Hacker News: jaen

New comment by jaen in "Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses"

jaen — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:09:28 +0000

It's a multi-level sauna though, so it's "choose-your-own-temperature" (due to the hot air gradient), not everybody is there for the 120C experience.

New comment by jaen in "Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses"

jaen — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:06:36 +0000

110C is not that unusual in the Nordics (although way above average, it's for tougher sauna goers). I've been in one. Not most people's cup of tea though, the experience is comparable to the opposite of a long cold plunge.

New comment by jaen in "Hold on to Your Hardware"

jaen — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:29:05 +0000

It doesn't write anything extra to the browser history. How about actually checking before exaggerating. If you are bothered by a single wrong title with the right URL, well... I think something else is wrong.

You are also completely speculating on the intent. Less drama please.

New comment by jaen in "Show HN: AI Roundtable – Let 200 models debate your question"

jaen — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:29:13 +0000

That site/app doesn't have a single piece of information about who's running it, what the privacy policy is (besides some AI slop in the FAQ section) etc. etc. - and you're supposed to put business-critical information into it (according to its demo)?!

Why are you recommending something so sketchy?

New comment by jaen in "White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit"

jaen — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:00:34 +0000

Those TFLOPS numbers are quite useless as they are "marketing peak TFLOPS". There's usually a 10-100× difference between that and actual computational capabilities in meaningful general workloads.

It only makes sense to compare specific, well-calibrated benchmarks, such as Linpack, which is what I did.

New comment by jaen in "I built a free interactive platform to learn KDB/q"

jaen — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:05:23 +0000

What is this based on? Where did the content come from? It looks quite LLM-generated TBH.

New comment by jaen in "White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit"

jaen — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:53:53 +0000

Not quite, the Earth Simulator in 2003 had 35.86 Linpack TFLOPS, 10TB of RAM and 700TB of disk.

That's still almost three orders of magnitude from the iPhone 12 (0.02 Linpack TFLOPS, 4GB RAM, 256GB storage).

New comment by jaen in "Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?"

jaen — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:43:42 +0000

That's assuming every developer can get the same AI efficiency boost and contribute meaningfully to any feature, which is unfortunately not really the case.

Seniors can adjust, but eg. junior frontend-only devs might be doomed in both situations, as they might not be able to contribute enough to business-critical features to justify their costs and most frontend-related tasks will be taken over by the "10x" seniors.

New comment by jaen in "Kagi: Small Web Just Got Bigger"

jaen — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 09:05:54 +0000

No, it's not, that links to a different page, this is a blog post.

New comment by jaen in "Parallel Perl – autoparallelizing interpreter with JIT"

jaen — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:13:14 +0000

HTML+JavaScript-based statically hostable apps (eg. presentations) can't use paths as deep links, since there's no standard for simple static hosting or URL rewriting (even 30 years later). Oh well.

New comment by jaen in "Too Much Color"

jaen — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:49:35 +0000

Was fun and kind of meditative locking in like that – I noticed that the anti-glare coating on my screen introduces a visibly larger Δ than the later stages of the game (kind of a dithered "cloud" noise), making it quite a challenge. 0.0021 oneshot.

New comment by jaen in "Aggregated File System (AGFS), a modern tribute to the spirit of Plan 9"

jaen — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:32:26 +0000

That didn't answer or reply to the original question... Security is orthogonal to performance.

My question was, how is the performance better? (as implied by the word evaluations)

(also the original post was about exposing all sorts of random ops via a file system which are accessed via general shell tools most of the time, so pretty likely there's basically zero added security...)

New comment by jaen in "Aggregated File System (AGFS), a modern tribute to the spirit of Plan 9"

jaen — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:29:11 +0000

(I'm not upset at all, I'm confused.)

New comment by jaen in "Monuses and Heaps"

jaen — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:27:07 +0000

Lovely bag of tricks. Abstractly, representing differences seems to make a lot of problems easier / more general.

For more weird stuff, see eg. regular expression derivatives, differential dataflow.

New comment by jaen in "No Semicolons Needed"

jaen — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:52:26 +0000

That does require designing the language grammar in a certain way, in particular, there should not be any optional elements in any productions used by statements on the right-hand side (otherwise it's ambiguous whether to terminate the statement or continue to the next line) that can also start a statement. Most languages violate that.

"where the context indicates that a command or definition cannot terminate at that point" is trivially unsuitable for C-like languages, `if`-`else` already violates that, since an `if` can terminate before the `else` by that definition (imagine splitting `else` to a new line).

An actually workable definition would be "unless the end of line occurs at a point where the current expression can not be terminated or the next tokens are not parseable as a separate statement", which is almost the definition of semicolon insertion in JavaScript....

But JavaScript has exactly the problem of the ambiguity since both braces (via object literals) and parentheses (via expressions-as-statements) can start a statement and those are ambiguous with eg. blocks and function calls, respectively.

New comment by jaen in "An x86-64 back end for raven-uxn"

jaen — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:48:44 +0000

Actually no, there's no "ROM", that's just the name for the code that gets loaded into RAM. Even the article talked about self-modifying code...

It's a Von Neumann machine with no instruction cache coherence instructions. JITs for these are not trivial to produce due to every memory store potentially invalidating the JIT code, so you need clever solutions to make that invalidation extremely fast.

New comment by jaen in "Type systems are leaky abstractions: the case of Map.take!/2"

jaen — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:46:38 +0000

TypeScript has row polymorphism at home.

New comment by jaen in "Launch an autonomous AI agent with sandboxed execution in 2 lines of code"

jaen — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:31:18 +0000

Grandparent is an LLM/agent, so what can you expect... sigh.

New comment by jaen in "Aggregated File System (AGFS), a modern tribute to the spirit of Plan 9"

jaen — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:26:14 +0000

People building these Rube Goldberg contraptions: Do you actually run evaluations if this is any better at all than eg. giving it access to a Python REPL, or just toughing it out with random tools composed via shell scripts?

Why would an LLM be better trained to access Redis via a FS vs. a native library API?

Makes no sense.

New comment by jaen in "Gummy Geometry"

jaen — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:12:23 +0000

What's the physics solver used here? This demonstration quickly runs into common problems associated with overly simplistic solvers/integrators where everything starts to become unstable and "vibrate" / "twitch".