Hacker News: andriamanitra

New comment by andriamanitra in "Honda is killing its EVs"

andriamanitra — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:36:44 +0000

Where did you get the idea that EVs have caused it? As far as I know the amount of road dust from EVs is within the same ballpark so the claim that it has led to overall higher pollution levels sounds inconceivable. I can't even find sources that indicate high pollution levels in Oslo besides a Bloomberg article that says the situation has actually improved in recent years. [1] On the contrary Oslo seems to be doing comparatively well according to the air quality data from iqair. [2]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/why-oslo-...

[2] https://www.iqair.com/us/norway/oslo/oslo

New comment by andriamanitra in "RE#: how we built the fastest regex engine in F#"

andriamanitra — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:27:09 +0000

This is very interesting. I'm a bit skeptical about the benchmarks / performance claims because they seem almost too good to be true but even just the extended operators alone are a nice improvement over existing regex engines.

The post mentions they also have a native library implemented in Rust without dependencies but I couldn't find a link to it. Is that available somewhere? I would love to try it out in some of my projects but I don't use .NET so the NuGET package is of no use to me.

New comment by andriamanitra in "Julia: Performance Tips"

andriamanitra — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:01:56 +0000

If you need to deal with matrices Julia's built-in support for that kind of stuff is the best out of any language I've ever seen (and I've tried dozens of different languages). It's like having first-class numpy arrays without installing any third party packages, and the syntax is even more convenient than Python. The standard library is reasonably comprehensive (not quite as big as in Python or Ruby or Go, but it's usually more well-designed).

It is also an excellent language for messing about because the language and especially the REPL have tons of quality-of-life features. I often use it when I want to do something interactively (eg. inspect a data set, draw a graph, or figure out what's going on with an Unicode string, or debug some bitwise trickery).

What Julia is not great at is things where you need minimal overhead. It is performant for serious number crunching like simulations or machine learning tasks, but the runtime is quite heavy for simple scripting and command-line tools (where the JIT doesn't really get a chance to kick in).

New comment by andriamanitra in "US Military leaders meet with Anthropic to argue against Claude safeguards"

andriamanitra — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:58:05 +0000

That model breaks when you don't have perfect knowledge of whether or not you will perish. Therefore in every practical situation we are forced to assign a finite cost to risk. And generally people tend to prefer tiny increases to societal risk over compromising their personal comfort.

New comment by andriamanitra in "Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC"

andriamanitra — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 12:44:43 +0000

Would you want it to? The further the goal posts are the more progress we are making, and that's good, no? Trying to make it into a religious debate between believers and non-believers is silly. Neither side can predict the future, and, even if they could, winning the debate is not worth anything!

What is interesting is what can do with LLMs today and what we would like them to be able to do tomorrow so we can keep developing them into a good direction. Whether or not you (or I) believe it can do that thing tomorrow is thoroughly uninteresting.

New comment by andriamanitra in "Show HN: Similarity = cosine(your_GitHub_stars, Karpathy) Client-side"

andriamanitra — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:01:54 +0000

That's really neat! I found a bunch of cool repositories I had never heard of by looking up my username and a few of my favorite projects.

New comment by andriamanitra in "Vietnam bans unskippable ads"

andriamanitra — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 05:36:29 +0000

Marketing for cars and soda isn't that far off from actual scams. Ads are a big part of why (especially American) car and food culture is so toxic. The ad-driven demand for sugary drinks and large, impractical, environmentally unconscientious cars has almost certainly caused more death and misery than many actual scams.

New comment by andriamanitra in "Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades"

andriamanitra — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 01:21:10 +0000

It's not possible to become a billionaire with a B without fucking over a lot of people, but for a billionaire he isn't so bad. If we can't get rid of billionaires the next best thing is to hope they are more like Buffett and less like Musk or Thiel or Trump...

New comment by andriamanitra in "GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder"

andriamanitra — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:25:59 +0000

Profit is not an appropriate measure of how well a business is operated. I'm sure they have been prioritizing growth because the whole point of the platform is to introduce competition to Steam. Keeping the margins low (or even negative) is smart when the primary goal is not to make profit but to insure the parent company against monopolistic behavior.

New comment by andriamanitra in "US bars approvals of new models of DJI, all other foreign drones"

andriamanitra — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 07:21:02 +0000

Corruption and nepotism does not get much more blatant than this. The president's son is involved in one of the American drone companies that stand to gain the most from this policy. Their investor presentation boasts about regulations as the first bullet point under the title "Our competitive advantage".

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2025/10/29/donald-t...

[2] https://www.unusualmachines.com/about-us/company-presentatio...

New comment by andriamanitra in "The military's new AI says boat strike 'unambiguously illegal'"

andriamanitra — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 08:46:03 +0000

> If they are enemy combatants you are allowed to follow up and ensure they have been killed

Not true. Launching an attack on shipwrecked enemy is a blatant violation of the Geneva conventions. [1, Chapter II Article 12] It's also prohibited by DoD's own guidelines. [2, page 1071, section 17.14]

It's not a question of whether or not what happened was illegal, it's a textbook example of a war crime. It's a matter of whether or not the justice system still has enough power to identify who is responsible and hold them accountable.

[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/assets/treaties/370-GC-II-EN....

[2] https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jul/31/2003271432/-1/-1/0/DOD...

