Hacker News: jewel

New comment by jewel in "Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter"

jewel — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 02:35:06 +0000

This made me think of https://e4rat.sourceforge.net/, which moves boot files into sequential runs, which was helpful on spinning disks where seeks were slow but sequential reads were fast.

Just as an idea for a feature your defragmenter could have.

(Also this is a side thought; but I wonder if AWS AMIs and EBS volumes will boot faster if also organized sequentially.)

New comment by jewel in "GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities"

jewel — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:31:43 +0000

My understanding is that the harness is the set of function calls (or tool calls) that let the LLM interact with your codebase. It's independent of the IDE or CLI.

The tool calls will be, among other things, something like ReadFile, RipGrep, PatchFile, Shell.

When people talk about the value of different harnesses, they're also implicitly talking about the quality of the system prompt.

The same exact model, when given a different set of tools and a different system prompt, can behave differently.

New comment by jewel in "Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption"

jewel — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:16:38 +0000

Even if your files are properly encrypted, if you keep them on, say, Google Drive, then you might lose access to them if your account gets inadvertently blocked.

I think GP is trying to say something along those lines. Not that encryption isn't trustworthy, but that even with homomorphic encryption you still give up autonomy.

Tech experts warn against using AI clone of murdered woman's voice in court

jewel — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:01:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ksl.com/article/51608219/tech-experts-warn-against-using-ai-clone-of-murdered-womans-voice-in-court

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49258538

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jewel in "So, you want to make a game engine (2023)"

jewel — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:49:49 +0000

"Hobbyhacking"?

New comment by jewel in "A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample"

jewel — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:20:47 +0000

I believe it's a reference to a joke meme that goes something like "Write Windows 12 from scratch. Make no mistakes." At least that's the first context I heard it in.

New comment by jewel in "Wireless LAN SD"

jewel — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:34:45 +0000

I had an Eye-Fi card in my DSLR years ago and had a python script [0] running on my home server that'd download the photos as they were taken. It'd play a noise over the home audio system to let the taker know that the photo had transferred.

It worked fairly well but at some point I got nervous that it might miss a photo and switched back to a boring SD card.

[0]: https://www.returnbooleantrue.com/2009/01/eye-fi-standalone-...

New comment by jewel in "DeepSeek V4 Pro beats GPT-5.5 Pro on precision"

jewel — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:01:11 +0000

Interesting. Can you elaborate on which harness you've tried it with? I'd love to switch to deepseek for my personal use.

Also, which SOTA western models are you comparing it with? Just to give more flavor.

New comment by jewel in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

jewel — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:09:24 +0000

As an alternative to the VoIP phone: Redpocket has a $2.67/mo plan. We loaded that SIM into a small android phone (Unihertz Jelly phone).

It works great as a home phone but has the additional advantage of being able to wander if a pre-cellularized needs to go somewhere. For example, my 13-year-old takes it when going on a long bike-ride with his friends.

We keep it in our closet and only comes out when needed. They aren't allowed to give the number out to friends.

New comment by jewel in "Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise"

jewel — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:43:35 +0000

Also the consumption of AI-generated text could be having an influence on the tone of how people write.

So even if AI was not used to write an article, it could "smell" like AI to someone who consumes less of it.

New comment by jewel in "The suck is why we're here"

jewel — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 03:45:27 +0000

"If it's not worth writing, it's not worth reading."

  - https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/prompt/

New comment by jewel in "Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival"

jewel — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:08:29 +0000

The way I think you'd set this up is you'd create a trust with the millions and then the trustees would pay the company its monthly fee from the trust's funds.

With enough funds, the trust should be able to both pay for your preservation and grow its balance. You'd even be able to inherit the remaining funds when revived.

Of course in practice there is still the possibility of the trustees being corrupt.

New comment by jewel in "Hammersmith Bridge – Where did 25k vehicles go?"

jewel — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 22:32:37 +0000

Here's a "Walk with me" video of the bridge: https://youtu.be/DA9NPmwWDWE?t=385

New comment by jewel in "Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker"

jewel — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:54:43 +0000

Here's a philosophical question. Does anyone account for inflation when looking at their long term history? I've been thinking of looking at everything in 2019 dollars.

It might also be useful to adjust for inflation going backwards, e.g. everything shows in 2025 dollars.

New comment by jewel in "Recovering videos from my Sony camera that I stupidly deleted"

jewel — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 19:23:08 +0000

My neighbor just did the exact same thing. The way FAT filesystems work is they change the first byte of the filename to an invalid character to make them a tombstone.

Since he hadn't used the SD card yet, we were able to restore the files with "TestDisk", a companion tool that ships with PhotoRec. Under "Advanced" there is an "Undelete" tool. This will let you browse the filesystem, find your missing files, and copy them to another drive.

For those old enough to remember, MSDOS came with undelete.exe which worked the same way.

New comment by jewel in "Kvcached: Virtualized, elastic KV cache for LLM serving on shared GPUs"

jewel — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 20:15:34 +0000

In my imagination, I thought that the large GPU clusters were dynamically allocating whole machines to different tasks depending on load.

So, hypothetically, if ChatGPT's peak load and their minimum load were a 3× ratio, they'd reallocate 2/3 of their servers to training when it's not peak time.

Doing the same thing inside an individual GPU seems irrelevant to anyone operating at scale when they can approximate the same behavior with entire servers or even entire racks.

New comment by jewel in "AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say"

jewel — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 19:15:02 +0000

Talk to the other vendors. I know of a place that had about that same amount and decided to have a redundant copy of all of their data in another vendor's S3-compatible product. That vendor paid for all of their egress fees as long as they signed a 12-month contract and used their tool for the migration.

New comment by jewel in "Zoox robotaxi launches in Las Vegas"

jewel — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 15:59:47 +0000

The front-to-back symmetry is interesting. It may cause some confusion for other drivers, in some limited circumstances, when they can't tell which way the vehicle is facing.

It appears, based on my study of the footage on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIRW8bfy4kE, that it could possibly switch which side is the front and the back by just changing the color of the lights. With RGB LEDs that would be pretty easy to do. But my question is, when would that be useful?

It would be neat that it could pull into a driveway and then leave in "reverse", but that doesn't seem like it'd come up that often for a robotaxi.

The back wheels look like they can steer. That's useful for parking in tight spaces.

New comment by jewel in "Signal Secure Backups"

jewel — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:06:00 +0000

Yes! That has been supported for a long while. At least on Android, go to Settings -> Chats -> Chat Backups. Set up a schedule and a passphrase and a folder, and it will export your chats every day.

I do that and then sync that folder with another computer using SyncThing.

New comment by jewel in "GitHub was having issues"

jewel — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 15:55:15 +0000

I used to work at a place that had a second copy of all the git repositories on a server, available over ssh. We could push there and then, at deploy time, instruct the servers to pull from that repo instead of bitbucket.

If I were to set up the same thing again today, I'd add some automation to automatically keep it in sync with github as well as automate the servers so that they'd attempt to pull from both on every deploy.

I share this as an idea for those who need an emergency or backup deploy mechanism.