Hacker News: ThePhysicist

New comment by ThePhysicist in "Drop, formerly Massdrop, ends most collaborations and rebrands under Corsair"

ThePhysicist — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:19:08 +0000

I mean even cheap keycaps won't wear out for many years for most people, so I don't think quality is a big factor. I got tons of keycaps from Ali Express which are just as good as the high quality stuff, in fact most of them are made on thre same machines...

So not sure if that was really the issue, people ordered keycaps because they liked the design, e.g. the Dasher MT3 set was super popular due to a similar one being used in the "Severance" show.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)"

ThePhysicist — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:46:26 +0000

Yeah I mean we have a mechanism that can bypass AI models for log lines where we are pretty sure no PII is in there (kind of like smart caching using fuzzy template matching to identify things that we have seen before many times, as logs tend to contain the same stuff over and over with tiny variations e.g. different timestamps), so we only need to pass the lines where we cannot be sure there's nothing to the AI for inspection. And we can of course parallelize. Currently we use a homebrew CFR model with lots of tweaks and it's quite good but an LLM would of course be much better still and capture a lof of cases that would evade the simpler model.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)"

ThePhysicist — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 13:05:56 +0000

This is really cool! I am trying to find a way to accelerate LLM inference for PII detection purposes, where speed is really necessary as we want to process millions of log lines per minute, I am wondering how fast we could get e.g. llama 3.1 to run on a conventional NVIDIA card? 10k tokens per second would be fantastic but even at 1k this would be very useful.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year"

ThePhysicist — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 07:42:01 +0000

People with such strong beliefs can be unpleasant to work with as well. Not saying you are, but there are often considerations beyond the immediate needs of developers that dictate tool choice in a company, and I find it not great if people complain about such minor inconveniences all the time (it's ok to discuss to some degree, but not in an overzealous way). Same goes for tech stacks, frameworks etc., I avoid hiring people that express extremely strong views (e.g. "JS is utter garbage") as they tend to be difficult to work with since they drag the team down with endless tech stack discussions and make others feel bad/inferior.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet"

ThePhysicist — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:21:50 +0000

"Every product on the Internet" - "US-only, sorry!" ... Guess it's actually not every product on the Internet, not even remotely. Is it even 1 % of all products on the Internet?

WhatsApp is getting ads using personal data from Instagram and Facebook

ThePhysicist — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 13:10:26 +0000

Article URL: https://noyb.eu/en/whatsapp-getting-ads-using-personal-data-instagram-and-facebook

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44289181

Points: 23

# Comments: 2

New comment by ThePhysicist in "HDMI on Gaming Consoles"

ThePhysicist — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 18:36:38 +0000

Sorry that this happened to you, if it's brand new or under guarantee I would just send it back. People always complain about Amazon but I buy most of my stuff there because they have always resolved such issues in my favor, even sending replacements or taking back hardware after the return period was expired.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "Pyrefly: A new type checker and IDE experience for Python"

ThePhysicist — Sat, 17 May 2025 14:15:04 +0000

Seems there are at least three Rust-based competitors for type checkers in Python now (Microsoft, Facebook, Astral), and of course there's still mypy.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)"

ThePhysicist — Fri, 16 May 2025 08:04:25 +0000

These companies aren't public utilities, no one would complain about a US bank not doing money exchange business with entities in the Ukraine or Belarus, why would that be different for US companies offering donations over the Internet? The fact is that all platforms that facilitate cross-border money transfers between two parties without clear services or good being exchanged are used for all kinds of money laundering, and governments try to contain that for good reasons. In the end they probably don't care much about the revenue they make in these countries as it's probably negligible. Again, their good right to do so, I don't see any issue with this at all.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "Domain Sniped on Launch Day"

ThePhysicist — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 07:41:07 +0000

Domain hoarding is really annoying. Recently I noticed superposition.de was available and wanted to register it for a side business, now a domain grabber got it and is reselling it for 27.000 USD... I can't fathom how this is a legal practice. I mean, I get that it is legal but the naming authorities could change their terms of service to disallow such trading. It's a small annoyance of course but I find it tiring how every little aspect that made the Internet great is getting monetized into oblivion.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "Hyperlight WASM: Fast, secure, and OS-free"

ThePhysicist — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 16:33:41 +0000

So is Hyperlight a competitor to things like Firecracker or does it serve a different niche?

