Hacker News: batmansmk

New comment by batmansmk in "Novel hollow-core optical fiber transmits data faster with record low loss"

batmansmk — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 10:57:37 +0000

I made my master thesis on real-time, with a chapter where I experimented with different levels of jitter and latency. Jitter is the consistency of the latency, is it like a locked 66ms or sometimes does it go to 200ms. Jitter is more impactful than latency for a wide range of applications, from gaming to music and video call. Having a lower latency allows for lower jitter, or less jitter while keeping the same latency. Today’s discovery is huge imo.

New comment by batmansmk in "Modern Node.js Patterns"

batmansmk — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 10:10:15 +0000

For years, I heard it's better to use cron, because the problem was already solved the right way(tm). My experience with cron has been about a dozen difficult fixes in production of cron not running / not with the right permission / errors lost without being logged / ... Changing / upgrading OSes became a problem. I since switched to a small node script with a basic scheduler in it, I had ZERO issues in 7 years. My devs happily add entries in the scheduler without bothering me. We even added consistency checks, asserts, scheduled one time execution tasks, ... and now multi server scheduling.

Deployments that need to configure OSes in a particular way are difficult (the existence of docker, kubernetes, snap are symptoms of this difficulty). It requires a high level of privilege to do so. Upgrades and rollbacks are challenging, if ever done. OSes sometimes don't provide solution when we go beyond one hardware.

If "npm start" can restrain the permissions to what it should be for the given version of the code, I will use it and I'll be happy.

New comment by batmansmk in "François Chollet: The Arc Prize and How We Get to AGI [video]"

batmansmk — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 09:11:38 +0000

One of the very first slides of François’ presentation is about defining AGI. Do you have anything that opposes his synthesis of the two (50 years old) takes on this definition?

New comment by batmansmk in "OWASP Non-Human Identities Top 10"

batmansmk — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 10:46:14 +0000

Identities are very hard to manage and secure overall. Audits are super long, tedious.

Adding more dimensions into reviews that aren't properly done right now will be extremely tricky.

New comment by batmansmk in "Jupyter Notebooks as E2E Tests"

batmansmk — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 14:36:56 +0000

Maintaining e2e tests is a pain. Maintaining a notebook is a pain. It seems it was a given somebody would make this match made in heaven!

New comment by batmansmk in "The Google Willow Thing"

batmansmk — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 09:00:18 +0000

Ahaha! Read the subtitle of the blog, literally at the top: "If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel."

New comment by batmansmk in "DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome"

batmansmk — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 10:41:46 +0000

I' m European. Apple got charged by the European Union for $14.4 billions of unpaid taxes between 2019 and 2021. Back of the mapkin they employ 22k people in EU (data Apple), average salary $80k (Apple), taxes at 30% per employee (my own understanding). Thats $550M. So their payroll taxes is about 15% of their tax package. If you have any contradictory data, I would love it, but your point is moot for 95% of the world outside California.

New comment by batmansmk in "DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome"

batmansmk — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:56:27 +0000

None of them are good players for humanity. "Don't be evil" is long gone. They don't pay taxes, pollute, give means to manipulate billions of humans, concentrate wealth in a few hands. They all give with ulterior motives, never from the goodness of their heart.

New comment by batmansmk in "Apple open-sources its Homomorphic Encryption library"

batmansmk — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 15:07:14 +0000

The idea behind Homomorphic lib is to allow 2 basic operations (such as add, multiply) on encrypted numbers. They return encrypted numbers as well. From those basic operations, we can build more complex functions. That's the gist of the magic.

New comment by batmansmk in "Show HN: PGlite – in-browser WASM Postgres with pgvector and live sync"

batmansmk — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 15:09:51 +0000

Pretty awesome. Would love to use it in CI and locally for our PG product. We use Prisma, so I guess we have to wait for the connector that looks like pg to plug it in.

New comment by batmansmk in "OpenAI illegally barred staff from airing safety risks, whistleblowers say"

batmansmk — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 14:06:54 +0000

I start to feel this is all marketing. Pretend it's dangerous, so it implies it's beyond what we imagine. Because on our end, on the reality of a B2B product used daily, finding use cases for the limited OpenAI we have access to is far from trivial.