New comment by andriamanitra in "Advent of Code 2025"

andriamanitra — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 17:37:39 +0000

I think Ruby is the ideal language for AoC:

* The expressive syntax helps keep the solutions short.

* It has extensive standard library with tons of handy methods for AoC style problems: Enumerable#each_cons, Enumerable#each_slice, Array#transpose, Array#permutation, ...

* The bundled "prime" gem (for generating primes, checking primality, and prime factorization) comes in handy for at least a few of problems each year.

* The tools for parsing inputs and string manipulation are a bit more ergonomic than what you get even in Python: first class regular expression syntax, String#scan, String#[], Regexp::union, ...

* You can easily build your solution step-by-step by chaining method calls. I would typically start with `p File.readlines("input.txt")` and keep executing the script after adding each new method call so I can inspect the intermediate results.

New comment by andriamanitra in "A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z"

andriamanitra — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 16:46:42 +0000

The list is clearly mostly machine generated but the name typo is an unlikely error for LLM to make. I'm guessing the "general editing pass" that introduced it was done by an actual human while trying to make the text flow better (less LLM-like).

https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/f8d149495a...

New comment by andriamanitra in "EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance"

andriamanitra — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 14:15:37 +0000

Complicated, sure, but opaque? EU is incredibly transparent – the amount of information on the European Council website [1] is daunting. There are vote results, meeting schedules, agendas, background briefs, lists of participants, reports, recordings of public council sessions, and so on and so on. All publicly available in each of the 24 EU official languages for whoever cares enough to look. And it's not just the council! The EU Treaties and Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU gives any EU citizen the right to access documents possessed by EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies (with a few exceptions for eg. public security and military matters) [2].

The problem is mostly the sheer amount of things going on, you couldn't possibly keep up with it all.

[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/

[2] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/document/en/163352

New comment by andriamanitra in "Iowa City made its buses free. Traffic cleared, and so did the air"

andriamanitra — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 13:12:14 +0000

> No? It’s not just crime, it’s harassment, antisocial behavior, and other things that are not strictly crimes but you don’t want to be around. A lot of crimes are crimes of opportunity where someone strikes because they’re in the same place as you and see an opening. The more time they’re in the place, the more opportunities for those crimes.

Isolating people from each other is a really dystopian "solution" to reduce crime and antisocial behavior. Things naturally tend to happen more when people come together – in both good and bad. The good usually outweighs the bad by a wide margin.

New comment by andriamanitra in "Make product worse, get money"

andriamanitra — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 05:09:40 +0000

> capitalism (where ownership is detached from operation)

That is a really eloquent way to phrase one of my main gripes with capitalist societies. Thanks, I will be stealing it.

New comment by andriamanitra in "Make product worse, get money"

andriamanitra — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 04:50:31 +0000

The article misses the most important factor: the customers have no way of knowing they would be getting a better product or extra 25 millimeters of leg room if they paid 3% more. The higher prices could just as well be for completely unrelated reasons (greed, inefficiency, ...). No one is going around measuring and documenting every single difference between products and services, and, even if someone did, almost no one has time to do such thorough research for every purchase. It is increasingly difficult to find objective information about any commercial product. Any attempt at providing impartial information gets drowned in an ocean of marketing content, sponsored reviews, astroturfing, and brand tribalism.

Consequence of the above is that marketing and anecdotal evidence are much more influential factors in purchase decisions than quality of the product. Using marketing campaigns to brainwash people is significantly easier (and cheaper) than improving a product enough for them to notice – especially if the product already has a zombie customer base that chooses a familiar brand out of habit rather than merit. We have built a world where money is valued over value, and making better products is often a terrible business strategy.

New comment by andriamanitra in "Firefox 147 Will Support the XDG Base Directory Specification"

andriamanitra — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 18:28:49 +0000

First .mkv support and now this! I really like what Firefox has been doing recently. The only major annoyance that still remains is hard-coded keyboard shortcuts, fingers crossed!

New comment by andriamanitra in "Fizz Buzz without conditionals or booleans"

andriamanitra — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 05:31:13 +0000

I gave it a go in C (I wanted to do assembly but couldn't be arsed to write string to int and int to string conversions). [1] The trickiest part was figuring out how to terminate the program. My first attempt invoked nasal demons through dividing by zero, but I then realized I could intentionally cause a segfault with high probability (which is much better, right?). One could argue that my `fizz` and `buzz` variables are still "disguised booleans", but at least the generated assembly contains no branching or cmov instructions (aside from the ones inside libc functions like atoi and sprintf).

[1] https://gist.github.com/Andriamanitra/5c20f367dc4570dd5c8068...

New comment by andriamanitra in "Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites"

andriamanitra — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 19:09:54 +0000

Iran's military spending (as percentage of GDP) is fairly similar to that of the U.S. and European countries. The most recent numbers I could find (from 2024) indicate that they spent 2.0% compared to 3.4% in the U.S. [1], although there have been reports that military spending has increased significantly in the most recent budget.

I agree with the sentiment that the humanity should focus on producing something more useful than bombs, but bringing it up specifically when talking about Iran comes off as a bit disingenuous, especially when they have been recently bombed by both the U.S. and Israel. [2] Imagine the roles were reversed: How would we react to an Iranian or Russian citizen suggesting that the U.S. or an European country should focus on infrastructure instead of building an army?

[1] https://milex.sipri.org/sipri

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/22/satellite-images-sh...