Hacker News: badlibrarian

New comment by badlibrarian in "Say No to Palantir in Europe"

badlibrarian — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:43:39 +0000

No, because gunpowder has no loyalty, no terms of service, no American CEO who can be forced to testify before Congress and say interesting things about European defense customers or provide lists of who has a tattoo or not.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

badlibrarian — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:47:02 +0000

Change it to "Some people" if your pedanticism won't let you follow the flow.

Or better yet point out the better paths they chose instead. Were they wrestling with Java and "Joda Time"? Talking to AWS via a Python library named after a dolphin? Running .NET code on Linux servers under Mono that never actually worked? Jamming apps into a browser via JQuery? Abstracting it up a level and making 1,400 database calls via ActiveRecord to render a ten item to-do list and writing blog posts about the N+1 problem? Rewriting grep in Rust to keep the ruskies out of our precious LLCs?

Asking the wrong questions, using the wrong tools, then writing dumb blog posts about it is what we do. It's what makes us us.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

badlibrarian — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:29:15 +0000

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine.

What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt?

People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era.

After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understanding of what you are building does not exceed the reality of the mess you and your team are actually building if budgets allow.

This seldom happens, even in solo hobby projects once you cost everything in.

It's not about agile or waterfall or "functional" or abstracting your dependencies via Podman or Docker or VMware or whatever that nix crap is. Or using an agent to catch the bugs in the agent that's talking to an LLM you have next to no control over that's deleting your production database while you slept, then asking it to make illustrations for the postmortem blog post you ask it to write that you think elevates your status in the community but probably doesn't.

I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Comparing Python Type Checkers: Typing Spec Conformance"

badlibrarian — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:57:01 +0000

It's a community that delayed progress for a decade while they waited for everyone to put parenthesis on the print statement. Give 'em enough time and they'll figure out best practices.

New comment by badlibrarian in "What if the Apple ][ had run on Field-Sequential?"

badlibrarian — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:01:42 +0000

6 MHz was there from the start. If it wasn't, the CBS field-sequential might have won. Both government (FCC) and industry (RCA) were pushing for a backward compatible system and there was enough bandwidth to pull it off. OP asks what would've happened had chroma been given its own separate, non-overlapping band. That was not possible while maintaining compatibility.

New comment by badlibrarian in "What if the Apple ][ had run on Field-Sequential?"

badlibrarian — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:22:57 +0000

You could argue that if extra bandwidth were available it might be better allocated elsewhere for improved picture quality. But yes. It would've reduced lots of engineering complexity and probably would've looked very much like PALplus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PALplus

New comment by badlibrarian in "OpenAI – How to delete your account"

badlibrarian — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:59:49 +0000

If you sign up with a Google account you don't need to give them a phone number. I realize the irony here.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Show HN: A physically-based GPU ray tracer written in Julia"

badlibrarian — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:40:01 +0000

Versus Python, it seems to fork into the "thinkers" vs "doers" camp. Julia provides a level of abstraction that some people find comforting. I thought I could use it as a sort of open source Matlab for a lot of thinky, 1-based index code I had lying around. It didn't meet my needs. And "spend half an hour waiting for a Jupyter notebook to boot up" is real. Great for some but it's not compatible with the way I work.

Elsewhere someone used the term "janky" and perhaps it's the fact that there are so many incredibly smart people around it that makes it so janky. By way of example, somebody needed to check disk space and the architect told him to shell out to Python.

Remember when LLVM first came out and it got kudos for the quality of its error messages? Well if you miss the old-school 1980s GCC experience the nonsense that eventually comes out of the Julia compiler after an hour will relight that flame.

Want to use greek letters and other symbols that don't appear on your keyboard as variable names? You've found your people.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Bunny Database"

badlibrarian — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 17:17:59 +0000

Adding my voice to the chorus here: they've established a pattern of introducing new features and never really getting them past the 80% point. No qualms with the CDN; it's a sweet spot among providers. But their other offerings have been frustrating me for years now.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Internet Archive's Storage"

badlibrarian — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 08:33:04 +0000

I wish them the best (and support them in ways they're not even aware of). But they really need to get their act together. The public statements and basic stats do not match reality. An actual board and annual reports would be a nice start.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Internet Archive's Storage"

badlibrarian — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 08:26:31 +0000

No, really: access to the server racks is solely protected by a battery-operated camera nestled into the fake dirt of a plastic floor plant.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Internet Archive's Storage"

badlibrarian — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 08:20:17 +0000

During the recent power outages in San Francisco, the site repeatedly went down. When a troubled individual set the power pole on fire outside their building, the site went down. Happy to give them the benefit of the doubt on data redundancy, but they publicly celebrate that Brewster himself has to bike down and flip switches to get the site back online. They don't even have employee redundancy.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Internet Archive's Storage"

badlibrarian — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 06:38:31 +0000

No climate control. No backup power. And it's secured by a wireless camera sitting in a potted plant. Bless them, but wow.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Pragmatic bitmap filters in Microsoft SQL Server"

badlibrarian — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:32:09 +0000

For genuinely useful workloads, it's available for $5/month (per database, not per server) on Azure. There's a free version if you hunt around.

I'm paying $10/month since 2012 and happy. Cannot find even a hint of these DTU packages on the Azure site to link to. (Good lord, Microsoft.)

New comment by badlibrarian in "Claude's new constitution"

badlibrarian — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:13:01 +0000

This thread has it all: child pornography, copyright violation, and gambling. All we need is someone to vibecode a site that sells 3D printed graven images to complete the set.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Claude's new constitution"

badlibrarian — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 01:58:41 +0000

Copyright detection would kick in and prevent the Harry Potter example before the CSAM filters kicked in. Claude won't render fanfic of Porky Pig sodomizing Elmer Fudd either.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Vector graphics on GPU"

badlibrarian — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 17:40:44 +0000

It's an argument you can make in any performance effort. But I think the "let's save power using GPUs" ship sailed even before Microsoft started buying nuclear reactors to power them.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Vector graphics on GPU"

badlibrarian — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:53:07 +0000

Right. The question is does Skia grows its broad and useful toolkit with an eye toward further GPU optimization? Or does Vello (broadened and perhaps burdened by Rust and the shader-obsessive crowd) grow a broad and useful API?

There's also the issue of just how many billions of line segments you really need to draw every 1/120th of a second at 8K resolution, but I'll leave those discussions to dark-gray Discord forums rendered by Skia in a browser.

New comment by badlibrarian in "Vector graphics on GPU"

badlibrarian — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:50:30 +0000

Author uses a lot of odd, confusing terminology and brings CPU baggage to the GPU creating the worst of both worlds. Shader hacks and CPU-bound partitioning and choosing the Greek letter alpha to be your accumulator in a graphics article? Oh my.

NV_path_rendering solved this in 2011. https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering

It never became a standard but was a compile-time option in Skia for a long time. Skia of course solved this the right way.

https://skia.org/

New comment by badlibrarian in "The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café"

badlibrarian — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 16:14:12 +0000

I know lots of broke-ass people who manage to travel and have a cup of coffee while there. It's choices, not privilege. Author of the piece sure is insufferable, though.