New comment by batmansmk in "How to Use SQLite as a NoSQL Store"

batmansmk — Thu, 02 May 2024 05:02:05 +0000

By GET, do you mean “get all fields of the unique item with id=x”? Oltp (sql), mongo or cassandra are working similarly for this and have the same complexity. Even worse, the same operation on the same storage can have very different performance profile independently of the cluster size, making o(n) complexity a very secondary discussion. All technologies offer more or less the same data structures and algorithms at such a basic level. You have to dig into replication, disk layout, transactionality, constraints, … to start to see differences.

New comment by batmansmk in "Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site"

batmansmk — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 07:15:01 +0000

I looked up the definition of scam and the goal is to make money out of the naivety of the victim. It involves a crisis, the illusion of shared exposure to a risk.

The price of cdn bandwidth is about 0.01/gb on low volume (cloudflare, aws, azure…) so op should be billed around $500 with 40TB. Netlify probably buys this for way less. He was presented a bill at $104k, « generously » reduced to $5k, still a x10 margin. Vercel and Netlify are outrageously expensive for what they do.

New comment by batmansmk in "Suikoden and Eiyuden Chronicles creator Yoshitaka Murayama has died"

batmansmk — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 18:03:25 +0000

What a terrible news. Suikoden is one of those incredibly creative game. Rip.

New comment by batmansmk in "GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving"

batmansmk — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 23:42:23 +0000

The current taxi market is already structured that way: drivers in SF aren’t from SF. So no competitive advantage there, or not significant enough to change the game yet.

New comment by batmansmk in "GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving"

batmansmk — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 21:53:07 +0000

Having to be remotely operated every 2.5 to 5 miles seem to defeat most of the economics of self driving cars.

Back of the napkin math, cars drive at an average of 18mph in cities, so every 10-20min. Let’s assume it takes over for 1min, and that you need remote drivers not too far for ping purposes, so at the same hourly rate. To guarantee you’ll be able to take over all demands immediately, due to the birthday paradox, you end up needing like 30 drivers for 100 vehicles? It’s not that incredible of a tech…

New comment by batmansmk in "Next.js 14"

batmansmk — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 22:00:18 +0000

Thanks for checking with us. SSR makes auth based routing harder as well as any faceted renders like localization (because now not only the cli needs to query the api, but also the rendering server, with all the CORS/security config that goes with it). Offline is obviously harder. Integrating some specific build features like css pre processors are harder too, as the SSR needs to hook itself up in the build process in very specific ways. The mixed approach with pages/ and apps/ makes it so hard for 3rd party supported libs: mantine 7 wants to sit in apps/ ad that was the only way their css preprocessor could hook cleanly with nextjs whereas the previous version wanted to sit in pages/ etc. Sharing components with our emailing platform isn’t possible anymore. It only runs on web now.

I understand the need as a business to address more use cases that buys servers. But as a current user, upgrading to a new nextjs has been mostly painful and unrewarding.

New comment by batmansmk in "Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans"

batmansmk — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 18:44:18 +0000

« Waymo says data shows ». The insurer never said anything, it’s just Waymo saying that some of their own reasoning based on those numbers reached the conclusions they want to see - and they paid some press release company to articulate this narrative.

New comment by batmansmk in "Next.js 14"

batmansmk — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 18:41:30 +0000

Really not interesting for us. Makes what’s simple simpler and what’s hard harder. Sure for a quick prototype website with 10min only that would help, but any decently sized app that needs auth/localization/high performance in memory/offline/optimistic updates/batch fetching … all become way harder. It feels like react unchained from Meta’s constraints and it looses its appeal.

New comment by batmansmk in "Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans"

batmansmk — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 02:48:13 +0000

Those news should be carefully regulated. After working for 2 years in the field as an engineering manager directly responsible in getting good numbers, none of the claims of the time were genuine, but were just framed in a way that provided the best outlook. I wonder if it’s still the case.