Hacker News: alexchamberlain

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers"

alexchamberlain — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:32:42 +0000

> Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized... We recently received US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity status.

If this is successful in the first iteration, I'd love to see a UK and EU based charities too. That would allow european donors to support on a gross pay basis, and may simplify grants to european nationals too. (I'm sure similar things apply in other jurisdictions too.)

New comment by alexchamberlain in "We installed a single turnstile to feel secure"

alexchamberlain — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:27:42 +0000

I'm not going to comment on the security implications of either situation, but is there a companion piece by the facilities team complaining about the amount of paperwork required to install turnstiles only for a software engineer to come along and lock them out of Jira on a whim?

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Show HN: Mines.fyi – all the mines in the US in a leaflet visualization"

alexchamberlain — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 21:44:57 +0000

There are 3 mines on Manhattan; is that correct?

New comment by alexchamberlain in "MessageFormat: Unicode standard for localizable message strings"

alexchamberlain — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 13:13:00 +0000

Apologies if this is obvious and I missed it. Does this define a way to store the strings in various languages?

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Kitchen optimizations"

alexchamberlain — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:39:53 +0000

You can have 240V outlets too... at least, a lot of woodworkers seem to install them in their garages. Are they legal in the kitchen?

New comment by alexchamberlain in "CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally"

alexchamberlain — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:26:23 +0000

Would this be effective at smaller volumes? Could it get down to say the size of a washing machine for use at home?

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Karpathy on DeepSeek-OCR paper: Are pixels better inputs to LLMs than text?"

alexchamberlain — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 16:22:05 +0000

Thanks, that's really interesting. Do they correct for spelling mistakes or internationalised spellings? For example, does `colour` and `color` end up in the same token stream?

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Karpathy on DeepSeek-OCR paper: Are pixels better inputs to LLMs than text?"

alexchamberlain — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 06:26:49 +0000

I'm probably one of the least educated software engineers on LLMs, so apologies if this is a very naive question. Has anyone done any research into just using words as the tokens rather than (if I understand it correctly) 2-3 characters? I understand there would be limitations with this approach, but maybe the models would be smaller overall?

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Show HN: SQLite Online – 11 years of solo development, 11K daily users"

alexchamberlain — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 19:14:44 +0000

My point was more about the original comment is fine from the perspective of an American, but for the rest of the world, it doesn’t really matter if it is USD or rubles - it’s still a foreign transaction. I appreciate that for a large percentage of the world, consumers can probably do an approximation of the USD conversion in their head, and not a rubles one, and therefore, USD may be more friendly. That being said, the sales page has already got the approximation in USD anyway, which would be enough for me.

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Show HN: SQLite Online – 11 years of solo development, 11K daily users"

alexchamberlain — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:48:53 +0000

> charging in rubles is most probably confusing, and that a flat $10 usd/month would be easier

As a Brit, I'd rather GBP...

Isn't this comment a form of US defaultism?

New comment by alexchamberlain in "EU age verification app not planning desktop support"

alexchamberlain — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 19:33:19 +0000

But what if my battery runs out?

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system"

alexchamberlain — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 15:33:29 +0000

The developers of git will continue to be motivated to contribute to it. (This isn’t specific to Rust, but rather the technical choices of OSS probably aren’t generally putting the user at the top of the priority list.)

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose"

alexchamberlain — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 19:28:11 +0000

This is the problem though, right? It’s not one league table of environmental goodness - there are tradeoffs that as an educated consumer are impose to navigate.

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose"

alexchamberlain — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 05:53:14 +0000

I think banning plastic completely in packaging is a much harder ask, as whether it is needed is rather nuanced (if I understand it correctly). For example, it's perfectly possible to deliver cucumbers to an end customer without them being shrinkwrapped. However, to deliver enough cucumbers to enough customers for a supermarket scale, I understand from several documentaries that plastic is still required in that case. (For those outside the UK, plastic covered cucumber is the social barometer for plastic packaging.) Banning plastic bags was easy and simple, and our laws don't tend to deal with nuance very well...

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose"

alexchamberlain — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 05:31:28 +0000

The UK banned single use plastic bags at major supermarkets. We all moaned about it for a few minutes, forgot our reusable bags a couple of times and then got on with it. Even the small plastic bags you put fruit or pastries in are now gone in a few super markets - initially, they replaced them with transparent paper-based windowed bags, but then I think people realised you really don't need to see inside the bag, and brown paper bags are back.

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up"

alexchamberlain — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 04:28:51 +0000

> Setting up a scaffolding for a new website? LLMs are amazing at it.

Weren't the code generators before this even better though? They generated consistent results and were dead quick at doing it.

New comment by alexchamberlain in "LandChad, a site dedicated to turning internet peasants into Internet Landlords"

alexchamberlain — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 15:58:43 +0000

This is a really unhelpful attitude. There are periods of life where buying doesn't make sense and it's financially impossible - landlords provide people with a home at these times. I'm not saying there aren't bad landlords - there are - but being a landlord isn't inherently bad; they are providing an essential service for society.

New comment by alexchamberlain in "LandChad, a site dedicated to turning internet peasants into Internet Landlords"

alexchamberlain — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 05:43:20 +0000

Why aren’t landlords a good thing? Is it unreasonable for people to provide a service to people seeking it?

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context"

alexchamberlain — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 16:43:44 +0000

I'm not sure how, and maybe some of the coding agents are doing this, but we need to teach the AI to use abstractions, rather than the whole code base for context. We as humans don't hold the whole codebase in our hear, and we shouldn't expect the AI to either.

New comment by alexchamberlain in "Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist"

alexchamberlain — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 13:58:38 +0000

There is a category called "Annie Maunder Open Category", which allows for creative use of generative AI, as long as it is declared, otherwise it is banned. You have to take that slightly with a pinch of salt though, as many of the images don't represent what could be seen with the naked eye. It could be as simple as a wide spectrum sensor (which I don't think anyone could claim is AI) through to alignment of many 100s of images (for which the algorithms in use may have been considered AI a decade or 2 ago).