<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: cdavid</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cdavid</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:20:20 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=cdavid" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "Significant raise of reports"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Also one of the initial creator of haproxy, a well known reverse proxy. To imply somebody like as a simple "AI shill" is just ignorant.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:41:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613694</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613694</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613694</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "The revenge of the data scientist"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree. It is difficult to convince leadership to do this work at all ("it works on my example, ship it"), and in my experience most DS don't even want to do it.<p>One of the key value is that it forces some thinking about what is the task you want to solve in the first place. In many cases, it is difficult if not impossible to do it, which implies the underlying product should not be built at all. But nobody wants to hear that.<p>Doing eval only makes sense if making the product better impacts something the business cares about, which is very difficult to do in practice.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:51:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607565</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607565</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607565</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The typical solution is to work in one of the "global" (aka American) companies in Japan: google, amz, apple, ms, etc. At least for now there are enough jobs across all those companies for motivated foreigners, though that could change.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 08 Mar 2026 01:25:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47293365</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47293365</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47293365</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, this is the real cause, and the OP explanation is just a symptom of that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:47:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47255073</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47255073</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47255073</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My rule of thumb is that management complexity is given by #direct reports x #project, where project is defined as a set of stakeholders (be it PM, etc. depending on business).<p>Concretely, managing 12 ICs on a well defined platform team w/ a single PM is much easier than managing 6 people working across 6 businesses, as is more common when managing a team of data scientists.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Jan 2026 03:11:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611842</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611842</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611842</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "How good engineers write bad code at big companies"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can believe it is deliberate at the top, I've certainly seen first hand in several orgs I've worked at.<p>My sense is that unless actively managed against, any org big enough to have a financial department and financial planning will work under assumption of fungibility.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Nov 2025 22:19:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46083286</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46083286</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46083286</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "VST3 audio plugin format is now MIT"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You had to accept some license terms before you could download the VST SDK. When linux audio started to get "serious" 20 years ago, it was a commonly discussed pain point.<p>Concretely, it made distributing OSS VST plugins a pain. Especially for Linux which generally will want to build their packages.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2025 07:21:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45679139</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45679139</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45679139</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree the big deal is tool calling.<p>But MCP has at least 2 advantages over cli tools<p>- Tool calling LLM combined w/ structured output is easier to implement as MCP than CLI for complex interactions IMO.<p>- It is more natural to hold state between tool calls in an MCP server than with a CLI.<p>When I read the OT, I initially wondered if I indeed bought into the hype. But then I realized that the small demo I built recently to learn about MCP (<a href="https://github.com/cournape/text2synth" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cournape/text2synth</a>) would have been more difficult to build as a cli. And I think the demo is representative of neat usages of MCP.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2025 22:20:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45622820</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45622820</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45622820</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Since the OT is about EU, it is important to keep in mind that costs per MW are much lower in EU than in the US (or the UK).<p>E.g. according to <a href="https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-edition" rel="nofollow">https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-e...</a>, UK/US is ~10 millions GBP, France ~4.5, and China/Korea/Japan around 2.5.<p>I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:25:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226943</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226943</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226943</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "De-Clouding: Music"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is not cheap, but it is clearly made by people who care about music. In those days where "slop" is so common, for people who can afford it, it is a nice refresher.<p>Another minor inconvenience is that it is memory hungry for large libraries. In my case, for ~1 TB of flac, the docker takes 5-6 GB RAM on my debian NAS. Limiting it at 4 GB definitely crashed w/ OOM, at 8Gb never had issue.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:18:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226881</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226881</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226881</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "Float Exposed"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe I am too mathematically enclined, but this was not easy to understand.<p>The ELI5 explanation of floating point: they approximately give you the same accuracy (in terms of bits) independently of the scale. Whether your number if much below 1, around 1, or much above 1, you can expect to have as much precision in the leading bits.<p>This is the key property, but internalizing it is difficult.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2025 12:03:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45221219</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45221219</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45221219</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "De-Clouding: Music"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I am surprised to see those discussions w/o a single mention of roon. As a music lover, roon is a software I've happily paid 100 of $ for.<p>While not OSS, roon
