Hacker News: amgreg

New comment by amgreg in "How to get your company AI pilled"

amgreg — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:44:24 +0000

Is this real?

How to get your company AI pilled

amgreg — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:44:24 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/geoffintech/status/2042002590758572377

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47756941

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

I Went to China to See Their Progress on A.I. We Can't Beat Them

amgreg — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:15:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/opinion/china-ai-america-chipmakers.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47756634

Points: 11

# Comments: 1

New comment by amgreg in "XML is a cheap DSL"

amgreg — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:05:04 +0000

Please please do this

New comment by amgreg in "Apple and Amazon will miss AI like Intel missed mobile"

amgreg — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 14:03:24 +0000

The author makes no effort to explain why AI :isn’t: a commodity as Apple and Amazon says. I was looking forward to that. I think the article is weak for not defending its premise. Everything else is fluff.

New comment by amgreg in "ClojureScript 1.12.42"

amgreg — Sat, 17 May 2025 18:13:35 +0000

Yeah nowadays I think non-ClojureScript people use it mostly for legacy reasons or the aggressive minification. Back in the day, aside from the pre-ES5 conveniences I mentioned surrounding inheritance and module bundling, it was also a way for developers to do some basic type enforcement (via JSDoc annotations that the Compiler would check). TypeScript essentially rendered that obsolete.

See: https://effectivetypescript.com/2023/09/27/closure-compiler/

New comment by amgreg in "ClojureScript 1.12.42"

amgreg — Fri, 16 May 2025 22:42:55 +0000

Yes and yes; in the past, prior to ECMAScript providing first-class inheritance, module ex/imports etc, the Library supplied methods to achieve these in development, and the Compiler would identify these cases and perform the appropriate prototype chaining, bundling, etc. See, eg, goog.provide

For the most part, I would guess people still use the Closure Compiler because of its aggressive minification or for legacy reasons. I think both are probably true for ClojureScript, as well as the fact that the Compiler is Java-based so it has a Java API that (I am guessing here) made it easier to bootstrap on top of the JVM Clojure tooling / prior art.

New comment by amgreg in "ClojureScript 1.12.42"

amgreg — Fri, 16 May 2025 22:26:21 +0000

I think you are conflating the Closure Library with the Closure Compiler. They are related but not identical. The Compiler, I think, is what makes it difficult to use externs; its “advanced optimizations” can and often does break libraries that weren’t written with the Compiler’s quirks in mind. But advanced optimizations is an option; if you don’t need aggressive minification, function body inlining, etc. you can opt out.

Shadow CLJS has made working with external libraries quite easy and IIRC it lets you set the compilation options for your libraries declaratively.

New comment by amgreg in "Microsoft Fails to Support MS SQL Server for Django"

amgreg — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 17:05:18 +0000

Why would one choose MS SQL nowadays? I am curious, why did the author choose it?

New comment by amgreg in "Ask HN: Where are the good Markdown to PDF tools (that meet these requirements)?"

amgreg — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 18:22:51 +0000

If you’re on a Mac or iOS you could try creating a Shortcut where you input Markdown, convert to rich text, then output as a PDF. I use Shortcuts regularly. It’s pretty easy to set up. I haven’t tried it on something as larger as 500 pages, though. YMMV

New comment by amgreg in "Ask HN: Confused about how DeepSeek hurts Nvidia"

amgreg — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 05:19:23 +0000

> NVIDIA is the only viable seller of shovels for this gold rush for everyone but Google and Anthropic.

Why do you except Google and Anthropic?

New comment by amgreg in "Why Twitter is such a big deal (2009)"

amgreg — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 18:58:17 +0000

I think the OP is posting this in the context of the other front-page discussion of the Bluesky protocol. I think in this context it is interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42752703

New comment by amgreg in "Could you pass this 8th grade test from 1912?"

amgreg — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 03:52:35 +0000

“Decline I” is an instruction for the student to provide the first person pronoun in all cases: I (nominative), me (accusative/dative/ablative), my (genitive), mine (genitive substantive). (I have borrowed the case names from Latin, with which I am more familiar. I think the English cases are nominative, objective, possessive.)

