Hacker News: bertmuthalaly

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "OpenAI says its new model GPT-2 is too dangerous to release (2019)"

bertmuthalaly — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:20:47 +0000

Now that I see this in the light of the recent sama article, I wonder whether the point of the "it's too dangerous" rhetoric is to enable "Open" AI to avoid open-sourcing the weights and process.

A convenient pretext for maintaining a monetizable competitive advantage while claiming a benevolent purpose.

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

bertmuthalaly — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:29:11 +0000

https://somethingdoneright.net

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "Why we built Lightpanda in Zig"

bertmuthalaly — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 05:57:29 +0000

rad! sponsored

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "jank is C++"

bertmuthalaly — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 22:54:54 +0000

It's the first section in the article -

"I have implemented manual memory management via cpp/new and cpp/delete. This uses jank's GC allocator (currently bdwgc), rather than malloc, so using cpp/delete isn't generally needed. However, if cpp/delete is used then memory collection can be eager and more deterministic.

The implementation has full bdwgc support for destructors as well, so both manual deletion and automatic collection will trigger non-trivial destructors."

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "Starship: The minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell"

bertmuthalaly — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 13:29:20 +0000

When you’re debugging, especially a complex system, especially during an outage or postmortem, understanding when your commands executed relative to when your log lines appeared is really helpful.

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "AT&T Email-to-Text Gateway Service Ending June 17"

bertmuthalaly — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 03:29:32 +0000

fun fact - this person (jcs) also founded lobste.rs

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’"

bertmuthalaly — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 05:43:42 +0000

This is the thesis of Bullshit Jobs!

Ask HN: How are OMNY/Oyster implemented?

bertmuthalaly — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 18:01:47 +0000

When you use a tap-to-pay card to enter the subway, what happens?

There’s some kind of communication over NFC, but after that, how does the OMNY system talk to e.g. the Visa network? Different methods have different speeds; tap-to-pay on my Chase credit card is much slower than apple pay on my phone using the apple card.

The wikipedia articles on both don’t describe how they’re implemented and a cursory search didn’t turn up a blog post.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38500473

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "The early days of Linux"

bertmuthalaly — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 18:59:20 +0000

I love the crossover with the Prince of Persia, which was also an early computer labor of love.

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "Are We Yet?"

bertmuthalaly — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 12:07:25 +0000

What was the original?

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "The time when Joshua Bell went busking in the subway, and no-one noticed (2022)"

bertmuthalaly — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 04:21:37 +0000

Wait, this busking happened on the way TO work and not the way home?

No wonder why no one stopped!

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Feb 2023)"

bertmuthalaly — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 17:16:31 +0000

Thinking through the implications of building batteries for homes and coordinating them for demand response programs a la Tesla Powerwall.

Distributed battery storage can help alleviate transmission bottlenecks that prevent other storage and renewables from coexisting on the current grid (building new transmission is slow, on the order of decades).

Home batteries themselves are made of commodity parts (18650 battery cells power everything from vapes to electric cars) and battery management and demand response are software problems that are amenable to good systems programming.

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "Conc: Better Structured Concurrency for Go"

bertmuthalaly — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 06:11:43 +0000

A "prior art" section is especially useful for people evaluating your library!

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "Quest for my perfect watch"

bertmuthalaly — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 16:49:29 +0000

pictures please! :)

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "Keyboard Latency (2017)"

bertmuthalaly — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 15:51:19 +0000

Electron can save you a lot of time but that doesn't mean your app has to be slow.

https://keminglabs.com/blog/building-a-fast-electron-app-wit...

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "Joker: A small interpreted dialect of Clojure written in Go"

bertmuthalaly — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 15:47:52 +0000

Immer [0][1] seems like a really serious attempt at bringing high-quality persistent data structures to C++.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPhpelUfu8Q

[1]: https://sinusoid.es/immer/

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "How to build a small town in Texas"

bertmuthalaly — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 18:41:00 +0000

A 150m walk on a bald Texas street does indeed sound miserable.

A tree-lined one, though, can be quite nice: https://twitter.com/brent_bellamy/status/1411133447062441990

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps"

bertmuthalaly — Tue, 18 May 2021 16:50:43 +0000

A nitpick but arguably an important one for your point - this article argues that the efficiency cores aren’t for “browsing the web / watching YouTube / checking emails” but for non-interactive tasks like Spotlight indexing (based on GCD scheduling priority).

https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/17/how-m1-macs-feel-faster-...

“Intro to Human Behavioral Biology” Needs Critique

bertmuthalaly — Sun, 02 May 2021 19:04:32 +0000

Article URL: http://somethingdoneright.net/2021/05/02/intro-to-human-behavioral-biology-needs-critique.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27017923

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by bertmuthalaly in "Is that ship still stuck?"

bertmuthalaly — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 22:34:32 +0000

It might be already happening? https://twitter.com/AriaCallaghan/status/1375154205233721348