This phenomenon is at the root of the hardest organizational & architectural challenges I’ve been involved in.

It really needs a name so it can be tagged as a leadership anti-pattern.

Good leaders find real connections to explore & strengthen.

Bad leaders reach conclusions at the fuzzy pattern matching stage.

twoodfinon US boy names that became girl names and vice versa

These are presumably from Social Security registrations, so reflecting official given names.

Another interesting analysis would be the movement back and forth between full names and their associated common diminutives.

twoodfinon The Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2B into the Midterms

The authors of the First Amendment were not ignorant of the “volume” afforded by expensive printing presses.

twoodfinon Nurses Sound Alarm as 'Uber for Nursing' Apps Push to Deregulate Healthcare

Doctors and nurses in the US are in both the average and the median earning significantly more than their counterparts in Canada, the UK, France, Germany…

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...

twoodfinon Show HN: To Honor Sir Patrick Stewart, Enjoy the TNG Episode Guessing Game

Up the Long Ladder

twoodfinon Show HN: To Honor Sir Patrick Stewart, Enjoy the TNG Episode Guessing Game

173467321476Charlie32789777643Tango732Victor73117888732476789764376Lock.

twoodfinon DoorDash to acquire Instacart

If it’s bad for restaurants and consumers, the restaurants can just stop partnering with these delivery services.

If they were actually “bad” for consumers as reflected in their revealed preferences, the restaurants shouldn’t lose any business.

Personally, I don’t get the economic appeal for most restaurants and foods, but obviously a lot of consumers disagree.

twoodfinon MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch

More: Apple makes long-term investments and big technology bets.

They placed a large bet for the MacBook on Intel’s roadmap at exactly the wrong time, and it screwed up multiple product planning and execution generations as a result.

Apple has finely tuned their organization to be great at long-term plans. That has come at the cost of being able to adjust “quickly” when those plans end up being flawed. The fiasco with the butterfly keyboard is maybe the best example.

twoodfinon MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch

By that time they had clearly made the decision to invest in their own CPUs and platform architecture.

twoodfinon Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale

I reject that we should craft tax policy on the idea that young people with significant human capital and low current wealth are “poor”!

twoodfinon Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale

I would flatly reject the idea that a just-graduated neurologist with a negative net worth due to loans is “poor”.

Wealth being the integration of gains - consumption over time makes it a poor metric for looking at society as a whole.

Something like 50% of Americans will be millionaires at some point in their lives—upper quintile per this chart, typically later in their earnings years. Almost all of them started “poor” as young adults, per this chart’s definition.

twoodfinon Python's experimental JIT to be removed

I meant the trend of making the C interop more opaque.

twoodfinon Python's experimental JIT to be removed

Are there any PEPs that describe this work?

twoodfinon Mark Zuckerberg Pushed Meta to Shield Him from California's Proposed Wealth Tax

Somebody could just create an index fund like that.

I suspect they don’t because such a fund would have missed out on a ton of growth captured by the less “picky” indexes of the last quarter century.

twoodfinon Mark Zuckerberg Threatened to Leave California. Meta's Board Cut Him a Deal

A national wealth tax would almost certainly require a Constitutional amendment to survive today’s SCOTUS.

That’s about as DOA as a policy proposal gets.

twoodfinon OpenAI models are coming to Google Cloud

Frontier AI development via agents uses plenty of CPU compute. Maybe in a lopsided way during development as opposed to training?

twoodfinon British Airways: Filming Crew W Meta Glasses Could Get Your Tickets Cancelled

I fly BA across the Atlantic every few months, and today for the first time the safety briefing included a specific callout of respecting privacy while filming aboard.