Hacker News: arn3n

New comment by arn3n in "Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches"

arn3n — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:22:20 +0000

I would be disappointed if someone took the completion of my degree and the ceremony behind it as an opportunity to push their business. There’s enough advertisements on the internet; We don't need ads in our universities, too.

Distributed Systems aren't just about scaling

arn3n — Sat, 16 May 2026 20:31:45 +0000

Article URL: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2024/06/04/scale.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163535

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Horror Stories from Former Azure Engineer

arn3n — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:01:47 +0000

Article URL: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion-2f5

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939874

Points: 21

# Comments: 0

New comment by arn3n in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

arn3n — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:53:29 +0000

What do we think is more to blame for GitHub's massive decrease in quality? I've heard the following theories:

1. Increasing amount of AI-generated code in their codebase, decreasing the quality of the service.

2. Bought by Microsoft, and their bad engineering culture has spread to GitHub.

Perhaps it's a bit of both.

New comment by arn3n in "Surviving the Unfolding"

arn3n — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:44:18 +0000

Your link is broken.

New comment by arn3n in "Introduction to Computer Music (2009) [pdf]"

arn3n — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 02:37:27 +0000

I often see people frame music as mathematical manipulation or try to approach music making from a “first principles” approach, where those principles are mathematics and physics. But watching musicians talk about making music, I seldom see any discussion of the underlying math, and instead see discussions of timbres, instruments, and stylistic/historical influences; musicians who make good music seems to believe “first principles” involves historical knowledge and a well-listened ear, and nothing involving math. My question is: Is thinking about music as applied mathematics a good way to create good music? Or is it just the most easily digestible model of music for the crowd on this site?

New comment by arn3n in "Async Python Is Secretly Deterministic"

arn3n — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:13:21 +0000

While not production ready, I’ve been happily surprised at this functionality when building with it. I love my interpreters to be deterministic, or when random to be explicitly seeded. It makes debugging much easier when I can rerun the same program multiple times and expect identical results.

New comment by arn3n in "The bee that everyone wants to save"

arn3n — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:04:49 +0000

That’s amazing! How did you capture it at that resolution?

New comment by arn3n in "Building Liberal Compute"

arn3n — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:45:17 +0000

The title made me hope for an article about making software serve democracies better instead of consolidating power and wealth. It's about how datacenter build-out in the EU might be accelerated by loosening regulations. Still interesting but a bit of a bummer.

I guess, on that note, are there writeups or articles on how software/compute might be used to help, rather than hinder, liberal democracies? From someone who increasingly sees the tech industry as a tool for authoritarians.

New comment by arn3n in "A Preview of Coalton 0.2"

arn3n — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:44:10 +0000

I love their discussion on currying. Currying is very cool theoretically, but I agree that it really causes some bugs and isn’t used that often. It’s cool that most functional compilers automatically curry my functions and give me partial applications, but Id much rather they enforce all parameters be provided and have to explicitly make partial functions when necessary.

New comment by arn3n in "Tony Hoare has died"

arn3n — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:02:06 +0000

Pardon if I’m dumb/missed something: Is Tony Hoare dead? I see no news anywhere.

New comment by arn3n in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

arn3n — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:13:21 +0000

Parents are competing with multi-trillion dollar companies who have invested untold amounts of cash and resources into making their content addictive. When parents try to help their children, it's an uphill battle -- every platform that has kids on it also tends to have porn, or violence, or other things, as these platform generally have disappointingly ineffective moderation. Most parents turn to age verification because it's the only way they can think of to compete with the likes of Meta or ByteDance, but the issue is that these platforms shouldn't have this content to begin with. Platforms should be smaller -- the same site shouldn't be serving both pornography and my school district's announcement page and my friend's travel pictures. Large platforms are turning their unwillingness to moderate into legal and privacy issues, when in fact it should simply be a matter of "These platforms have adult content, and these ones don't". Then, parents can much more easily ban specific platforms and topics. Right now there's no levers to pull or adjust, and parent s have their hands tied. You can't take kids of Instagram or TikTok -- they will lose their friends. I hate the fact that the "keep up with my extended family" platform is the same as the "brainrot and addiction" one. The platforms need to be small enough that parents actually have choices on what to let in and what not to. Until either platforms are broken up via. antitrust or until the burden of moderation is on the company, we're going to keep getting privacy-infringing solutions.

