Hacker News: cpa

New comment by cpa in "Pareto Front"

cpa — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:00:58 +0000

At $JOB, I use the Pareto frontier all the time.

If one option is at least as good on every relevant dimension and better on one, just pick it. That's not really a trade-off, and it shouldn't need escalation. Eg, if two SaaS tools cost the same and have similar support, but one fits your use case better, you choose that one. Otherwise, you just suck at your job!

The interesting decisions only start once you're already on the frontier, where getting more of one thing means giving up something else. If the better tool costs 50% more, now you're trading capability against cost, and that may need sign-off.

Basically, everyone should be able to get to the frontier on their own. Coordination and arbitration at higher levels of the org / between different departments should happen on the frontier, where the trade-offs involve several people or teams.

New comment by cpa in "Umuganda"

cpa — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:37:14 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e

New comment by cpa in "Why the Next Era of AI Is About Infrastructure, Not Just Models"

cpa — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:11:54 +0000

It's nice to be rich.

New comment by cpa in "Geosql: A Claude/Codex skill for geospatial data"

cpa — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:14:44 +0000

This space is very active. I work at the French mapping agency, and we're currently building MCPs to work with our data.

See: https://github.com/ignfab/geocontext (French) Beta MCP instance: https://geollm.beta.ign.fr/geocontext/mcp

Unrelated, but also take a look at the nice high-density LiDAR point data we have! https://visionneuse-lidarhd.ign.fr/?px=4441970.281583222&py=...

New comment by cpa in "Ask HN: What is everyone in SF talking about?"

cpa — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:15:54 +0000

Something something AI

New comment by cpa in "Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good"

cpa — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:17:59 +0000

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...

New comment by cpa in "All 9,300 Japanese train station, animated by the year it opened (1872–2026)"

cpa — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:03:05 +0000

Super cool! I did something similar (in terms of visualisation) a few years back, a map of cities by their birthdate on wikipedia: https://cpa.github.io/wiki-cities-birthdates/

New comment by cpa in "Accelerate – Embedded language for high-performance array computations"

cpa — Sat, 16 May 2026 15:57:59 +0000

For those wondering what it's for: it's basically NumPy + a JIT compiler with standard Haskell syntax (you mostly just need to change the type signatures, not the code).

It can vectorize, parallelize on the CPU, or offload to the GPU automatically.

It's a very mature project, maybe 10+ years old.

Google Knol

cpa — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:19:13 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113098

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Show HN: Multiplayer Voronoi

cpa — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:21:20 +0000

A multiplayer hommage to Jean-Michel Sanejouand's Jeu de Topo (1963), a game with no winner or loser where partners arrange stones until both points of view are satisfied.

Here, stones become colored points in a game based on Voronoi diagrams. The original opposing points of view become each player's screen: everyone shares the same points, but phones, tablets, and browser windows frame the space differently, so each player is likely seeing a different Voronoi view.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47960061

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by cpa in "Monad Tutorials Timeline"

cpa — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 06:55:24 +0000

Pretty cool!

I've spent a lot of time wrapping my head around monads; whenever I thought I "got it," I would come across some exotic monad that completely blew my mind. The best way to understand them is not to rely on analogies but just follow the rules—everybody says that, but it took me a while to truly realize it.

See, for example, the Tardis monad or the Cont monad: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/446d13/exotic_mona...

New comment by cpa in "Men who stare at walls"

cpa — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:43:33 +0000

I thought it'd be the male version of https://www.thehairpin.com/women-laughing-alone-with-salad/

New comment by cpa in "Everything we like is a psyop?"

cpa — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 06:34:45 +0000

Top comment of a frontpage post, you're not doing that bad at marketing.

New comment by cpa in "Trust signals as sparklines for Hacker News"

cpa — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 07:45:21 +0000

Interesting, but how is the trust signal measured? I couldn’t find this information

New comment by cpa in "Owner of ICE detention facility sees big opportunity in AI man camps"

cpa — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:00:15 +0000

As member of OSCE, they have observers although it’s fairly light.

https://odihr.osce.org/odihr/elections/usa/580111

New comment by cpa in "The normalization of corruption in organizations (2003) [pdf]"

cpa — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:53:37 +0000

Another good read: https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/business-ethics/resou...

New comment by cpa in "Show HN: MOL – A programming language where pipelines trace themselves"

cpa — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:42:16 +0000

Pretty cool to have a first-class tracing mechanism. Obviously... it's a monad! Haskell has had a MonadTrace monad for a long time, that can be switched on or off depending on your environment.

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/tracing-0.0.7.4/docs/Con...

New comment by cpa in "Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition"

cpa — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:50:15 +0000

It reminds me of when I used to write lisp, where code is data. You can abuse reflection (and macros) to great effect, but you never feel safe.

See also: string interpolation and SQL injection, (unhygienic) C macros

New comment by cpa in "Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes"

cpa — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 12:47:22 +0000

To add to sibling comment, if you have streaming data you have to update the whole index every time with r/kd trees whereas with H3 you just compute the bin, O(1) instead of O(log n).

Not rocket science but different tradeoffs, that’s what engineering is all about.

New comment by cpa in "Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes"

cpa — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 10:10:52 +0000

The big reason is that H3 is data independant. You put your data in predefined bins and then join on them, whereas kd/r trees depend on the data and building the trees may become prohibitive or very hard (especially in distributed systems).