Hacker News: MPSimmons

New comment by MPSimmons in "Dear people who work at the airport"

MPSimmons — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:20:33 +0000

Look, our culture does not reward excellence, so those people are doing the least possible to not get fired. That's kind of the whole American thing in general at this point. Nobody is doing great outside of technology workers, and even then, only some of them. You're not going to have a great experience in general from people here. There are always outliers, but those are individuals who have found some internal motivation to go above and beyond, and it's not a systemic thing.

New comment by MPSimmons in "Breaking the WAL"

MPSimmons — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:11:45 +0000

How difficult would it have been to isolate that problem if you didn't already know the SQLite subsystem it was in? This feels, to someone relatively ignorant of the SQLite / Tailscale / Antithesis architectures as a "hindsight is 20/20" kind of thing, but I'm open to learning more.

New comment by MPSimmons in "The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life"

MPSimmons — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:53:07 +0000

It was coined by Apple engineers who would agree to whatever Steve wanted them to do while Steve was at their desk, and then when he left they'd be distraught over what they'd agreed to.

https://www.folklore.org/Reality_Distortion_Field.html

New comment by MPSimmons in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

MPSimmons — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:36:24 +0000

My favorite (probably apocryphal) Microsoft brain teaser question I've heard is, "If you had to move Mt Fuji, how would you do it?"

I've never interviewed there, or been asked that question, but I think it would be a lot of fun to answer.

New comment by MPSimmons in "Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting"

MPSimmons — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:50:05 +0000

I was literally thinking this reminds me of Google+ and Buzz.

New comment by MPSimmons in "Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years"

MPSimmons — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 02:45:28 +0000

I'll second this. I'm continually impressed with the breadth of coverage from Asianometry. Great channel.

New comment by MPSimmons in "The Kimi K3 Moment"

MPSimmons — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:00:37 +0000

oh wow, an entire seedy underbelly I was unaware of. Thanks, great reply. Appreciated!

New comment by MPSimmons in "The Kimi K3 Moment"

MPSimmons — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 10:20:51 +0000

>through proxies and heavily discounted token resellers

Could you explain a little more about how this works? Are you saying that the Chinese run or have backdoored something like OpenRouter?

New comment by MPSimmons in "PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats"

MPSimmons — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 03:00:14 +0000

Unless you're executing these commands in a loop over a large number of items, or the item itself is gargantuan, it's almost always harmless.

Personally, when I'm exploring, I build a command line iteratively. Cat the file to see the content, pipe to grep to get the lines I want, sed/awk/cut/etc to finagle from there.

New comment by MPSimmons in "$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol"

MPSimmons — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:56:21 +0000

Yeah, a $100 AI music video is materially worse than not having a music video.

New comment by MPSimmons in "Decoy Font"

MPSimmons — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:55:11 +0000

Also goes the other way, where you use the decoy to give instructions to the AI...

New comment by MPSimmons in "The real prices of frontier models"

MPSimmons — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 23:05:11 +0000

It would be nice if inference could somehow perform token generation using "contractions" of "fluffy" tokens, where combining those tokens doesn't decrease nuance but provides additional efficiency. That may already be happening - I haven't looked at the most modern methods of inference in a long long time.

New comment by MPSimmons in "The real prices of frontier models"

MPSimmons — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 23:02:16 +0000

I don't know if it's fair to say that a tokenizer is being less efficient if it generates more tokens per text. I think it's more fair to say the tokenizer is more nuanced. The question is whether the additional nuance permits better model output, which could justify the additional token cost in inference.

New comment by MPSimmons in "Linux on the Atari Jaguar"

MPSimmons — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:08:14 +0000

Oh yeah, well that may be. Once I got X working in Slack, I did boot into that, but then again, back then I didn't know how to recompile my kernel and the machine did this interesting loop where it would try a few different drivers until it got to the one that worked with my matsushita CD drive.

New comment by MPSimmons in "Linux on the Atari Jaguar"

MPSimmons — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:27:31 +0000

Honestly not that far off from my 486 DX2/66 back in the day

New comment by MPSimmons in "I ported Kubernetes to the browser"

MPSimmons — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:55:07 +0000

What are you using to replace etcd here? Where is state stored?

New comment by MPSimmons in "What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis"

MPSimmons — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 01:34:57 +0000

It doesn't take away joy. It does cause me to be slapped in the face with the "full" feeling while I am in the middle of eating, which is like 15 minutes earlier than I used to get it. I don't overeat anymore because I would be literally miserable if I did. It would be like force-feeding myself. But before I get that full feeling, food is excellent.

New comment by MPSimmons in "What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis"

MPSimmons — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 01:33:07 +0000

Oh hi, I'm a heart attack survivor who had GLP-1 prescribed by my cardiologist for its heart-protecting benefits. I told my cardiologist that I wasn't losing weight as fast as I thought I would, and he said, quote, "I don't care about you losing weight. That's not why I prescribed you this."

So I'm not sure your first sentence is universally accurate.

New comment by MPSimmons in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

MPSimmons — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:14:16 +0000

People automate things they don't value.

New comment by MPSimmons in "Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark"

MPSimmons — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:53:37 +0000

>written in the spirit of sharing with humans.

Not humans who are using AI tools?