Hacker News: girfan

New comment by girfan in "The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++"

girfan — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:44:32 +0000

Partly serious, partly in jest: so type systems are no good?

New comment by girfan in "Claude Fable 5"

girfan — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:25:41 +0000

This is super annoying and imo, really limits the usefulness of this model. It speaks volumes about what Anthropic's position as a company and its priorities will be going forward. I doubt this kind of gatekeeping will prevent open-models or other innovation outside Anthropic to slow down. I would imagine these guardrails, if needed at all, should be done at a legal framework level and students should not be a part of this blanket approach to limiting the usage of these models.

New comment by girfan in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

girfan — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:09:01 +0000

I broadly agree with the premise. As a PhD student in Computer Science, I feel there are some significant upsides to my work routine. LLM access has made many new domains more "accessible" to me which I otherwise would be too hesitant in investing my time in. For example, my area of research is computer systems which involves operating systems, distributed systems and more recently systems for AI. Within these, there is a wide breadth of topics/techniques one can employ and up until now, I have not gone deep into theoretical aspects of things like scheduling etc. But with access to LLMs, I feel like I can at least brainstorm from a high-level about these sub-areas that I am not well-versed in and the responses give me some relevant pieces to start exploring on my own, depending on what interests me more or the amount of time I want to spend on that sub-branch of a larger tree of ideas. However, the one thing I do have skepticism is the lack of awareness of blind-spots when dabbling into areas that I am not an expert in, and taking the LLM's lead in applying such techniques to some systems problems that I am working on. I often feel that I am not aware of what alternatives exist that the LLM has not explored for me, or if the directions it has proposed really do apply or have corner cases/assumptions that break in what I am doing. On the other hand, when working on something I have good intuitions about, I am often correcting the model's assumptions and it back-tracks what it told me. Unfortunately, I cannot do that comfortably with topics I don't have good intuition about which limits my confidence in "if this is the right direction to pursue."

New comment by girfan in "Virtualizing Nvidia HGX B200 GPUs with Open Source"

girfan — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:01:45 +0000

Cool post. Have you looked at slicing a single GPU up for multiple VMs? Is there anything other than MIG that you have come across to partition SMs and memory bandwidth within a single GPU?

New comment by girfan in "Marble: A Multimodal World Model"

girfan — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:56:51 +0000

This seems very interesting. Timely, given that Yann LeCun's vision also seems to align with world models being the next frontier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45897271

New comment by girfan in "Teddit – An alternative Reddit front-end focused on privacy"

girfan — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 02:09:55 +0000

Right now it seems legal to scrape Reddit. But given their trajectory of making the API fairly expensive to use, do you think it's likely that they would also limit/prohibit scraping (assuming apps like Apollo start scraping as an alternative)?

New comment by girfan in "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing"

girfan — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 02:04:30 +0000

Even if that is the case, it does not say much about their ability to evaluate what category of users (e.g., those coming from Apollo or their first-party clients) is generating more views/interactions and indirectly more "value" on their platform.

New comment by girfan in "Faster CPython 3.12 Plan"

girfan — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 15:20:55 +0000

That's great!

There are a few cases where `dlmopen` has issues, for example, some libraries are written with the assumption that there will only be one of them in the process (their use of globals/thread local variables etc.) which may result in conflicts across namespaces.

Specifically, `libpthread` has one such issue [1] where `pthread_key_create` will create duplicate keys in separate namespaces. But these keys are later used to index into `THREAD_SELF->specific_1stblock` which is shared between all namespaces, which can cause all sorts of weird issues.

There is a (relatively old, unmerged) patch to glibc where you can specify some libraries to be shared across namespaces [2].

[1]: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24776#c13

[2]: https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/glibc/patch/20211010163...

New comment by girfan in "Faster CPython 3.12 Plan"

girfan — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 15:14:33 +0000

Currently it is, yes. I am not sure how fundamental it is. I tried patching glibc to support more (128 in my case) and it seemed to work fine.

New comment by girfan in "Faster CPython 3.12 Plan"

girfan — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 11:57:00 +0000

> You can't load one so/dll multiple times in some sort of container

I believe you can do that with `dlmopen` in separate link maps. I have worked with multiple completely isolated Python interpreters in the same process that do not share a GIL using that approach.

New comment by girfan in "How to choose the right Python concurrency API"

girfan — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 15:04:12 +0000

This is a great analysis; thanks for writing.

I have also been working on running multiple Python interpreters in the same process by isolating them in different namespaces using `dlmopen` [1]. The objective on a high level is to receive requests for some compute intensive operations from a TCP/HTTP server and dispatch them on to different workers. In this case, a thin C++ shim receives the requests and dispatches them on to one of the Python interpreters in a namespace. This eliminates contention for the GIL amongst the interpreters and can exploit parallelism by running each interpreter on a different set of cores. The data obtained from the request does not need to be copied into the interpreter because everything is in the same address space; similarly the output produced by the Python interpreter is also just passed back without any copies to the server.

[1] https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/dlmopen.3.html

New comment by girfan in "New CRISPR-based map ties every human gene to its function"

girfan — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 20:22:42 +0000

Can you please share pointers to some of the podcasts etc. you listened to? Looking for something similar for non-Bio expert people.

New comment by girfan in "Dragonflydb – A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached"

girfan — Mon, 30 May 2022 21:46:48 +0000

This looks like a cool project. Is there any support (or plan to support) I/O through kernel bypass technologies like RDMA? For example, the client reads the objects using 1-sided reads from the server given it knows which address the object lives in. This could be really benefitial for reducing latency and CPU load.

New comment by girfan in "Launch HN: Seed (YC W21) – A Fully-Managed CI/CD Pipeline for Serverless"

girfan — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 21:48:08 +0000

Cool product! Any plans to support Azure Functions?

New comment by girfan in "Ask HN: How do you learn complex, dense technical information?"

girfan — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 16:52:47 +0000

Here is something that has helped me a lot. It's a paper on how to read academic papers. You can extract the general idea and apply to many other technical reading material.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPape...

New comment by girfan in "Four Years in Startups"

girfan — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:58:26 +0000

Reading this beautifully written piece brings to mind the recent book about Elizabeth Holmes - Bad Blood. Some of the completely unacceptable behavior by tech CEOs and "higher ups" definitely rings a bell; some startups like Theranos were doing exactly that and ended up getting a lot of negative attention.

New comment by girfan in "“China's Tesla” NIO slashes thousands of jobs as losses mount"

girfan — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 17:49:11 +0000

Just fyi, €80 billion is $87.55 billion.

New comment by girfan in "Ask HN: What advice would you give to a computer science undergraduate?"

girfan — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 21:57:45 +0000

Take courses across a breadth of areas in Computer Science, even if you think you don't (or won't) enjoy them much. Don't take up courses only in areas you enjoy (say, Networking) and have no concrete knowledge of areas you think you don't really like (say, Graphics) - Undergrad in my opinion is ideal for building up breadth of Computer Science knowledge. You can always focus on specific areas in grad school or when you start working.

New comment by girfan in "Practical Deep Learning for Coders"

girfan — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 08:54:28 +0000

This is absolutely amazing. Thanks for the effort. How do we join the slack group for interactive help/questions?

New comment by girfan in "Open Letter to Tim Cook"

girfan — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 01:22:56 +0000

The 15inch MBP has i7 Quad Core processor, Radeon graphics and double the RAM than the default 13inch models. This is not a minor jump in performance. I agree that they do sometimes prioritize size, thickness and beauty over performance but I don't see what else could go into the 15inch MBP that it currently lacks?