I believe the misspellings in the spelling section are intentional so that the student will identify them—I am guessing that’s the point.

New comment by amgreg in "Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine"

amgreg — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 15:53:41 +0000

This case is about whose interpretation gets to fill in the gaps.

The statute (APA) requires courts to form an independent judgment about the gaps.

The Chevron doctrine required courts in certain cases to set this judgment aside in favor of an agency’s judgment—-basically on the basis that the agencies are closer to the problems and know better.

This setting aside may be the better outcome, however it is not explicitly specified in the statute (APA).

Ultimately, if Congress wants this to be the case, they /can/ amend the statute (APA), effectively enshrining the Chevron doctrine.

At the end of the day, the court’s decision here rests on statutory interpretation (not constitutional doctrine) so Congress could change the outcome by amending the statute (APA) to explicitly codify Chevron. This would be achieved with its ordinary legislative power (Article 1 Section 7 of the Constitution).

The court’s decision does effectively put the ball back in Congress’ court.

New comment by amgreg in "Jepsen: Datomic Pro 1.0.7075"

amgreg — Wed, 15 May 2024 19:06:18 +0000

It struck me that Jepsen has identified clear situations leading to invariant violations but Datomic’s approach seems to have been purely to clarify their documentation. Does this essentially mean the Datomic team accepts that the violations will happen, but don’t care?

From the article:

> From Datomic’s point of view, the grant workload’s invariant violation is a matter of user error. Transaction functions do not execute atomically in sequence. Checking that a precondition holds in a transaction function is unsafe when some other operation in the transaction could invalidate that precondition!

New comment by amgreg in "Clojure: Managing throughput with virtual threads"

amgreg — Thu, 09 May 2024 13:59:04 +0000

Thank you for this, but thank you especially for virtual threads! They are awesome!

Is point 2 a virtual-thread only risk, or would we incur it with regular threads too?

New comment by amgreg in "Clojure: Managing throughput with virtual threads"

amgreg — Tue, 07 May 2024 04:06:22 +0000

> things get complicated with virtual threads, they shouldn't be pooled, as they aren't a scarce resource

Why not pool virtual threads, though? I get that they’re not scarce, but if you’re looking to limit throughput anyway wouldn’t that be easier to achieve using a thread pool than semaphores?

New comment by amgreg in "My favourite data structure: The trie"

amgreg — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 22:44:58 +0000

Clojure’s immutable data structures are implemented as hash-array mapped tries, inspired by Phil Bagwell’s paper [1]. Other languages followed suit.

[1] https://os.unil.cloud.switch.ch/tind-customer-epfl/30e62590-...

New comment by amgreg in "The hunt for life in Alpha Centauri"

amgreg — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 01:49:52 +0000

Spoiler alert. In /The Three-Body Problem/, by Cixin Liu, a planet in the Alpha Centauri system is inhabited by an advanced alien civilization that evolved to survive the hardships related to the unpredictable effects of the three stars on the planet. Though able to survive, it comes at a great cost to their civilization (requiring them to “dehydrate” and hibernate for, sometimes, hundreds if not thousands of years) and eventually they hatch a plan to move to another habitable planet. Fortuitously they receive a message from Earth, from an astrophysicist who detests humanity and invites aliens to invade.

I found the rest of the book (and the two volumes that follow it in the series) to be very entertaining!

Ask HN: How much of inflation is caused by supply rather than demand issues?

amgreg — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 14:51:55 +0000

The Fed’s rates increases are predicated on the belief that they will “tame inflation.” But Fed representatives recognize it’s a blunt instrument, which in particular won’t address supply side issues, which are impacting, e.g., the price of gas and food. A major decision to raise rates so quickly is (certainly?) based on research and deliberation. I’d imagine that the Fed concluded that, while the instrument is blunt, it’s better than any alternatives. Could someone help explain the extent to which the Fed actually has the power to tame this current bout of inflation—whether their efforts have a ceiling, if you will—and what alternatives it might have considered, but discarded?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35261946

Points: 21

# Comments: 77