Hacker News: cheepin

New comment by cheepin in "Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing"

cheepin — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 06:46:27 +0000

All of the things you mentioned are designed and tested incrementally. Furthermore software has been used on Mars missions in the past, and that software was also developed incrementally. It’s proposed as the best way because it’s a way that has a track record

New comment by cheepin in "Career Asymtotes"

cheepin — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 04:30:07 +0000

That’s a pretty solid endorsement. Where do you work?

Simian Sympathy: Harnessing Your Inner Ape for Peak Performance

cheepin — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 19:59:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tantaluspath.com/tales/simian_sympathy/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43849986

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by cheepin in "A 10x Faster TypeScript"

cheepin — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:58:28 +0000

Rust memory management is automatic. Object destructors run when the object exits scope without needing explicit management by the programmer

Show HN: 100 Depth tree search on your iPhone with Rust

cheepin — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 20:44:41 +0000

I made this app with Rust + React Native. It combines a puzzle game with a solver. While quite a lot of work went into UX, the solver is what I’m most proud of and was the first functional piece of the app. Originally, it solved one layer at a time, but when I added the undo feature I decided to try to go deeper and try to answer “What if the solver has perfect knowledge of the RNG?”. Going from computer CPU to phone and from search depth of 36 to 108 was obviously not going to get good brute force coverage considering I could only explore 30ish moves in a reasonable time which is a small percentage of all paths even before tripling the length of a solution. It ended up being a rabbit hole that led to what might be a novel search strategy that finds higher scores despite eliminating most of the pruning that made the single layer so fast.

Rust was chosen because I like it and already had success using it for game solving. I also had written another iOS app using Rust for the business logic. React Native as the UI was something I wanted to evaluate after their ability to interface with Rust code vastly improved last year with the release of uniffi-bindgen-react-native. The only reason it isn’t also available for Android is procrastination.

The rules of the puzzle come from an old Java game, which means that by reading the decompiled source and porting the RNG from Java, the app is a pretty faithful reproduction. In fact, if you sniff the seed from the game’s network traffic or dump it from the game’s memory, you can replay the same game.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42797295

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Show HN: Random Positive Reward App for iPhone

cheepin — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 23:01:27 +0000

I built an iPhone app that is now available in the App Store. Its purpose is to make it easy and effective to use intermittent positive reinforcement as a motivation tool - the psychological phenomenon behind doom-scrolling, gambling, and animal training, now finally purposed for your benefit. It provides the tools to manage the little treats your brain needs to move in the right direction, combined with gamification designed to support your journey and encourage healthy usage.

This is the outgrowth of a “scratch your own itch” project when I learned about how variable reward schedules and wanted to be able to use it to break through times of lower motivation. While simpler alternatives like rolling a (virtual) d20 worked to prove the concept, there was a lot of room for improvement. There’s a system for dynamically weighting outcomes inspired by how RNG-heavy video games avoid big streaks of wins/losses. The other big idea was building anticipation into the app itself in the form of gamification so even if your rewards themselves aren’t really getting you into the right headspace at some time, there’s something to work towards in-app to add an extra boost.

SwiftUI for presentation, Rust for business logic in case it ever pencils out business-wise to port to another platform. If I was doing it again starting today, I would probably do React Native for the UI, but the integration story with Rust was pretty weak when I was evaluating options (they work together well enough now, and I have another project combining them, but not able to justify a UI rewrite yet).

CTA: this is a niche product in a (currently) non-existent market category. I’m starving for feedback, so if you have opinions about the app or even just the problem space, please let me know (comments here, App Support link from App Store, or messages to TantalusPath on social media), and I’ll eat it up!

TantalusPath https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tantaluspath/id6504832898

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42732016

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by cheepin in "UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored"

cheepin — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 22:02:10 +0000

Here's why: https://bconnected.berkeley.edu/projects/google-cost-reducti...

TLDR: Google Workspace for Education rug pulled schools on their "unlimited" plans, and the deadline is coming up to avoid paying extra fees. This was communicated in advance, but maybe still a bit quick for a large institution

New comment by cheepin in "Gitlab is reportedly up for sale"

cheepin — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 04:26:20 +0000

I recently had a recruiter from them email for hybrid positions with no remote so take that as you will

Edit: 15 remote engineering positions open out of 219 total on their career site

iOS App Launch Timeline 2024, Red Tape Review from Local App to TestFlight

cheepin — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 20:35:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tantaluspath.com/tales/ios_launch_timeline_review/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40860182

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: How are you using Intermittent Reward? (or why you ought to try it)

cheepin — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 20:14:32 +0000

Random Intermittent Reward (known as Variable Ratio Reinforcement Schedule in the field of Applied Behavior Analysis) is a powerful concept from psychology. It states that the increase in motivation (through dopamine) from the anticipation of a reward is stronger when the reward is not guaranteed. You can see this effect in action with gambling, social media, mobile games (especially loot boxes), and dog training. If you're noticing themes of manipulation or addiction, that's not accidental. In the most typical and visible places that random intermittent rewards are implemented, it reinforces behaviors that are not well aligned with people's values.

