Hacker News: Mahn

Is GitHub Down?

Mahn — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 19:42:22 +0000

Seeing unicorns and 500 errors right now

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44303052

Points: 40

# Comments: 23

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence (2015)

Mahn — Sun, 11 May 2025 16:54:42 +0000

Article URL: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43955075

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Mahn in "Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools"

Mahn — Wed, 07 May 2025 14:41:00 +0000

At its core what it really reflects is that the technology is a blackbox that wasn't "programmed" but rather "emerged". In this context, this is the best we can do to fine tune behavior without retraining it.

New comment by Mahn in "Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools"

Mahn — Wed, 07 May 2025 14:34:52 +0000

At this point you have to start entertaining the question of what is the difference between general intelligence and a "sufficiently complicated" next token prediction algorithm.

New comment by Mahn in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

Mahn — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 21:40:18 +0000

European here, I do not think that electing Trump makes the US a laughing stock; there were legitimate reasons to disagree with the Biden administration, and, given that Kamala was essentially a continuation of Biden's policies, there was no other real alternative.

New comment by Mahn in "Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?"

Mahn — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 18:40:41 +0000

Key quote from the article:

> Many have argued that the lack of large-scale applications for the past ten years proves that crypto is useless. I have always argued against this: pretty much every crypto application that is not financial speculation depends on low fees - and so while we have high fees, we should not be surprised that we mainly see financial speculation!

> Now that we have blobs, this key constraint that has been holding us back all this time is starting to melt away. Fees are finally much lower; my statement from seven years ago that the internet of money should not cost more than five cents per transaction is finally coming true.

---

All of this depends on so called "Layer 2s", which adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user. I'm skeptical that this is best way to solve the scalability issues that plague cryptocurrency, but I will say that this looks to me like it has a much better shot of succeeding that anything Bitcoin has ever attempted to do on this front.

New comment by Mahn in "Zenbleed"

Mahn — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 15:13:05 +0000

I would think that Cloudflare is reputable enough that they would not state that claim without at least having some knowledge about it.

Ask HN: Is it just me or does Linode lately go down more frequently than usual?

Mahn — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 23:24:26 +0000

I'm worried that we are starting to see the effect of the Akamai takeover. Linode has always been very dependable for us in the past, but this is the third time in the past 6 months that our startup experiences a +30 minute downtime all across the board on all our nodes. This used to be a very rare occurrence in the nearly ten years that we've been with them, but not so anymore apparently.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32601336

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

Ask HN: Is Reddit Becoming Dumber?

Mahn — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 21:29:30 +0000

I realize that asking this probably makes me sound like an asshole, but bear with me for a second. When I joined Reddit, circa 2012, it had its shared of misinformed, poorly researched comments/posts like every other internet community, but as long as you stuck to niche subreddits it was mostly downvoted and contained.

As the years pass and I pick up new niche interests, my instinct is to turn to Reddit to find like minded individuals, but more and more increasingly I find that misinformed and poorly researched content is becoming the default and taking over the more quality content.

Is this everyone else's experience with Reddit lately as well or I'm just becoming more of an asshole as I age? Genuinely curious what others think.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30446727

Points: 50

# Comments: 57

New comment by Mahn in "Ask HN: Is Google Search Dying?"

Mahn — Wed, 05 May 2021 17:54:51 +0000

That's funny, I've been doing this (appending searches with "reddit") for a while, but I thought it was just a random thing I did, not the universal experience of so many people.

It's probably not so much search that is dying but non-profit content on the internet. Not a whole lot that search engines can do about that, unless they become search "walled gardens" ala Apple.

New comment by Mahn in "Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S."

Mahn — Sun, 08 Nov 2020 11:52:38 +0000

And therein lies the problem, algorithms can't tell if you click and spend time with something because you enjoy it, or because it enraged you.

New comment by Mahn in "U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord"

Mahn — Wed, 04 Nov 2020 13:55:26 +0000

More importantly, if you want China, India and Africa to pollute less, the only way to do so is leading by example and figuring out a way to achieve cost-effective, environmental-friendly path for economic growth for yourself. If it works, and it's better, they'll copy it.

New comment by Mahn in "U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord"

Mahn — Wed, 04 Nov 2020 13:40:20 +0000

"We want" here is a figure of speech. The world doesn't actually care if you don't want other people to live as comfortably as you, because it's gonna happen either way, no country in the world is going to stop pursuing a better quality of life. The real question here is "do we want to figure this out, or do we look the other way".

There are 4,378 CHIP-8 emulators on GitHub

Mahn — Sun, 24 May 2020 01:47:16 +0000

Article URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=chip8+inurl%3Agithub&oq=chip8+inurl%3Agithub

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23288384

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by Mahn in "1% rule"

Mahn — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 03:09:09 +0000

Tangential, but it's strange to me the sort of culture that Quora has cultivated over the years. It seems to tolerate and even encourage low quality content and contributors to the point that ignorance, misinformation and poorly researched opinionated answers thrive on a regular basis. That's not to say there aren't good contributors and content, but browse any one random topic today and you'll be forgiven for thinking you are on Yahoo Answers. Just no filter at all, extremely poor questions, offtopic comments posted as answers, people with no understanding of the subject shamelessly pretending to know what they are talking about, etc etc.

It's just all around incredibly unpleasant. I loved Quora in its early years when it was invitation only, but I don't ever want to have anything to do with it again.

The Surprising Endurance of the EReader

Mahn — Sun, 01 Dec 2019 18:57:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.kobo.com/blog/about-ereaders-ebooks

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21677150

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by Mahn in "Book Review: The Body Keeps the Score"

Mahn — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 19:15:14 +0000

According to Dr. Sapolsky (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Behave), there's ample evidence of enlarged, hyperactive amygdalas in chronically stressed individuals, both on artificially stressed lab rats and when looking at differences in individual human beings.

New comment by Mahn in "We do not use foreign keys (2016)"

Mahn — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 05:37:20 +0000

This thread makes it sound like it's impossible to make a medium scale application work without FKs constrains. I work on a commercial application that depends on relational relationships without FKs and the number of data corruption cases that we run into on regular basis is zero. Data integrity is handled at the application side, unexpected crashes are accounted for by heavy use of transactions, and everything works just fine.

To be clear, I'm not advocating against the use of foreign keys. But not using them is perfectly doable and not at all what this thread would have you believe.

New comment by Mahn in "We do not use foreign keys (2016)"

Mahn — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 05:19:41 +0000

There are ways to prevent invalid states in a database without foreign keys, for example enforcing "all or nothing" operations via transactions.

New comment by Mahn in "Letter from Tim Cook to Apple Investors"

Mahn — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 01:01:49 +0000

And it will be their undoing, since now that people are not upgrading their iPhones continued growth will depend on how well they can transition to become a services company, which, for the most part, you can only do phoning home the way Google and Facebook do. The only reason Apple touts privacy today is because they suck at services, and they figured they might as well sell it as a feature. But that won't last if Apple is to grow.