Hacker News: incorrecthorse

New comment by incorrecthorse in "Why is everything so scalable?"

incorrecthorse — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 16:59:47 +0000

Plot twist: It's not actually scalable because no amount of tools and buzzwords can compensate for the lack of experience in proper architecture for scaling.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole"

incorrecthorse — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 07:51:24 +0000

> For the uninitiated, Linear is a project management tool that feels impossibly fast. Click an issue, it opens instantly. Update a status and watch in a second browser, it updates almost as fast as the source. No loading states, no page refreshes - just instant, interactions.

How garbage the web has become for a low-latency click action being qualified as "impossibly fast". This is ridiculous.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords"

incorrecthorse — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 08:47:47 +0000

And compute-intensive hash functions. Computers this day are powerful enough to hashcat each individual pwd+salt if a fast hashing function is used.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "Log by time, not by count"

incorrecthorse — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 10:19:47 +0000

I think the common confusion boils down to:

> The moment of capturing a measurement is known as a metric event

Which suspiciously reads like a log.

In practice, a metric is an aggregate of events (the "metric events") when you're not interested in the individual event but, but in the aggregate itself. For practical reasons this is not implemented with logs but with more primitive technical events emission.

This is not fundamentally incompatible notions. If you do an electrocardiogram, you might be interested in your BPM, but it is deduced by the full log of each beat. The segregation we do in computing is more practical than fundamental.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "Locality of Behaviour (2020)"

incorrecthorse — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 15:00:26 +0000

The bad ID naming `d1` is convenient for the argument...

New comment by incorrecthorse in "OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B"

incorrecthorse — Tue, 06 May 2025 13:37:07 +0000

It blows my mind OpenAI wouldn't be able to build a Windsurf alternative for orders of magnitude less than $3B.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "The case against conversational interfaces"

incorrecthorse — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 10:11:50 +0000

> we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute

I would like to know what this measures exactly.

The reason I often prefer writing to talking is because writing lets me the time to pause and think. In those cases the bottleneck is very clearly my thought process (which, at least consciously, doesn't appear to me as "words").

New comment by incorrecthorse in "Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row"

incorrecthorse — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 17:06:19 +0000

It _is_ equivalent to a back door, that's the point. The UK demand can be accessed more rapidly and properly by disabling the feature than by implementing a backdoor, since it is the same thing.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "The Generative AI Con"

incorrecthorse — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 17:54:33 +0000

> So, what exactly has generative AI actually done? Where are the products?

The product is ChatGPT, actually.

If LLMs are a bubble, then you should expect most of OpenAI's revenue to come from its API (which is used by startups which have raised money to do "magic AI stuff", and the bubble would pop when investors would stop giving the money). But according to https://futuresearch.ai/openai-revenue-report, revenue from the API accounts only for 15%, the other 85% being the different subscriptions offers, including 55% of ChatGTP Plus subscriptions -- that is, _direct consumers_.

This doesn't prove that it isn't a bubble (the consumers could realize it's useless and then leave some time later), but it makes it less likely IMO.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "My washing machine refreshed my thinking on software estimation"

incorrecthorse — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 17:42:23 +0000

Do they have an incentive to learn? If the reward process in the company also consider it "out of scope" (meaning the remaining work is scheduled as such), there is nothing to really learn.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "We all took the DVD boom era for granted"

incorrecthorse — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 09:10:29 +0000

*Cinephiles took the DVD boom era for granted

The reason it ended is because the general public doesn't care.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "Rye and Uv: August Is Harvest Season for Python Packaging"

incorrecthorse — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 08:17:45 +0000

Those people seem to have a passion for developing package managers (instead of just seeing it as a tool that needs to do the job), and as long as it is the case, I don't see how we wouldn't end up with one new package manager every year.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "Data Exfiltration from Slack AI via indirect prompt injection"

incorrecthorse — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:20:37 +0000

Aren't you screwed from the moment you have a malicious user in your workspace? This user can change their picture/name and directly ask for the API key, or send some phishing link or get loose on whatever social engineering is fundamentally possible in any instant message system.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "Recent Performance Improvements in Function Calls in CPython"

incorrecthorse — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 15:59:05 +0000

It can take an arbitrary amount of time. Modules are just code executed top to bottom, and might contain anything beyond mere constants and functions declaration.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "RLHF is just barely RL"

incorrecthorse — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 14:35:16 +0000

Code coverage proves that the code runs, not that it does what it should do.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "RLHF is just barely RL"

incorrecthorse — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 09:58:38 +0000

Unless you want an empty test suite or a test suite full of `assert True`, the reward function is more complicated than you think.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "CrowdStrike's impact on aviation"

incorrecthorse — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 08:36:29 +0000

The update affected less than 1% of all Windows machines. [1] Although maybe the biggest software failure in history, far from the biggest possible one. The level of cloud connectivity in the world could basically break the world if we didn't have diversity.

[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/07/20/helping-our-cust...

New comment by incorrecthorse in "The Seal Failure in the SRB That Doomed Challenger (2021)"

incorrecthorse — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 08:35:16 +0000

> Those two flight deck pilots had breathed-up all the oxygen in their breathing packs by the time they hit the sea, something confirmed by the empty breathing packs that were recovered. Which means they were alive when they hit the sea!

I don't understand how this follows. The best scenario is that they had their last drops of oxygen around hitting the sea; in other scenarios they died from lack of oxygen before hitting the sea.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "The rarest move in chess [video]"

incorrecthorse — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 09:27:08 +0000

Board state itself becomes unique pretty quickly, so you would just end up with a gigantic lot of "moves" played only 1 time.

EDIT: so you could define "rare" moves as the biggest difference of occurrences between state N and state N+1.

New comment by incorrecthorse in "Static Chess"

incorrecthorse — Tue, 14 May 2024 10:25:53 +0000

Looks like this missed the opportunity to load the board in JS from the URL to be truly static.