Hacker News: cipherself

New comment by cipherself in "On Rendering Diffs"

cipherself — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:55:49 +0000

For anyone else who's suffering, paste this in the console in devtools:

  document.getElementsByTagName('main')[0].style.margin = '0 auto';

New comment by cipherself in "Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds"

cipherself — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:00:46 +0000

It's quite exciting how far we've come from the modern exposition of world models by David Ha and Jürgen Schmidhuber in 2018 https://worldmodels.github.io/

New comment by cipherself in "Ask HN: How are you doing RAG locally?"

cipherself — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:31:36 +0000

Here's a Dockerfile that will spin up postgres with pgvector and paradedb https://gist.github.com/cipherself/5260fea1e2631e9630081fb7d...

You can use pgvector for the vector lookup and paradedb for bm25.

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

cipherself — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:24:03 +0000

https://mohamed.computer

New comment by cipherself in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)"

cipherself — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:26:24 +0000

I am trying to get the TLA+ tools to run completely in the browser https://github.com/tlaplus/tlaplus/tree/master/tlatools

New comment by cipherself in "Five Years of Tinygrad"

cipherself — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 09:12:49 +0000

I don't think this is bad, if you know Python then most of the code will be fine for you. I think you're probably referring to pm_reduce_collapse, but while it looks daunting at first, it really isn't when you consider the alternatives, I'd be curious on how you'd improve it short of creating a DSL.

New comment by cipherself in "Parsing Advances"

cipherself — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:25:24 +0000

I have written parsers using parser combinators in Haskell and Clojure. I find that ML-like (Haskell, OCaml, StandardML) languages generally are great at writing parsers, even hand-written ones in it is a superior experience.

In this case, this was a project at $EMPLOYER in an existing codebase with colleagues who have never seen Haskell code, using Haskell would've been a major error in judgement.

New comment by cipherself in "Parsing Advances"

cipherself — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 12:19:58 +0000

One anecdote in the same vein, a couple of months ago, I wanted to parse systemd-networkd INI files in Python and the python built-in ConfigParser [0] and pytest's iniconfig parser [1] couldn't handle multiple sections with the same name so I ended up writing 2 parsers, one using a ParserCombinator library and one by hand and ended up using the latter given it was much simpler to understand and I didn't have to introduce an extra dependency.

Admittedly, INI is quite a simple format, hence I mention this as an anecdote.

[0] https://docs.python.org/3/library/configparser.html

[1] https://github.com/pytest-dev/iniconfig

New comment by cipherself in "Capsudo: Rethinking sudo with object capabilities"

cipherself — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 11:00:51 +0000

I have used systemd services before to do this to run an application, I had a user created specifically for the application, and I defined the capabilities the application needed via CapabilityBoundingSet and AmbientCapabilities [0] and I used a lot of stuff from [1] to restrict the application e.g. the sandboxing facilities, restricting the allowed syscalls [2], ...etc. systemd also comes with a useful command systemd analyze security [3]

[0] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

[2] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

[3] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

New comment by cipherself in "Building a Simple Search Engine That Works"

cipherself — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 08:32:51 +0000

That was a great book, I wonder what the 2025 equivalent of it is...

New comment by cipherself in "Show HN: Spam classifier in Go using Naive Bayes"

cipherself — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 01:13:56 +0000

12 (13?) years ago I had also written a Naïve Bayes classifier in Perl https://github.com/cipherself/NaiveBayes_perl

IIRC, next thing on my TODO list was to add vectorization. Also (like OP) it uses log probabilities to avoid floating-point underflow.

New comment by cipherself in "Heartbeats in Distributed Systems"

cipherself — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 10:59:20 +0000

10 years ago I've implemented SCAMP (a gossip protocol) in Clojure, you might find it interesting, the implementation is quite small https://github.com/cipherself/gossip

New comment by cipherself in "How often does Python allocate?"

cipherself — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:10:26 +0000

> I recommend using the `dir` function in a REPL

A while back I wrote this https://mohamed.computer/posts/python-internals-cpython-byte..., perhaps it's interesting for people who use `dir` and wonder what some of the weird things that show up are.

New comment by cipherself in "Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents"

cipherself — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 21:13:08 +0000

Assuming that's what he meant, why would it be considered baseline versus anything else? I am genuinely curious because I'd like to know more about issues people face with this or that vector store in general.

New comment by cipherself in "Code from MIT's 1986 SICP video lectures"

cipherself — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 10:35:35 +0000

Moreover, you can have SICP inside emacs by just downloading a package from Melpa:

https://melpa.org/#/sicp

New comment by cipherself in "Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents"

cipherself — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 10:32:10 +0000

Got it, I think this might make sense for a "conversation" type of search not for an instant search feature because lowest latency is gonna be too high IMO.

New comment by cipherself in "Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents"

cipherself — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:08:46 +0000

S3 Vectors is hands down the SOTA here

SOTA for what? Isn't it just a vector store?

New comment by cipherself in "Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents"

cipherself — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:04:32 +0000

I am working on search but rather for text-to-image retrieval, nevertheless, I am curious if by that's all baked into Azure AI search you also meant synthetic query generation from the grandparent comment. If so, what's your latency for this? And do you extract structured data from the query? If so, do you use LLMs for that?

Moreover I am curious why you guys use bm25 over SPLADE?

New comment by cipherself in "Docker Hub Is Down"

cipherself — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 07:28:45 +0000

While I haven’t tried --pull=missing, I have tried --pull=never, which I assume is a stricter version and it was still attempting the HEAD request.

New comment by cipherself in "Docker Hub Is Down"

cipherself — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 23:56:20 +0000

I’ll admit I haven’t checked before posting, perhaps an admin can merge both submissions and change the URL on the one you linked to the one in this submission.