If you support privacy, you should support antitrust, else we're going to be seeing these same bills again and again and again until parents can effectively protect their children.

New comment by arn3n in "Most people are individually optimistic, but think the world is falling apart"

arn3n — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:25:33 +0000

I think there's a pretty simple explanation for this: It's hard to admit when we're not doing well. It's easy to say that the world is getting worse, that you're worried for the future, but to admit that you personally are having trouble is depressing and a little humiliating. I'm guilty of this -- even when times are really bad for me personally, I try to be optimistic and consider my current misery as a temporary misfortune. It helps to keep moving forwards.

New comment by arn3n in "Claude Shannon's randomness-guessing machine"

arn3n — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 08:30:58 +0000

There’s a basic approach to this using markov chains which works surprisingly well. Scott Aaronson once challenged some students to beat his algorithm — only one student could, who claimed he just “used his free will”. Human randomness isn’t so random. There’s a neat little writeup about it here: https://planetbanatt.net/articles/freewill.html

New comment by arn3n in "Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)"

arn3n — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 23:26:31 +0000

Double entry account is, in fact, what gave “transactional” databases their name: They were meant for financial transactions! Nowadays TigerBeetle is a custom built financial database just for double entry accounting. The implementation is fascinating.

New comment by arn3n in "iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan"

arn3n — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 21:37:00 +0000

Especially with Apple, I often see people scared that if they open up their ecosystem, then users will lose one of the most consumer friendly tech companies out there. It’s not just “if apple allows alternative browsers then Chrome will win”, which is (probably) true. It’s:

* If Apple allows alternative app stores then the whole ios ecosystem will rot and be foooded with malware, brough up during the Apple vs. Epic cases

* If Apple can’t control the data on their user’s phones, then privacy rights will disappear, a common talking point during the Apple vs. Facebook case for opt-in data collection.

And like, these points are correct — Apple kind of acts like a “benevolent dictator” when it comes to their ecosystem. But shouldn’t there be alternatives between “Apple can control all software on the hardware they sell” and “the moment Apple doesn’t have control of their user’s experience then it’ll be far worse”? Like, we should have more tech companies, more options to pick from between these two extremes. The market needs to be more competitive, and if that isn’t possible shouldn’t there be regulation to protect users and devs better? This constantly feels like a “pick your poison“ kind of deal, where we can only pick between a company locking down their hardware or abuse of users via. software. If Microsoft banned alternative browser engines there’d be riots in these comments. Apple is just better to its users.

Giving companies the power to lock down hardware they sell isn’t a solution that will work when Apple inevitably turns against its users, and is a horrible precedent to set legally. Lord knows John Deere and a million other predatory hardware companies are salivating at the idea of users of their hardware not having control over what they bought, and Meta and Microsoft love the idea of users not having control of the software they run and the data it collects. We can’t just picking between the least worst of two companies.

New comment by arn3n in "NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power"

arn3n — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:48:31 +0000

Wind gusts were reaching 125 MPH in Boulder county, if anyone’s curious. A lot of power was shut off preemptively to prevent downed power lines from starting wildfires. Energy providers gave warning to locals in advance. Shame that NIST’s backup generator failed, though.

How do SSDs change database design?

arn3n — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 11:52:55 +0000

Article URL: https://brooker.co.za:443/blog/2025/12/15/database-for-ssd.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46287464

Points: 16

# Comments: 2

New comment by arn3n in "Vanity activities"

arn3n — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 18:56:40 +0000

Are we really shaming having hobbies now?

NYC Mesh Network

arn3n — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 14:03:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nycmesh.net/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46107537

Points: 2

# Comments: 0