Hacker News: eskaytwo

New comment by eskaytwo in "pg_clickhouse v0.10: Subquery pushdown and 1000x faster TPC-H queries"

eskaytwo — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:33:25 +0000

Yeah. There's some solid work in there, but it reads like an LLM without a review pass.

This paragraph has an awkward rhythm:

> Getting more into the nitty-gritty, we also closed a subsecond-precision loss when inserting timestamps over HTTP (#300), and to top it all off, a broader static-analysis pass over the codebase turned up and fixed a handful of other latent bugs (#313); these hadn't showed up in the field, but were worth closing before they could.

Even just asking Claude to apply Strunk and White makes it much easier to read:

> We also fixed a loss of subsecond precision in timestamps inserted over HTTP (#300). A static-analysis pass over the codebase turned up several other latent bugs (#313); none had surfaced in the field, but we fixed them anyway.

And its diagnosis of why the original is tricky shows an LLM is more than capable of improving readability given a couple of review passes:

> Three things make it awkward, and they pile up:

> 1. Two bits of throat-clearing. "Getting more into the nitty-gritty" and "to top it all off" both just say here comes the next thing. Neither tells you anything. Back to back, they read as filler.

> 2. Mixed tone. "Nitty-gritty" and "to top it all off" are chatty; "subsecond-precision loss" and "static-analysis pass" are dry and technical. The sentence keeps switching voice.

> 3. Too much in one sentence. Two unrelated fixes joined by a semicolon, plus a clause hanging off the second one, plus the trailing "before they could." By the end, you've lost track of what "they could" was about — the thing it points back to is thirty words behind you.

It's a shame when solid technical work gets obscured by the poor SNR of default LLM output, when clarity is only a few iterations away.

New comment by eskaytwo in "How Passive Radar Works"

eskaytwo — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:01:40 +0000

Much more covert, and civilian infrastructure also less likely to be blown up.

New comment by eskaytwo in "How Passive Radar Works"

eskaytwo — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:00:36 +0000

With their movement you might get some strange SAR like effects. Computationally complex but could add another dimension over a static tower.

New comment by eskaytwo in "Agentic Software Engineering Book"

eskaytwo — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 08:21:32 +0000

This was done in the analogue age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room

New comment by eskaytwo in "Show HN: NanoClaw – “Clawdbot” in 500 lines of TS with Apple container isolation"

eskaytwo — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:56:26 +0000

Thanks! Was hoping someone would do something more sane like this.

Openclaw is very useful, but like you I share the sentiment of it being terrifying, even before you introduce the social network aspect.

My Mac mini is currently literally switched off for this very reason.

New comment by eskaytwo in "Meditation as Wakeful Relaxation: Unclenching Smooth Muscle"

eskaytwo — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 01:29:29 +0000

Meditation has many techniques. Similar to how people have many different motivations and programs when they have a regular gym practice. Strength is different to agility is different to flexibility.

New comment by eskaytwo in "Meditation as Wakeful Relaxation: Unclenching Smooth Muscle"

eskaytwo — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 01:27:58 +0000

MCTB or Dhamma overground might have been a less confronting link to share :)

New comment by eskaytwo in "Meditation as Wakeful Relaxation: Unclenching Smooth Muscle"

eskaytwo — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 01:24:16 +0000

In more formal traditions the focus on breath (or similar) is to develop concentration/samatha/samadhi. The focus on sensations is the insight/vipassana component, and often this is where the tension bubbles up to the surface. Keeping calm (equanimous) during this process can indeed be non-trivial!

It sounds like you have come to a practice very similar to a lot of the Burmese traditions of insight meditation, which is quite fascinating.

New comment by eskaytwo in "Meditation as Wakeful Relaxation: Unclenching Smooth Muscle"

eskaytwo — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 01:21:52 +0000

I think they’re just focussing on the Samatha concentration aspect?

New comment by eskaytwo in "The best way to use text embeddings portably is with Parquet and Polars"

eskaytwo — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 03:36:55 +0000

There’s some nice plugins too, some are finance related: https://github.com/ddotta/awesome-polars

New comment by eskaytwo in "Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website"

eskaytwo — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 03:09:06 +0000

It’s also important to consider the upcoming tax cuts. Don’t assume the efficiency savings are to return $50.50 to your back pocket.

New comment by eskaytwo in "Ingrid Daubechies awarded National Medal of Science"

eskaytwo — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 06:53:13 +0000

Not every problem needs a CNN thrown at it.

New comment by eskaytwo in "Time-Series Anomaly Detection: A Decade Review"

eskaytwo — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 06:15:52 +0000

Thanks for the pointer. Augurs looks really promising. If the matrix profile method was included it would be a nice alternative to the numba jit methods that are commonplace.

New comment by eskaytwo in "Time-Series Anomaly Detection: A Decade Review"

eskaytwo — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 06:11:55 +0000

It does convolution of each sub sequence across the series length, and then shows the distance of the closest match. This can detect both outliers (long distance from closest match) as well as repeated patterns (short distance).

New comment by eskaytwo in "Time-Series Anomaly Detection: A Decade Review"

eskaytwo — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 06:10:46 +0000

I don’t think it’s the same people.

New comment by eskaytwo in "VMware is now part of Broadcom"

eskaytwo — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 23:14:46 +0000

They deliberately kept them at arms length to protect the brand value

New comment by eskaytwo in "An asteroid will occult Betelgeuse on December 12th"

eskaytwo — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 02:25:12 +0000

for checking this sort of stuff, Stellarium is amazing open-source doftware.

New comment by eskaytwo in "Writerside – a new technical writing environment from JetBrains"

eskaytwo — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 06:11:34 +0000

If this could generate Confluence that would overlap well for a lot of JetBrains IDE users

New comment by eskaytwo in "Recent adventures in performance optimization with Rust"

eskaytwo — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 07:52:34 +0000

DuckDB can also operate on Polars data frames, and return the results to Polars data frames.

New comment by eskaytwo in "Recent adventures in performance optimization with Rust"

eskaytwo — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 05:30:10 +0000

Pandas is ok for numerical, but Polars (rust-based) is absolutely the way to go for big datasets. The article is fascinating if you're a Python developer and you need to stray off the path of things Polars can do.