It seems like a waste for something this effective to only be used against us, when it could be a huge asset for our personal growth.

I want to know if you have tried using this concept to motivate yourself to do things that are important to you. How did it go? What kind of behaviors were you trying to motivate? What kind of rewards worked or didn't?

Disclaimer: I've been using this concept for a while now to great effect, so I'm building a phone app to make it easier, more effective, and fun to use. You can go to https://tantaluspath.com to see more information and sign up to get notified when the app is available.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39771488

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by cheepin in "Evil Coding Incantations"

cheepin — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 02:59:42 +0000

This isn’t correct for a=5, b=0, c=0. It would return true while OP’s example would return false

New comment by cheepin in "How Much Do You Know About Solving Global Warming?"

cheepin — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 22:42:12 +0000

He was almost assuredly talking about enforcing carbon tax. Enforcing working hours limits has already been accomplished in many countries.

New comment by cheepin in "The 20 Best Cars That Still Offer a Manual Transmission in the US"

cheepin — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 06:04:34 +0000

"An estimated 95% of all cars sold in the U.S. have automatic drive, versus less than 20% in Europe and Japan, where stick-shift is the overwhelming transmission of choice."

Still a good market globally, if not in the US. I'm more worried about EVs taking over than automatic transmissions.

http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/americans-driving-stick-shi...

New comment by cheepin in "Rust is more than safety"

cheepin — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 22:15:34 +0000

The discussion he referenced, if you haven't seen it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13267537

New comment by cheepin in "Stroustrup's Rule and Layering Over Time in Rust"

cheepin — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 01:55:31 +0000

Or you can call map_err to do an on-the-spot transformation if you don't have a general way to go from Error A to Error B.

I still sometimes make mistakes reading rust code with the ? at the end of the line, but it's just a question of what type is it and does the line return. Both of which are handled by the compiler in the end, so you get a little bit of extra knowledge that even if you misread the line of code, there's often limits to how much damage you can cause.

New comment by cheepin in "Sub-millisecond GC pauses in Go 1.8"

cheepin — Sat, 29 Oct 2016 03:53:49 +0000

If you are measuring response in nanoseconds, 100 microseconds is still a lot.

However, it may be good enough for games at well below 1% of your time budget for a 60 fps game assuming cache locality is good enough so you don't waste too much time fetching from main memory.

New comment by cheepin in "Alphabet Creating Stand-Alone Self-Driving Car Business"

cheepin — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 03:33:00 +0000

In my experience they don't really stand out other than being a bit slow (for which it actually got ticketed).

They seem to just be very conservative.

New comment by cheepin in "Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites"

cheepin — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 05:38:39 +0000

DDOS usually occurs via a botnet of infected networked devices. Thus, the attacker is getting their resources for "free" since their host is unknowingly wasting CPU and bandwidth during the attack, while the defender is paying for theirs.

New comment by cheepin in "2017 Rust Roadmap"

cheepin — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 02:39:23 +0000

> Is there an equivalent guide to the compile-time representation of important constructs for those trying to learn C/C++?

Definitely. It was taught in school and there's pretty good guides for it online (maybe not caught up to c++11 and beyond, but the fundamentals are there). You're right that it is not readily available for most languages, but when you need to get serious about performance you either are going to have a guide or spend a lot of time looking at assembly/bytecode. To be fair, I'd probably still have to inspect generated code sometimes, but it's nice to have good instincts for how things run to guide your design/implementation so you can spend less time looking at assembly.

http://www.agner.org/optimize/optimizing_cpp.pdf

New comment by cheepin in "2017 Rust Roadmap"

cheepin — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 01:38:08 +0000

I read through the Rust book, and the problem I was having with it and the other docs is that it was hard to map the Rust concepts with what actually runs when it is compiled. For a language that touts "uncompromising performance", it was difficult for me to find performance characteristics of the underlying abstractions and std library (for example, are algebraic data structures just tagged unions or does the compiler do more fancy things with them? What about iterators?). I'd really like to see a "Rust for C/C++ devs" guide that helps you figure out if you were using [some C++ feature] the way to get that behavior/performance with idiomatic Rust.

Another thing that is still tricky for me is figuring out when I should use 'unsafe' blocks in my code. Is it to be avoided if at all possible, or should I go there any time the 'safe' part of the language is making it difficult to express what I want? The meme that Rust is C++ without SegFaults and or race conditions is a bit misleading since the actual guarantee is that you don't get SegFaults or Race conditions outside of Unsafe blocks, and any nontrivial project will make use of unsafe blocks.