Hacker News: johnthescott

New comment by johnthescott in "Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site"

johnthescott — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:16:14 +0000

+2 for humidity. great work. keep it simple.

New comment by johnthescott in "The politics of air conditioning in Switzerland"

johnthescott — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:18:15 +0000

after going through my first quake in valley, years ago, i shut windows at night, cause every strong breeze woke me up thinking a quake was coming. bummer.

New comment by johnthescott in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

johnthescott — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:25 +0000

years ago i lived next door to a bar popular with off duty emts. interesting, to say the least.

New comment by johnthescott in "Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected"

johnthescott — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 15:13:41 +0000

lecunn was at facebook after llmama3.1, says ai.

New comment by johnthescott in "Postgres transactions are a distributed systems superpower"

johnthescott — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 03:44:11 +0000

amen.

New comment by johnthescott in "Postgres transactions are a distributed systems superpower"

johnthescott — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 03:32:00 +0000

for smallish databases, where uuid is surogate id, i would trust dbos/postgres replication. replication is just too hard to role your own.

tangentially, for dbs with large blobs, lot's of easy tricks when uuids are immutable digests.

syncing, say, two blob stores, A and B, boils down to jaccard metric, as a first order approximation

   |(A ∩ B)| / |(A ∪ B)|

diffing the two digest sets at point in time is second order approximation.

and don't forget logical replication ...

New comment by johnthescott in "Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't"

johnthescott — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 23:41:09 +0000

i spent a weekend with an ai expert trying to get claude to generate code from a yacc grammar for a new language and a smallish set of examples. claude never seemed to get past the bnf syntax.

New comment by johnthescott in "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]"

johnthescott — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:56:40 +0000

"elegance and speed go hand in hand" - d. mcilroy

New comment by johnthescott in "PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you"

johnthescott — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:54:02 +0000

pg_pachy ?

New comment by johnthescott in "Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't"

johnthescott — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:07:36 +0000

ai has no fear.

New comment by johnthescott in "Hacker News, Sans AI"

johnthescott — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:30:53 +0000

otherwise limited to "keyword" search ...

New comment by johnthescott in "Every Byte Matters"

johnthescott — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:28:20 +0000

if truly "every byte matters" then why java?

New comment by johnthescott in "Life is too short for a slow terminal"

johnthescott — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:22:54 +0000

"gui"? what gui?

my take is terminal is just quicker than "gui".

New comment by johnthescott in "Moving beyond fork() + exec()"

johnthescott — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:36:40 +0000

shared libraries does not imply shared in ram only.

New comment by johnthescott in "I'm going back to writing code by hand"

johnthescott — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:45:54 +0000

write code like your life depends on it. cause it does if you are any good.

New comment by johnthescott in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

johnthescott — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:19:08 +0000

> They tend to gloss over the untold suffering, great depressions and world wars that took us to get here..

spot on. you gotta wear shades to survive, future so bright.

New comment by johnthescott in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

johnthescott — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:47:49 +0000

those who know how work for those who know why.

New comment by johnthescott in "A Theory of Deep Learning"

johnthescott — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:17:41 +0000

> We present a non-asymptotic theory of generalization

what is a non-elephant animal (to paraphrase stan ulam)?

New comment by johnthescott in "AI slop is killing online communities"

johnthescott — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:50:44 +0000

consider participating in the honey pot project to block ips of proven bad guys.

New comment by johnthescott in "AI slop is killing online communities"

johnthescott — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:49:51 +0000

consider the honeypot project to block ips.