Hacker News: jonstewart

New comment by jonstewart in "How GLM built its own inference infrastructure"

jonstewart — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 11:31:15 +0000

Necessity is the mother of invention. The shortsighted protections put on chips, etc., by the US has forced Chinese AI industry to adapt or die. Guess what their response to this fitness function has been? Kudos to Z.ai on their inventions and excellent write-up, which reads like humans wrote it.

New comment by jonstewart in "Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout"

jonstewart — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 11:53:49 +0000

I intellectually understand the retailpocalypse replaced by online shopping, but I will always want to try on clothes before buying them, and that goes double for shoes. After trying out New Balance for a year or two in adulthood I ended up going back to Nike running shoes (I still remember my pair of Air Icarus from high school, so light), just seemed to fit my feet better.

But now I wear Hokas. Nike’s loss.

New comment by jonstewart in "She Also Found It at the Movies"

jonstewart — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:13:52 +0000

Because she was smart, and her reviews will make you think.

New comment by jonstewart in "South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones"

jonstewart — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:47:05 +0000

Too bad. I get mine from the small town butcher/locker when I’m in the Midwest in summer, and the neighborhood farmer’s market on the east coast the rest of the year. A couple of ribeyes a year and I’m good, so I see them as an affordable luxury where I can pay for good prime meat from a short supply chain.

New comment by jonstewart in "South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones"

jonstewart — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:22:05 +0000

Hopefully most people here getting ribeyes aren’t getting them from the same factory farms that supply McDonald’s and sell other cheap kinds of beef. A ribeye is an occasional luxury and best bought from the farmer.

New comment by jonstewart in "South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones"

jonstewart — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:16:36 +0000

So lab grown diamonds are good and cheap enough I can finally buy my wife of 21 years a diamond ring?

New comment by jonstewart in "The revolt of the reader"

jonstewart — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 23:58:05 +0000

AI slop really needs to be auto-flagged. It’s been like 20% of front page links I click on lately.

New comment by jonstewart in "Product Backlog Problems: Why Your Hierarchy Is Broken"

jonstewart — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:03:07 +0000

A strong whiff of AI writing.

New comment by jonstewart in "Show HN: FrontierHarness Eval – 9 harness, same model, cost per pass varies 17x"

jonstewart — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:33:34 +0000

Forgive my stupidity but how do you run Claude Code with non-Anthropic models?

New comment by jonstewart in "Poisson Disk Sampling"

jonstewart — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:28:09 +0000

Oh, that’s rather a different sort of disk sampling than I imagined.

New comment by jonstewart in "Hacking IKEA Furniture"

jonstewart — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 02:18:31 +0000

I hadn’t been to IKEA in a decade or more but went this weekend to get new furniture for our kids. Today I put together a “vanity” for my daughter, and couldn’t help but think of the vanity I had in my room as a teenager that my mom had I inherited from some other family member, solid wood with beautiful birds-eye maple veneer. “Simulacrum” was the word I kept muttering to myself as I thought about what this next year in AI coding will bring.

New comment by jonstewart in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

jonstewart — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:04:39 +0000

Pondering this one night last week, I realized that because LLMs can only reason with written language, what we might be seeing emerge with Opus’s load-bearing mumbo jumbo is its own creole for structural reasoning. Not only are our brains wide, our senses are, too. I slow down to a crawl when I have to read actual math in a CS paper, but show me diagrams and I can reason about whatever sort of data structure or algorithm, no problem. Opus by and large can’t and its adaptation has been to adopt metaphor for structural reasoning. So while it may be exceedingly annoying to chat with, I sort of wonder whether this metaphorical-reasoning behavior has been selected for precisely because it leads to better coding outcomes.

New comment by jonstewart in "The German Mittelstand"

jonstewart — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 04:01:09 +0000

> Advancing the precedent set by Alfred, generations of Krupps would continue to develop the region through various private and public works, for almost a century into the 1920s. > > With their basic needs addressed and the workforce inculcated with the “Kruppianer spirit,” the firm crossed the fifth ring. They forged an empire that, by the late 1950s,

“What did Krupp make in the 1930s?”

This was kind of an interesting article but could have been a great deal shorter and wasn’t particularly insightful.

New comment by jonstewart in "Protopia"

jonstewart — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:43:38 +0000

Imagine writing several paragraphs defining “utopia” and not mentioning Thomas More.

New comment by jonstewart in "The Beam Engine"

jonstewart — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:26:24 +0000

If you enjoyed this and haven’t been, you need to plan a trip to Paris to spend a day at Musée des Arts et Métiers.

New comment by jonstewart in "The kids with phones are alright"

jonstewart — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:48:20 +0000

This essay extends one anecdote involving 16+ year old teenagers to the unsupported conclusion that kids should have phones and those who wish to restrict that are all wealthy 1% right wing authoritarians. Then with the personal note it seems clear that the core of the essay stems from the author's own personal trauma/experience.

I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.

New comment by jonstewart in "Regular expressions that work "everywhere""

jonstewart — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 03:22:30 +0000

Then there’s not just the issue of whether the engine supports a particular syntactical feature but the issue of matching semantics. Perl/PCRE’s semantics are far different from POSIX’s and some implementations different semantics altogether (and quite reasonably).

New comment by jonstewart in "Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide"

jonstewart — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 13:40:27 +0000

I’ve got a 15 year old workstation that I’m breathing new life into, but fortunately starting from a higher baseline. 24GB of RAM is going to 96GB, and it turns out it should be able to use an NVMe drive, so have a card and an M2 drive on the way. The annoying thing is that the GTX 460 is no longer supported by the Nvidia driver so I’m back to nouveau. That might get replaced with something more modern. I had an old Mint installed and decided to blow it away with stock Debian, and Claude’s setting up nix VMs for itself to run in. It has been crazy how $4k in 2011 for an SR-2 system has yielded a long productive life for this box.

New comment by jonstewart in "Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity"

jonstewart — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 01:13:50 +0000

Citation? I’m sure he’s fine but $100M?

New comment by jonstewart in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"

jonstewart — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:30:33 +0000

There should be a "hickory" option where the axe just bounces back at you or gets stuck in the round.