Hacker News: hansvm

New comment by hansvm in "Automatic Transmission – a data-privacy study of connected vehicles"

hansvm — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 23:06:41 +0000

There's a certain irony in a touchscreen modal popping up to tell you to keep your eyes on the road.

New comment by hansvm in "Automatic Transmission – a data-privacy study of connected vehicles"

hansvm — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 23:04:09 +0000

Part of the problem is it just gets shoved into a model without enough data support. So I hit the gas hard merging onto the freeway? Of course; your brakes are much more powerful than your throttle if you need to take evasive action, and merging onto the freeway at 50mph is dangerous. The model just sees that you like keeping your foot on the gas from time to time. To keep your rates low you have to drive more dangerously, and that's not the sort of incentive structure I like to participate in.

New comment by hansvm in "Automatic Transmission – a data-privacy study of connected vehicles"

hansvm — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 22:58:02 +0000

I tried using an older version of that program, and it was especially annoying because it only worked if you let it monitor and phone home continuously, not just while driving. If the app couldn't steal your information often enough, you were disqualified from the program, stating that it assumed you were hiding some driving activity.

New comment by hansvm in "Adding Floating-Point Decimals for Fun and Profit"

hansvm — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:33:09 +0000

I like using rational types for that sort of thing.

New comment by hansvm in "What TLA+ can and can't check"

hansvm — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:28:19 +0000

Yeah, the last time I had to check anything regarding memory orderings, I wrote a custom analyzer for that problem. It's...not easy. The state space is enormous too, so even with compiled code I had to take some shortcuts and prove parts of the problem by hand.

New comment by hansvm in "There are no "rogue" AI agents"

hansvm — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 17:54:47 +0000

The people getting made richer are the people who already have connections and power. People quip about how capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the others, but its actual property is that it's inevitable without external pressures preventing it from happening -- people who have money (power) are able to use it to claim more money (power). If even a few people choose to exercise that privilege and that privilege isn't curtailed by other mechanisms, the current "wealth inequality" or whatever you want to call it is inevitable. Your girlfriend's crime was writing malware while poor, not writing malware.

New comment by hansvm in "Too AI; Didn't Read"

hansvm — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 21:34:06 +0000

How do you tactfully fix that, or can you?

New comment by hansvm in "I'm tired of being on the network"

hansvm — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:28:45 +0000

For an example from my own life (technically less relevant because if it comes down to it I'm fortunate and stubborn enough to win the lawsuit if that's what it comes down to, but swap me for any of their other million customers and the story still applies), my HSA has unilaterally made owning a sufficiently modern smartphone (<3yrs practically speaking, though it depends a bit on the manufacturer) with all the secure enclave bells and whistles mandatory to access my money I voluntarily placed into their system under a completely set of rules. Customer service has gone nowhere. If I couldn't afford the lawsuit, what options would I have? The employer offering the HSA a decade ago was just trying (and succeeding) to provide a nice benefit. I would've been insane to turn down a bunch of free money from my employer when the only stipulation was that it went through a third party taking a <<1% cut. The fuck-the-customer mentality happened later, and suddenly enough I couldn't do anything about it. If some family caves to their demands to access their own money, I'm not going to be the one to blame them for not being intentional about their decision making.

New comment by hansvm in "Mercury 2.5 LLM hits 770 tokens per second"

hansvm — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:30:25 +0000

If it could output 1k tokens per second but needed 4 seconds to produce the first batch of 4k, would that not be viable?

New comment by hansvm in "Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update"

hansvm — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 14:15:29 +0000

There's an old joke floating around if anyone remembers where it's from:

A tech enthusiast has the latest and greatest smartphones, voice assistants, and everything else cool and flashy. A programmer has a single inkjet printer from the 90s, and they keep a shotgun by their bedside in case it makes a noise.

New comment by hansvm in "ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector"

hansvm — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 02:36:42 +0000

Maybe 3 decades ago people had excuses, but the latest decade of cookie abuses have been designed by people who not only knew better but who took that better world into account as they buried it away from the general public. The fact that half a million developers think CORS is a server security measure isn't an accident.

