Hacker News: jacobgorm

New comment by jacobgorm in "Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account"

jacobgorm — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:32:41 +0000

I've been on Mastodon for a few years, and though it has less drama than Twitter/X, it does seem to have reached critical mass of users and does cover most of my needs for random gossip. I am surprised that that nobody has mentioned it here.

New comment by jacobgorm in "Why some US restaurants are banning tips"

jacobgorm — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:28:05 +0000

You were lucky to get out alive.

New comment by jacobgorm in "US announces new sanctions on top ICC figures"

jacobgorm — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:52:49 +0000

You can always hide in your own country, as long as you or the people who protect you are able to stay in power, but at least you cannot use the rest of the world as playground or shopping center. Sucks to be a rich kleptocrat and not be able to have a yacht in Nice or be able to take your wife shopping in London.

New comment by jacobgorm in "Hillock – Local neuro-symbolic memory engine running in <1.2GB VRAM"

jacobgorm — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:54:28 +0000

There is no memory overhead, in that everything resides on disk/in the sqlite database, and is read from there on demand. That said, sqlite for blob storage is a bit inefficient, so the next version will use tightly packed structs on disk. I also managed to finetune an embedding down to 96d, so in the coming version the storage for the index is getting close to parity with the size of the text being indexed.

New comment by jacobgorm in "Hillock – Local neuro-symbolic memory engine running in <1.2GB VRAM"

jacobgorm — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:22:39 +0000

Here is a project with similar goals (I am the main author), but using late interaction semantic search: https://github.com/dropbox/witchcraft

New comment by jacobgorm in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"

jacobgorm — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:12:08 +0000

I just uninstalled it FWIW.

New comment by jacobgorm in "SpaceX's president is floating a Tesla merger as the company begins trading"

jacobgorm — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:53:12 +0000

Seems very likely, related: https://electrek.co/2026/05/31/a-spacex-tesla-merger-could-t...

New comment by jacobgorm in "Freediving, Embodiment and Humanity – Joanna Rutkowska"

jacobgorm — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:32:27 +0000

Make sure you watch the Big Blue, in the original French (not US, has the wrong soundtrack) version, but with the original(!) English speech, not the dubbed-to-French version.

New comment by jacobgorm in "Sweden becomes a smoke-free country"

jacobgorm — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:59:55 +0000

Smoke free perhaps but not nicotine free by far. I live in Denmark and have a teenage son, he tells me that 90% of girls at his year are hooked on illegally imported and unregulated vapes, much stronger in nicotine than cigarettes, and in some cases loaded with fentanyl and other drugs. We have had the first couple of deaths of 15-year olds already.

Meanwhile, the parents' generation and politicians are looking at the declining cigarette sales (and declining tax revenues) and are busy declaring victory and self-congratulating, with no idea what is coming.

New comment by jacobgorm in "Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027"

jacobgorm — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:16:27 +0000

It is not that long ago that smartphones would die from moisture exposure if you left them in the bathroom while taking a shower. I had a girlfriend around 2001 who spent all her savings on a shiny new Nokia 8250, got drunk and barfed on her jacket. The phone was in the pocket, and the moisture from the wet jacket completely killed it, she cried about it for weeks. I also remember my mother dropping her iPhone 6 in the harbor while getting off a boat, it got picked up but was dead. Last year I was out hiking in the rain, and my aging (5+ years old) iPhone 11 got water inside it and started dying soon after (I'd been sailing/swimming with the phone and had exposed it to salt water, apparently that will wear down the seals if you do it enough.)

In other words, I absolutely see the need for waterproof phones, even for ordinary people doing ordinary things, and am never going to buy one that isn't.

New comment by jacobgorm in "1.4 GW: battery storage at former Grohnde nuclear power plant"

jacobgorm — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:52:17 +0000

In Denmark, wind mills were initially quite popular, because locals owned them and benefited. The iconic wind farm Middelgrunden on the waters outside of Copenhagen is 50% owned by a co-op.

https://www.middelgrunden.dk/

New comment by jacobgorm in "Rewriting Every Syscall in a Linux Binary at Load Time"

jacobgorm — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:41:20 +0000

Good point, an int3 is not going to be faster than a syscall, and if they implement the sandboxing policy in guest userspace is seems it would be quite easy to disable.

New comment by jacobgorm in "Rewriting Every Syscall in a Linux Binary at Load Time"

jacobgorm — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 13:08:21 +0000

I think the point here is optimizing for the common case, the untrusted code is still running inside a VM, so you can still trap malicious or corner cases using a more heavy-handed method. The blog post does mention "self-healing" of JIT-generated code for instance.

It is possible to restrict the call-flow graph to avoid the case you described, the canonical reference here is the CFI and XFI papers by Ulfar Erlingsson et.al. In XFI they/we did have a binary rewriter that tried to handle all the corner cases, but I wouldn't recommend going that deep, instead you should just patch the compiler (which funnily we couldn't do, because the MSVC source code was kept secret even inside MSFT, and GCC source code was strictly off-limits due to being GPL-radioactive...)

Show HN: Witchcraft and Pickbrain – fast multi-vector semantic search in Rust

jacobgorm — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:42:49 +0000

Witchcraft is from-scratch Rust reimplementation of Stanford's XTR-Warp (SIGIR'25, https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17788 ) multi-vector semantic search engine. Witchcraft runs out of a single SQLite database, is blazing-fast (21ms p.95 end-to-end search latency on NFCorpus on a MacBook Pro), accurate (33% NDCG@10), and easy to deploy in your own apps. The Witchcraft repo also comes with Pickbrain, a sample app and agent skill that you can use to instantly query across all your Claude Code and Codex CLI sessions, effectively giving your agents global long-term memory. Please see the Github page for more details, and feel free to ask questions here, and I will try to answer them.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47792166

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by jacobgorm in "Tesla's supervised self-driving software gets Dutch okay, first in Europe"

jacobgorm — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 11:02:40 +0000

More like third in Europe after BMW and Ford, according to https://electrek.co/2026/04/10/tesla-fsd-supervised-approved...

New comment by jacobgorm in "[dead]"

jacobgorm — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:20:32 +0000

I have been developing local AI on Apple devices since 2019, and they already had great AI support via Accelerate and MPS back then. Contrast to the Windows DirectML fiasco, which was basically just finger-pointing between MS, Intel and AMD all saying “it works on my machine” for years, I would say that Apple was always far ahead and did invest where it actually mattered to developers and users.

New comment by jacobgorm in "Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness"

jacobgorm — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:23:35 +0000

Some of us never left the terminal. Welcome to the future.

New comment by jacobgorm in "Members-only Philly cop bar has been linked to two DUIs and a third crash"

jacobgorm — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:02:34 +0000

When I lived in the US I was surprised about how casually everyone treated DUI. In Northern Europe, where I am from, driving after drinking is socially unacceptable in Generation X and younger.

New comment by jacobgorm in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

jacobgorm — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:23:14 +0000

The pilot episode was so lame I almost skipped this, but the rest is just stellar.

New comment by jacobgorm in "I fixed Windows native development"

jacobgorm — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:29:02 +0000

I’ve found that just installing LLVM, CMake and Ninja is enough to get started developing on Windows for most things C/C++.