Hacker News: galdauts

New comment by galdauts in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

galdauts — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:39:32 +0000

A battery cycle is a full discharge/charge cycle (100 -> 0 -> 100). Going from 70% to 20% and then charging back to 70% is half a cycle.

New comment by galdauts in "Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom"

galdauts — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:39:04 +0000

Back when I went to school in Germany, we had a locker at school, but I just took the books I needed for assignments home with me. I haven't heard of schools that don't let you take (loaned) books home.

New comment by galdauts in "Julia: Performance Tips"

galdauts — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:16:25 +0000

The source code is available here: https://gitup.uni-potsdam.de/bsvs/public/hpc-benchmark-game

As far as I know the code was ported to use @floops, with minor optimisations in addition to that.

I think it's quite possible that it's an allocation issue, that's something we're looking into, although I don't have any specific results for Julia yet.

New comment by galdauts in "Julia: Performance Tips"

galdauts — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 11:06:18 +0000

Yes, that's the paper my predecessors worked on! I replicated the measurements with an upgraded version of Julia (1.12), but despite the claimed performance benefits, Julia still performed poorly.

New comment by galdauts in "Julia: Performance Tips"

galdauts — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 11:01:24 +0000

Thank you for the article! We're mainly interested in floating-point performance and energy consumption w/r/t to solving differential equations and tridiagonal systems of equations, while running on a 128-core compute node. Our current results will likely only be presented in May, but here are last year's results: https://www.cs.uni-potsdam.de/bs/research/docs/papers/2025/l...

Our Julia code is parallelised with FLoops.jl, but so far Numba has shown surprising performance benefits when executing code in parallel, despite being slower when executed sequentially. Therefore I can imagine that Julia might yield better results when run in a regular desktop environment.

New comment by galdauts in "Julia: Performance Tips"

galdauts — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:32:08 +0000

We have been running benchmarks to compare different languages relevant to high-performance computing and unfortunately Julia still lags behind even Numba-JIT-compiled Python. Perhaps my understanding of Julia is limited, but even the Rodinia SRAD program, which was originally written in Julia, performs faster in all other implementations that aren't Julia.

New comment by galdauts in "I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor"

galdauts — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 13:15:41 +0000

I agree with you. Having lost a close family member to cancer over a period of years, the only regret I have is not trying more to improve her quality of life for as long as I could. Putting in effort to understand the diagnosis is warranted, but there are no miracle cures, even if there are miracles sometimes.

New comment by galdauts in "We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler"

galdauts — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:50:41 +0000

Precisely. Figuring out what the specification is supposed to look like is often the hardest part.

New comment by galdauts in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

galdauts — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:10:47 +0000

I feel like the use of the term "anti-AI hype" is not really fully explored here. Even limiting myself to tech-related applications - I'm frankly sick of companies trying to shove half-baked "AI features" down my throat, and the enshittification of services that ensues. That has little to do with using LLMs as coding assistants, and yet I think it is still an essential part of the "anti-AI hype".

New comment by galdauts in "Building an AI agent inside a 7-year-old Rails monolith"

galdauts — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 15:26:43 +0000

You see, now they can market the tool as AI-powered! I‘m sure the sales department is overjoyed.

New comment by galdauts in "Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model"

galdauts — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 09:58:25 +0000

I agree. As a frequent reviewer on Goodreads, this feels really icky.

New comment by galdauts in "Sora: Creating video from text"

galdauts — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 10:42:45 +0000

The issue is not even so much generating fake videos as creating plausible deniability. Now everything can be questioned for the pure reason of seeming AI-generated.

New comment by galdauts in "Apple is spending a lot of time and money working out how LLMs might be useful"

galdauts — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 08:16:50 +0000

Do people really want that? I feel like what often makes a game good is a tight experience, not added bloat.

New comment by galdauts in "Ask HN: Why aren’t planes boarded back-to-front?"

galdauts — Sun, 16 Apr 2023 17:20:55 +0000

I was recently on a Norwegian.com flight and they boarded both in the front (using a jet bridge) and at the back (using stairs)

New comment by galdauts in "Overcoming Bias: ‘The Profit’ Socialism Challenge"

galdauts — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 21:14:08 +0000

I'd like to add that there are different flavours of both capitalism and socialism. The kind of disaster capitalism practiced in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries in the 90s certainly didn't lead to an improvement of living standards for quite a long time, if even. China also presents a case of state capitalism where companies are strictly controlled by the government as evidenced by the recent set of regulations published a few weeks ago and many companies are owned by the children of party members.

New comment by galdauts in "Think BTC Is a Dirty Business? Consider the Carbon Cost of a Dollar"

galdauts — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 13:57:26 +0000

Considering the environmental impact of the US economy and its policies is important in its own right, but applying that to the dollar is a stretch in my opinion. Also, the dollar is not the only traditional currency in the world.