1) can run on linux
2) supports large local libraries (I have > 2k albums in FLAC, and it supports much more)
3) have roon arc that allows you to listen from phone anywhere
4) has a very good system to link metadata and recommendation <i>within your library</i>.<p>The metadata support is truly wonderful, you can easily browse your music like wikipedia, can find music per composer, performer, discover related musicians, etc. I strongly recommend people serious about music to try it out.<p>I've happily replaced spotify with it a few years ago, and will never go back.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2025 11:40:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45221078</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45221078</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45221078</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "Hashed sorting is typically faster than hash tables"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>the big O copmlexity makes assumptions that break down in this case. E.g. it "ignores" memory access cost, which seems to be a key factor here.<p>[edit] I should have said "basic big O complexity" makes assumptions that break down. You can ofc decide to model memory access as part of "big O" which is a mathematical model</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Sep 2025 13:21:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45211299</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45211299</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45211299</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "ML needs a new programming language – Interview with Chris Lattner"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree ability to use python to "script HPC" was key factor, but by itself would not have been enough. What really made it dominate is numpy/scipy/matplotlib becoming good enough to replace matlab 20 years ago, and enabled an explosion of tools on top of it: pandas, scikit learn, and the DL stuff ofc.<p>This is what differentiates python from other "morally equivalent" scripting languages.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Sep 2025 06:47:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45147181</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45147181</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45147181</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "Derivatives, Gradients, Jacobians and Hessians"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree it is confusing, because starting with notation will confuse you. I personally don't like the partial derivative-first definition of those concepts, as it all sounds a bit arbitrary.<p>What made sense to me is to start from the definition of derivative (the best linear approximation in some sense), and then everything else is about how to represent this. vectors, matrices, etc. are all vectors in the appropriate vector space, the derivative is always the same form in a functional form, etc.<p>E.g. you want the derivative of f(M) ? Just write f(M+h) - f(M), and then look for the terms in h / h^2 / etc. Apply chain rules / etc. for more complicated cases. This is IMO a much better way to learn about this.<p>As for notation, you use vec/kronecker product for complicated cases: <a href="https://janmagnus.nl/papers/JRM093.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://janmagnus.nl/papers/JRM093.pdf</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 Aug 2025 23:02:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44935709</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44935709</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44935709</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "The Framework Desktop is a beast"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, memory bandwidth is often the limitation for floating point operations.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 Aug 2025 13:24:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44855035</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44855035</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44855035</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "The Framework Desktop is a beast"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was surprised at previous comparison on omarchy website, because apple m* work really well for data science work that don't require GPU.<p>It may be explained by integer vs float performance, though I am too lazy to investigate. A weak data point, using a matrix product of N=6000 matrix by itself on numpy:<p><pre><code>  - SER 8 8745, linux: 280 ms -> 1.53 Tflops (single prec)
  - my m2 macbook air: it is ~180ms ms -> ~2.4 Tflops (single prec)
</code></pre>
This is 2 mins of benchmarking on the computers I have. It is not apple to orange comparison (e.g. I use the numpy default blas on each platform), but not completely irrelevant to what people will do w/o much effort. And floating point is what matters for LLM, not integer computation (which is what the ruby test suite is most likely bottlenecked by)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 Aug 2025 09:45:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854014</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854014</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854014</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "Hiroshima (1946)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is very likely: the atomic bomb was initially built to defeat Nazi Germany, and the Manhattan program was started before Pearl Harbour. When you read The Atomic Bomb book, many scientists who worked on the bomb justified their effort by defeating the Nazis, and many had to escape from Europe.<p>Once it became clear Nazi were about to be defeated, there were discussions from the scientists about sharing the knowledge w/ all countries. But at that point, the scientists had long lost control over the project.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 Aug 2025 13:33:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44797760</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44797760</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44797760</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "My Ideal Array Language"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If I understand correctly what is meant by rank polymorphism, it is not just about speed, but about ergonomics.<p>Taking examples I am familiar w/, it is key that you can add a scalar 1 to a rank 2 array in numpy/matllab without having to explicitly create a rank 2 array of 1s, and numpy somehow generalizes that (broadcasting). I understand other array programming languages have more advanced/generic versions of broadcasting, but I am not super familiar w/ them</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 04 Aug 2025 15:06:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44786864</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44786864</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44786864</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cdavid in "Skip the exit interview when you leave your job"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Or a good one who cares about their naive reports not to get burn.<p>Like any advice, it is contextual. Especially when working for large organizations, the OT is the right default. If you're leaving because things are bad, it will be a mix of 1) people know but did not care/could not do anything about it and 2) people did not know about specific issues. Younger me thought it was often 2), but actually it is almost always 1).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Jun 2025 23:34:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44361315</link><dc:creator>cdavid</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44361315</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44361315</guid></item></channel></rss>