Hacker News: Skunkleton

New comment by Skunkleton in "Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message"

Skunkleton — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:54:07 +0000

The title is misleading and not in the article. This change is for business/enterprise accounts. Also, these are still credit based. The change is that credits now operate on tokens like the API rather than on messages as they used to.

New comment by Skunkleton in "What if AI doesn't need more RAM but better math?"

Skunkleton — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:02:17 +0000

The TurboQuant paper is from April 2025. I’m sure the major labs knew about it on, or even before, the day it published. Any impact it had would have been a year ago. Yet I keep seeing these posts and discuss completely ignoring this.

Can we please start talking about this in that context? We already know what TurboQuant will do to DRAM demand. We already know what it will do to context windows. There is no need to speculate. There is no need to panic sell stocks.

New comment by Skunkleton in "US Job Market Visualizer"

Skunkleton — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:24:25 +0000

It could also be that masters degrees concentrate in fields with lower compensation. Teachers are in high demand, but yet they still tend to have something beyond an undergrad.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Layoffs at Block"

Skunkleton — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:22:29 +0000

I didn't add a why. Here is why.

Most of the staff doesn't have the visibility into the business to understand what may or may not make money. You can have a great idea, even on that could be a successful product, but it could still be a bad fit for the business.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Layoffs at Block"

Skunkleton — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:49:38 +0000

This depends on your goals. If your goal is to drive efficiency into your processes, drive down tech debt, or fix pain points for customers of your existing products, sure. Most people at a your company with have thoughts, and lots of them will have good ideas.

If your goal is to pivot the company into new verticals, or to develop an entirely new product, then "asking staff for ideas" isn't a likely way to succeed.

New comment by Skunkleton in "747s and coding agents"

Skunkleton — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:35:12 +0000

I don't think it's odd. Sacrificing deep understanding, and delegating that responsibility to others is risky. In more concrete terms, if your livelihood depends on application development, you have concrete dependencies on platforms, frameworks, compilers, operating systems, and other abstractions that without which you might not be able to perform your job.

Fewer abstractions, deeper understanding, fewer dependencies on others. These concepts show up over and over and not just in software. It's about safety.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Layoffs at Block"

Skunkleton — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 03:56:32 +0000

My experience is that "asking staff for ideas" does not lead to successful products. Sometimes, sure, but in general it does not.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Origin of the rule that swap size should be 2x of the physical memory"

Skunkleton — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:47:46 +0000

It's not just fork. The operating system overcommits memory all over the place. For example, when you map memory, that can/will succeed without actually mapping physical pages. Even "available" memory is put to some use and freed in an asynchronous way behind the scene, a process that is not always successful.

Honestly, I think overcommit is a good thing. If you want to give a process an isolated address space, then you have to allow that process to lay out memory as it sees fit, without having to worry too much about what else happens to be on the system. If you immediately "charge" the process for this, you will end up nit-picking every process on the system, even though with overcommit you would have been fine.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition"

Skunkleton — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:36:18 +0000

If you make structural changes to your filesystem without a journal, and you fail mid way, there is a 100% chance your filesystem is not in a known state, and a very good chance it is in a non-self-consistent state that will lead to some interesting surprises down the line.

New comment by Skunkleton in "CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun"

Skunkleton — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:20:43 +0000

Yes, that is really all it is.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Linux kernel security work"

Skunkleton — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 23:25:59 +0000

In the context of the kernel, it’s hard to say when that’s true. It’s very easy to fix some bug that resulted in a kernel crash without considering that it could possibly be part of some complex exploit chain. Basically any bug could be considered a security bug.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Lessons from the PG&E outage"

Skunkleton — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 23:02:50 +0000

> The spontaneous explosions become so common and normalized that just about everyone knows someone who got caught up in one, a dead friend of a friend, at least

That’s an extraordinary claim.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Vm.overcommit_memory=2 is the right setting for servers"

Skunkleton — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 05:47:59 +0000

Over commit is a design choice, and it is a design choice that is pretty core to Linux. Basic stuff like fork(), for example, gets wasteful when you don't over commit. Less obvious stuff like buffer caches also get less effective. There are certainly places where you would rather fail at allocation time, but that isn't everywhere and it doesn't belong as a default.

New comment by Skunkleton in "73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering"

Skunkleton — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:29:25 +0000

The question that isn't answered completely in the article is how useful are the pipelines for these startups? The article certainly implies that for at least some of these startups there very little value add in the wrapper.

New comment by Skunkleton in "AMD GPUs Go Brrr"

Skunkleton — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 07:38:35 +0000

This meme is tired. Let it rest boss.

New comment by Skunkleton in "How apps are using Liquid Glass"

Skunkleton — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 02:48:53 +0000

Maybe I’m grumpy, but the old designs all look better and more functional to me.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Why aren't smart people happier?"

Skunkleton — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 07:41:18 +0000

If you find yourself getting in trouble, maybe you are solving the wrong problems?

New comment by Skunkleton in "ChatGPT Atlas"

Skunkleton — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 18:38:07 +0000

A browser using your keychain seems like the least questionable bit, if anything.

New comment by Skunkleton in "Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool"

Skunkleton — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 22:51:33 +0000

No case is great. I’ve taken to slapping a screen protector on my phone with no case. Keeps me from feeling bad about setting it face down.

New comment by Skunkleton in "What would you do with 52 hours a week of discretionary time? (2023)"

Skunkleton — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 05:53:32 +0000

I'm not convinced I have enough energy to do 16 hours a day of stuff that I am proud of.