New comment by hansvm in "Principles for Fast Tokio Applications"

hansvm — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:49:10 +0000

I'm not sure how other people are using LLMs for instrumentation, but IMO the layer you want running in prod is very different from what you want running for a one-off test. E.g., I have some code floating around which burns a pinned core on increasing a counter, with a little wrapper code around grabbing real timestamps at the beginning and end of a session and converting between the two units of time. It's helpful when microbenchmarking a very small unit of code as it actually behaves in a larger program (not perfect -- obviously tweaks the icache and pipeline behavior at a minimum -- but no measurement has zero tradeoffs, and you're always choosing which set of tradeoffs you prefer). An LLM can quickly instrument the call path I care about while I study this or that intervention. The ability to bang out a large amount of throwaway code is delightful.

New comment by hansvm in "Data collected by cars and sold to third parties"

hansvm — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 02:31:29 +0000

I know you're not the culprit, but it's annoying to see crap like this (highly invasive tracking, ostensibly for slightly more efficient tax collection), when far cheaper, better efforts (like Rhode Island's attempt to add tolls for just semis -- 98-99% of their freeway maintenance costs) are killed before they have a chance to prove themselves.

New comment by hansvm in "Bad code is kudzu"

hansvm — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 23:26:23 +0000

FWIW, I've seen the flip-side as well; solid coding patterns are easy for a person (or an LLM) to copy. To abuse the analogy a bit, your gardeners are happy copying whatever happens to be there, bad code will dominate that process unless actively removed, and the exponential nature of that arrangement favours removing trash code (weeds) early, much earlier than you might otherwise think.

New comment by hansvm in "Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?"

hansvm — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 22:01:17 +0000

- The big problem is that malicious ads are being displayed without appropriate attribution

- Add that attribution -- blame Google (or, supposing the ads are good, credit Google; a good header goes a long way toward swaying people's opinions)

- But it doesn't matter if a single website appropriately attributes Google's highest/lowest-quality ads. The last step (speculative and hand-wavy) is to incorporate that behaviour in some sort of software more people want to use. If you're fighting alone then you'll lose. If you can convince more people that appropriately crediting Google's advertising successes and blaming their malicious failures is advantageous, you'll (by definition) have more traction in the anti-megacorp-endorsed scams and other life-altering consequences.

New comment by hansvm in "Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?"

hansvm — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 21:01:36 +0000

That seems fixable. When people include this JS garbage, have a header/title/etc stating that this is Google's professional opinion. Bake it into a library offering enough other features that a large number of people are inclined to use it.

New comment by hansvm in "Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master"

hansvm — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 19:01:24 +0000

The fatigue aspect matters too, but another important point I was trying to get across is that not all reviews are created equally. In a working, well tested, properly factored system, with a high quality PR, I can do a cursory, local analysis of the new code and be very confident that it works. AI code I've seen is ... not that. I wouldn't be comfortable in that review without manually checking preconditions and postconditions, defining invariants, examining lifetimes, and a host of other activities. Moreover, for a greenfield replacement of lots of SLOC, I'd expect that most of the code for the early PRs can't even meaningfully run or do anything important, making any sort of broader architectural analysis impossible.

I could see a world potentially where they came up with a magic prompt allowing each proposed PR to be cohesive, shippable, well factored, and everything else you need to be able to actually review it at a higher level and be comfortable with the results, but I'm skeptical. That's a major innovation if they managed to do so even as a one-off, and that wasn't the thing they highlighted when talking about the project.

New comment by hansvm in "Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master"

hansvm — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 06:13:01 +0000

Assuming the LLM never got anything wrong or otherwise had to be re-prompted, that means your devs were reviewing 130 SLOC per hour, on what was described as moderately greenfield (examining new implementations rather than comparing to old historical accidents).

How?

I don't want to sound flippant, but if the point is to add human thought to the mix, that's a high review rate even when examining small tweaks to an existing, working product, even with substantial AI help to pre-filter major gotchas before you bother spending a lot of human effort on the review. That's only 20-30wpm, but a review isn't just scanning or reading code, especially if you're trying to figure out how a new system which doesn't run yet will fit together.

New comment by hansvm in "Why Emacs Consult async searches feel slow and how to speed them up"

hansvm — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:12:45 +0000

I've had good luck disabling the internet when I need my work computer to run faster. Those "security" checks are optional, and it'll let you work offline.

If just logging filesystem interactions and whatnot for future upload is also slow then you're hosed, but at one place I worked every application too an extra several seconds to start up for some sort of remote program inspection, which is fine till the application is git, grep, or cd.

New comment by hansvm in "Why Emacs Consult async searches feel slow and how to speed them up"

hansvm — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:10:24 +0000

> scrolled reddit

> no focus-wandering, no lollygagging