Hacker News: andyg_blog

New comment by andyg_blog in "Beyond Semantic Similarity"

andyg_blog — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:45 +0000

This reminds me a bit of "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster" from 2014 https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

The constraint I, and I bet many here, have is just how much data there is. 3GB like in the 2014 article is one .pdf

Enterprise level data store is measured in hundreds of GB for a single customer, and you'll get murdered on data egress costs if you try to search an entire corpus, if you can even get through it all before the request times out or the customer decides after 5 minutes that enough is enough.

You'd need a true distributed filesystem to even start attempting what the authors suggest at any scale outside of your local machine.

New comment by andyg_blog in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

andyg_blog — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:21:45 +0000

Completely agree on alignment. Without it, it's a shortcut to rejection. I actually wrote a lot about this in a blog post I called "Minimum Reviewable Unit" https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2025/03/21/minimum-reviewable...

New comment by andyg_blog in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

andyg_blog — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:48:19 +0000

I don't think it contradicts the OP. OP says the system is unreliable. Memory leaks that lead to out of memory failures for example. Smart pointers would stabilize things. (Also note that OP says their smart pointers PR was rejected).

New comment by andyg_blog in "GitDibs: Call dibs on a Git commit hash"

andyg_blog — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:14:59 +0000

This is a small April Fools' project I created while exploring git commit hooks. I wondered if you could fail a commit based on the commit hash itself. Turns out you can't; you have to wait until the post-commit hook fires, and then do a reset on failure. Eventually I decided to see just how far I could take it, and well, now there's an official website and python sdk distributed through pip.

GitDibs: Call dibs on a Git commit hash

andyg_blog — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:12:55 +0000

Article URL: https://gitdibs.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601185

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

HyperAgents: Self-referential self-improving agents

andyg_blog — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:54:10 +0000

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19461

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47505670

Points: 234

# Comments: 90

New comment by andyg_blog in "If DSPy is so great, why isn't anyone using it?"

andyg_blog — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:42:35 +0000

>the whole article assumes the only language in the world is Python.

This was my take as well.

My company recently started using Dspy, but you know what? We had to stand up an entire new repo in Python for it, because the vast majority of our code is not Python.

Pull requests are dead, long live pull requests

andyg_blog — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:37:45 +0000

Article URL: https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2026/03/20/pull-requests-are-dead-long-live-pull-requests/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47461680

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by andyg_blog in "If you truncate a UUID I will truncate your fingers"

andyg_blog — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 14:33:05 +0000

Really appreciate it. I love mixing humor with technical communication. This post is topical because strangely I encountered GUID truncation three times in the last week.

If you truncate a UUID I will truncate your fingers

andyg_blog — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 14:01:40 +0000

Article URL: https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2025/12/14/if-you-truncate-a-uuid-i-will-truncate-your-fingers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46263022

Points: 7

# Comments: 4

New comment by andyg_blog in "Multiple status ladders are better than a monoculture"

andyg_blog — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 12:58:22 +0000

I'm skeptical these status ladders truly exist outside of the author's imagination, but then again I've never been part of that side of tech culture. It doesn't ring true of my own experience where pretty much every technical person sees other technical people on equal footing. This includes "big names" in tech that I've spoken with.

Edited to add: what's hypothetical about Alice being happy to run a coffee shop or Bob satisfied being a 90th percentile engineer (measured how?)? Plenty of these people exist, I've met them!

New comment by andyg_blog in "Push Ifs Up and Fors Down"

andyg_blog — Sat, 17 May 2025 14:40:46 +0000

A more general rule is to push ifs close to the source of input: https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2024/06/24/dont-push-ifs-up-p...

It's really about finding the entry points into your program from the outside (including data you fetch from another service), and then massaging in such a way that you make as many guarantees as possible (preferably encoded into your types) by the time it reaches any core logic, especially the resource heavy parts.

Minimum Reviewable Unit

andyg_blog — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 11:17:29 +0000

Article URL: https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2025/03/21/minimum-reviewable-unit/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43434296

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by andyg_blog in "Ask HN: What's your blog / portfolio stack?"

andyg_blog — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 13:28:25 +0000

You can downvote me all you want. I'm not claiming any kind of superiority of WordPress but merely answering the question in the OP. I've had this blog for 15 years now, long before WordPress was so reviled. It just works and I'm still on their free tier.

New comment by andyg_blog in "Ask HN: What's your blog / portfolio stack?"

andyg_blog — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 13:03:52 +0000

Markdown that is then unceremoniously shoveled to WordPress with some finagling of the images. I'm not trying to experiment with fancy tech when I write, just trying to get the words out of my head.

If something gets mathy I'll use LaTex.

New comment by andyg_blog in "The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE"

andyg_blog — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 21:10:16 +0000

Please elaborate? I define experience in terms of mostly "time" spent on something. And I consider any engineer with less than 5 yrs of experience as "inexperienced" regardless of whether they are talented or not. I've met many talented, but inexperienced engineers who still needed redirecting.

New comment by andyg_blog in "F-strings for C++26 proposal [pdf]"

andyg_blog — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 01:34:37 +0000

I agree that we should have safe-by-default "decay" behavior to a plain ol std::string, but I'm also picking up that many aren't certain it's a useful syntactic sugar in top of the fmt lib? Many other languages have this same syntax and it quickly becomes your go-to way to concatenate variables into a string. Even if it didn't handle utf-8 out of the box, so what? The amount of utility is still worth it.

New comment by andyg_blog in "Introducing deep research"

andyg_blog — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 01:21:24 +0000

Greek mythology? But seriously please elaborate for my less educated self.

New comment by andyg_blog in "Load is not what you should balance: Introducing Prequal"

andyg_blog — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 12:53:10 +0000

From TFA:

> PReQuaL does not balance CPU load, but instead selects servers according to estimated latency and active requests-in-flight

So, still load balancing

New comment by andyg_blog in "C++ Template Macroprogramming versus Lisp Macros"

andyg_blog — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 03:47:55 +0000

I hate to agree. For an article about metaprogramming in C++, you'd expect expert level C++ code, and not what's presented here. It's bad. And the first example with the list even has a bug.