Hacker News: arn3n

New comment by arn3n in "c100"

arn3n — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:50:46 +0000

Usually the ads on hacker news are accompanied by a press release or a technical writeup so that I at least learn something new.

New comment by arn3n in "The August 17 outage"

arn3n — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 20:54:20 +0000

Everyone suggesting that they simply charge users for commits to drive off AI-heavy users forgets that Github is owned by Microsoft, who has a big incentive to keep having developers use AI.

I suspect that Microsoft would even prefer to have Github operate at a loss, if that loss were because all its users were using their models and paying for OpenAI subscriptions to generate the code.

New comment by arn3n in "SpacetimeDB: a short technical review"

arn3n — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 20:24:06 +0000

Always a fun time to bring up my favorite writeups in database benchmarking: https://questdb.com/blog/lies-damn-lies-and-database-benchma...

There’s also an excellent paper called “Fair Benchmarking Considered Difficult: Common Pitfalls In Database Performance Testing”.

Benchmarks are genuinely hard. Modern systems and hardware are notoriously complex and have different behaviors across runs and with minor tweaks to performance settings.

New comment by arn3n in "Assembly Hall of Shame"

arn3n — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:45:12 +0000

There’s definitely strategies here; A lot of the floating point operations use subnormals, and a lot of the worst instructions are slowed down by really, really fucking with MMIO.

How Compiler Explorer Runs on AWS in 2026

arn3n — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:47:26 +0000

Article URL: https://xania.org/202608/how-compiler-explorer-runs-on-aws

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210332

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by arn3n in "Baseload Is a Myth (2024)"

arn3n — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:20:11 +0000

I have this stance. It’s, for me, a tail-risk calculation: For a given nuclear power plant to be more environmentally friendly than equivalent coal, you have to price in the probability of a nuclear catastrophe with the fact that such catastrophes create fallout that can outlast human civilization.

I can expect that a well-built nuclear plant might not have a catastrophe in my lifetime. But when the consequences are so long-lasting it seems prudent to avoid them entirely. One misbuilt reactor or one governmental regime that rolls back safety regulations and you end up with irreversible consequences. Given the tendency of corporations to “race to the bottom” and abandon safety, and the general unwillingness of the US Government to give proper attention to potential catastrophes (like climate change), I don’t believe that we as a society can handle the responsibility of nuclear reactors. I wish we could have nuclear safely; I don’t trust us to be safe, so I’d rather we not have nuclear at all.

New comment by arn3n in "Who does Anubis actually stop?"

arn3n — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 23:14:44 +0000

It’s meant to be both funny AND highly unprofessional; Anubis makes money of licensing a version of the firewall where you can change the image.

It’s a good strategy; personal websites and blogs can display the anime girl without fear, and companies that care about their image end up paying. Win-win.

New comment by arn3n in "The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker"

arn3n — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 23:24:39 +0000

There’s the DSA. Organized resistance to the cost of living crisis in NYC has been mostly organized through them, to great popularity.

New comment by arn3n in "Exapunks (2018)"

arn3n — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:03:15 +0000

Eliza is one of the only games that I enjoyed so much that I sent fan mail when it came out — it’s nothing that a standard Zachtronics game but it stands alone as an excellent visual novel.

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.