New comment by ThePhysicist in "The Frontend Treadmill"

ThePhysicist — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 13:06:35 +0000

I've seen this so many times already, going from server-rendered web apps to client-side rendered web apps in React, then through multiple generations of state management and component management strategies in React, then back to server-side rendered stuff with Next.js, it is so tiring.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "Supply constraints do not explain house price, quantity growth across US cities"

ThePhysicist — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 14:31:10 +0000

Probably needs to be taken with a large grain of salt and might be exaggerated but I recently heard a claim (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKdtyDnGM-o) that the FHA program basically prevents a large number of foreclosures from happening as the government effectively keeps paying for loans where borrowers are already in default, and without the program many homes would be on the market again suppressing prices. If my understanding is correct the home owners get the interest payments made by the government tacked onto their mortgage so once they would go into default they would be faced with a home that is not worth enough to pay off the mortgage due to previously inflated market prices and all the added interest payments. Not sure if we have a new subprime crisis in the making here, it seems unhealthy in any case. But then again, never believe stuff influencers tell you on Youtube, so I take it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "Is Product Search Broken? Why Are We Still Stuck with Ads and Fake Reviews?"

ThePhysicist — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:20:40 +0000

I guess. I mean my own services get fake reviews without my involvement. I have a B2B software business for which I know all customers personally and still there is a product page on G2 reviews (which I didn't create) full of fake reviews, and I haven't been able to take them down (though I haven't tried too hard to be honest). I don't know what's the deal with that, I guess it's just about warming up fake reviewer accounts by writing reviews for products where it's unlikely that they will get flagged. They are all glowing reviews too, which I guess makes sense as writing a bad review would surely prompt a response from the affected company.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "Pressure grows to hold secret Apple data privacy hearing in public"

ThePhysicist — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 13:49:53 +0000

Man, this is really the worst case we've been fearing in Germany as well, i.e. an overzealous government that wants access to the master decryption keys of any app using end-to-end encryption so they can backdoor them anytime they like. I really hope they have enough common sense left to reverse their course, and I have to say kudos to Apple for taking this fight.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "Why Quantum Engineering Is Emerging as a Distinct Industrial Sector"

ThePhysicist — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:43:43 +0000

https://theses.hal.science/file/index/docid/857654/filename/...

New comment by ThePhysicist in "Why Quantum Engineering Is Emerging as a Distinct Industrial Sector"

ThePhysicist — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 16:35:17 +0000

I did my PhD in that area, building the first working superconducting quantum processor (working in the sense of showing quantum speed up, although practically useless of course). That was one of the most fun things I did my entire life, I basically could work on all of the aspects of the computer from the cryostat, the microwave setup, control electronics, PCB manufacturing, chip design and fabrication, soldering, measurement software (written in Python and C++) to doing quantum theory calculations and analysing and visualising data. Nothing I did in my software career ever came close to that level of satisfaction (though there was also a ton of frustration involved).

So yeah I would be happy to work in that area again, though today there aren't that many well paying jobs there yet so I would take a big pay cut if doing that work, but if I wouldn't need to worry about money I would definitely work in that area again.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "The cost of Go's panic and recover"

ThePhysicist — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 09:37:22 +0000

Do you use recover() a lot? I have never used it much, I guess it is important in some cases but I don't think it's used that much in practice, or is it?

New comment by ThePhysicist in "We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand"

ThePhysicist — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 08:52:03 +0000

Fiber has been laid out in many areas already, it won't be long until most households are upgraded. But to be honest it's not as much of an issue as people make it out, in most areas you can get 250 Mbit downstream and 50 Mbit upstream through DSL, that is plenty for most home use cases, there's just not enough demand for higher speeds. Don't tell me people are regularly maxing out their 1 Gbps lines. In most rural places the fiber linkup stalls not because there's no will to do it but because not enough households vote to get it, providers typically need a quorum of 10-20 % and they don't get it because most people just don't need or want faster Internet (or let's say they are not willing to pay 50-100 € per month for it). Telekom and other companies have fiber running in most of the smaller cities already (otherwise they couldn't offer 250 Mbit DSL) it was just the last mile that was missing and that is mostly being fixed now, but again most households don't even see the need to upgrade. That might change once services requiring super high bandwidth become popular (but what might those be), even 4k streaming is possible on 25 Mbit already and with 100 Mbit you can stream 8k content...

And yeah, Romania might have better Internet in some places with high population density but certainly not in the more rural areas, there was a big EU project (RO-NET) to help them get that up and running in more places in the last 5 years. In Germany you can get fiber connection in most cities as well.

Don't get me wrong I love faster Internet myself but don't pretend like that is a chief reason why Germany can't have IT startups, we have some of the best connectivity and peering in Europe with DE-CIX and the hub in Frankfurt.

New comment by ThePhysicist in "Nuclear fusion: WEST beats the world record for plasma duration"

ThePhysicist — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 22:14:26 +0000

Lots of leet scientists there, in all seriousness. CEA is my alma mater, though I worked on quantum computing, not fusion.