Hacker News: atdt

New comment by atdt in "Bitwarden CLI compromised in ongoing Checkmarx supply chain campaign"

atdt — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 02:42:42 +0000

What exactly would you have done differently?

Cargo made its debut in 2014, a year before the infamous left-pad incident, and three years before the first large-scale malicious typosquatting attacks hit PyPI and NPM. The risks were not as well-understood then as they are today. And even today it is very far from being a solved problem.

New comment by atdt in "Guinea worm on track to be 2nd eradicated human disease; only 10 cases in 2025"

atdt — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:25:07 +0000

Please share this with someone who doesn't know the story yet. Ingenuity alone can't save our species. We also need the will to do good. We are living through a moment of deep cynicism about our ability to solve existential problems. Let this be a reminder of what we are capable of.

New comment by atdt in "Why senior engineers let bad projects fail"

atdt — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:47:26 +0000

Having worked with both kinds, I have generally preferred three-dimensional human beings to cut-outs from a compliance training manual. Being fundamentally kind and collaborative is prerequisite, of course. But so is having a modicum of spite, misanthropy, pettiness, irony, and dark humor. An appreciation for the tragic sense of life. How do you get through the day if all you get from your coworkers are patriotic slogans?

New comment by atdt in "A 40-line fix eliminated a 400x performance gap"

atdt — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 03:52:35 +0000

Flame graphs have an official web site, maintained by Brendan Gregg, who invented them: https://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html. It's a useful starting point.

New comment by atdt in "Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS"

atdt — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 03:32:42 +0000

My hunch is that the same is true of Wikipedia's choice of Lua for template scripting, made back in 2012.

https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists...

New comment by atdt in "The pivot"

atdt — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 16:56:46 +0000

> you might not understand what the problem is for working and middle class people quickly finding themselves surrounded by a sea of people with dramatically different cultures, values, and religions

Of course. That is why Trump received the highest voter support in counties with the lowest levels of immigration.

https://latino.ucla.edu/press/report-finds-white-voters-supp...

New comment by atdt in "Bayesian Data Analysis, Third edition (2013) [pdf]"

atdt — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 19:29:57 +0000

I am interested in this topic, but this textbook is too daunting for me. What I'd love is a crash course on Bayesian methods for the working systems performance engineer. If you, dear reader, happen to be familiar with both domains: what would you include in such a course, and can you recommend any existing resources for self-study?

New comment by atdt in "Gemini in Chrome"

atdt — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 03:35:14 +0000

It has access to the current page, so you can ask Gemini questions about its content.

New comment by atdt in "Performance and telemetry analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode fork"

atdt — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 19:10:53 +0000

Your content is great, and the participation of non-native English speakers in this community makes it better and richer.

New comment by atdt in "Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)"

atdt — Mon, 26 May 2025 01:19:36 +0000

The level of intellectual engagement with Chomsky's ideas in the comments here is shockingly low. Surely, we are capable of holding these two thoughts: one, that the facility of LLMs is fantastic and useful, and two, that the major breakthroughs of AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution.

That may change, particularly if the intelligence of LLMs proves to be analogous to our own in some deep way—a point that is still very much undecided. However, if the similarities are there, so is the potential for knowledge. We have a complete mechanical understanding of LLMs and can pry apart their structure, which we cannot yet do with the brain. And some of the smartest people in the world are engaged in making LLMs smaller and more efficient; it seems possible that the push for miniaturization will rediscover some tricks also discovered by the blind watchmaker. But these things are not a given.

New comment by atdt in "Systems Correctness Practices at AWS: Leveraging Formal and Semi-Formal Methods"

atdt — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 01:34:31 +0000

OK, I will be the useful idiot. I don't fully understand your anecdote. Could you explain what is exactly it that you perceived and that the other engineer failed to see?

New comment by atdt in "Augurs demo"

atdt — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 07:51:35 +0000

For someone new to time series analysis, how did you choose these particular algorithms? Are they standard in the field, or more of a personal selection?

New comment by atdt in "Zed now predicts your next edit with Zeta, our new open model"

atdt — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 21:31:56 +0000

What is it about Zed that you find superior to VS Code?

Brazil's Farmers Are Plowing over an Ancient Amazon Civilization

atdt — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 06:57:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-brazil-amazon-deforestation-ancient-civilization/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42024548

Points: 28

# Comments: 5

New comment by atdt in "Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next"

atdt — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 04:50:13 +0000

I am starting to understand why these luminaries warn us about a future that is dominated by a solitary superintelligence, self-obsessed and uninterested in humanity.

New comment by atdt in "Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon"

atdt — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 13:42:37 +0000

POCSAG is an ideal for broadcasting low-sensitivity push notifications, like "report to your local commanding officer by 15:00 today". These messages don't need encryption, just a reliable way to reach militants without revealing their location.

New comment by atdt in "Rye and Uv: August Is Harvest Season for Python Packaging"

atdt — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 01:12:10 +0000

Armin advocates for 'uv' to dominate the space, but acknowledges it could be rug-pulled due to its VC backing. His solution to this potential issue is that it's "very forkable." But doesn't forking inherently lead to further fragmentation, the very problem he wants to solve?

Any tool hoping to dominate the Python packaging landscape must be community-driven and community-controlled, IMO.

New comment by atdt in "Hexadecimal Sucks"

atdt — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:41:10 +0000

This brings to mind Chernoff faces[1], a type of visualization where facial features are mapped to data points.

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face

New comment by atdt in "Jpegli: A new JPEG coding library"

atdt — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:51:50 +0000

When using Jpegli as a drop-in replacement for for libjpeg-turbo (i.e., with the same input bit-map and quality setting), will the output produced by Jpegli be smaller, more beautiful, or both? Are the space savings the result of the Jpegli encoder being able to generate comparable or better-looking images at lower quality settings? I'd like to understand whether capitalizing on the space efficiency requires any modification the caller code.

New comment by atdt in "What if I’m wrong? (2023)"

atdt — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 23:08:26 +0000

Wonderful piece. Dennett knows how to write. And he captures the pleasure and privilege of Hacker News with this felicitous phrase:

> Distributed understanding is a real phenomenon, but you have to get yourself into a community of communicators that can effectively summon the relevant expertise.