Hacker News: karmakaze

New comment by karmakaze in "Why I'm Building a Database Engine in C#"

karmakaze — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:45:05 +0000

I drank the Go kool-aid, then tried to do some high performance things the Go way: didn't work (channels are slow) and I got over it. Still think Go is great for web backends and the like with production grade stdlib.

Great post with details, not a I'm vibe coding...

New comment by karmakaze in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess"

karmakaze — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:13:48 +0000

Bullshit is the perfect term here, even as AI's get so much better and capable Brandolini's Law aka the "bullshit asymmetry principle" always applies--the energy required to refute misinformation is an order of magnitude larger than that needed to produce it. Even to use AIs effectively today requires a very good BS detector--some day in the future it won't.

New comment by karmakaze in "Razor 1911 (first place at revision 2026 demoparty) [video]"

karmakaze — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:05:29 +0000

Cool. I really like the music and composition with graphics.

I didn't hear of Revision demoparty before, the constraints are generous from what I found. Seems to be more about programming the art and not as much about impressive resource constraints.

Platform: Entries must run on standard Windows PC hardware (2026). GPU: Usually a top-tier NVIDIA card (e.g., RTX 4080/4090 or the 50-series equivalent). Resolution: It must be able to run at 1080p @ 60Hz at a minimum. Most now expected 2160p Audio: Standard stereo output primary audio device (usually HDMI or a high-end DAC).

File Size: there is no specific file size limit for the PC Demo category. However...

Content: The demo must be a standalone executable. all visuals and audio must be generated in real-time.

Originality: The entry must be "party-fresh," not been released or shown publicly before

Duration: While there is no hard cutoff, [...] between 3 to 8 minutes

New comment by karmakaze in "Every GPU That Mattered"

karmakaze — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:10:33 +0000

Same. Still play StarCraft2 on a 4790k and AMD R9 Fury X.

New comment by karmakaze in "AGI Is Here?"

karmakaze — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:52:16 +0000

Mine was beating the top pro at Go.

New comment by karmakaze in "Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices?"

karmakaze — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:36:28 +0000

I had the same thought as I'm working with LLMs. Then I reached the same conclusion as I did without LLMs: you can get most of the benefits without many of the drawbacks using well-bounded 'modules' within a monolith. The article doesn't distinguish these:

> When coding in a monolith, you have to worry about implicit coupling. The order in which you do things, or the name of a cache key, might be implicitly relied-upon by another part of the monolith. It’s a lot easier to cross boundaries and subtly entangle parts of the application. Of course, you might not do such unmaintainable things, but your coworkers might not be so pious.

What it's saying could also apply to a monorepo with distinctly deployed artifacts. The reason many don't think about clear boundaries between modules is that popular interpreted languages don't support them. Using the Java ecosystem as an example, each module can be a separate .jar containing one or more package namespaces. These must have an explicit X uses Y declaration.

The problem I see isn't so much that misuse it's easy (though that's a part of it), it's that there's to clear indication that boundaries are being crossed since calling from one package to another is normal, and the fact that some packages belong to other modules isn't always obvious.

New comment by karmakaze in "Don't Buy the DGX Spark: NVFP4 Still Missing After 6 Months"

karmakaze — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:33:25 +0000

I would say don't buy one unless you are either (1) a researcher, or (2) plan to get multiple (up to 4) of them. One has 273 GB/s memory bandwidth and you'd be better off with a Mac M5 Pro/Max.

New comment by karmakaze in "Union types in C# 15"

karmakaze — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:28:33 +0000

I haven't read this in detail but I expect it to be the same kind of sealed type that many other languages have. It doesn't cover ad-hoc unions (on the fly from existing types) that are possible in F# (and not many non-FP languages with TypeScript being the most notable that does).

New comment by karmakaze in "AGI Is Here?"

karmakaze — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:22:05 +0000

Repeating that we don't have a definition isn't helping anything except vapid blog posts having another thing to debate. I'll give one that I believe. It's the practical ability to use AI for most things that humans do at human levels of competence, without specifically being trained for each. There is no requirement for AGI actually think/reason beyond practical measures.

New comment by karmakaze in "The Hormuz Hypothesis – What If the U.S. Navy Isn't in a Hurry to Reopen Hormuz?"

karmakaze — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:03:30 +0000

I heard a similar analysis by an episode of Predictive History[0]. Only watched the first 15 minutes so far where it gets to where the US country/those in power (not population) benefits.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrmERlHUqBk

New comment by karmakaze in "I'm Suing Anthropic for Unauthorized Use of My Personality"

karmakaze — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:32:37 +0000

> by Linch 1st Apr 2026

New comment by karmakaze in "President's new science council: 9 billionaires and 1 scientist"

karmakaze — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:57:40 +0000

...and you can with a single technologist?

New comment by karmakaze in "Ask HN: What was it like in the era of BBS before the internet?"

karmakaze — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 02:55:27 +0000

There weren't that many people online, but because there were so few BBSes/lines it could be difficult to get connected. Once connected there wasn't all that much to do, send and check messages, look at mostly utility programs like file compression, and serial terminal, maybe a few dithered GIF images, bit rates were so low 2400 for a very long time that larger programs/files weren't really shared. Demo versions of full shareware was popular. I remember finding Composer 669 music tracker thinking it was the coolest thing ever and learning how to send a money order to the author in the mail.

Quite some time later also ran an OS/2 BBS for a while that I started with a younger highschooler. By then there were lots more BBSes and online services but not much for OS/2 so that made sense. I recall getting an amazing discount on a US Robotics Courier modem (the large flat black one, Dual Standard I think it was) it was so much faster. At that time I also had a job and the office used Telebit Trailblazer modems that had a fast proprietary protocol for communication between offices. I once did tech support from Toronto to Vancouver to recover corrupted OS/2 drives at an IBM office, I sent Norton Utility over the modem and a series of things to enter at the DOS prompt to reconstruct/undelete the OS/2 HPFS filesystem. This part doesn't have much to do with BBSes but that's what it was like around those times. Laplink was another super popular file transfer utility that could directly connect two computers using a printer/parallel, serial cable, or remotely via modem. BBSes were possibly how I also found the VESA VGA driver for OS/2 1.3 that a summer student had made at an IBM office--it was incredible being able to run high-res (800x600 or 1024x768) graphics on a PC clone and ATI VGA card (overclocked 11 MHz ISA bus) running OS/2.

New comment by karmakaze in "The widely reported "hole in the Universe" is a lie"

karmakaze — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:18:44 +0000

bigthink just made my list of places to avoid wasting time

New comment by karmakaze in "Meta Targets $9T Valuation with New Executive Incentive Program"

karmakaze — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:22:54 +0000

I imagine all of the above. Maybe they'll even get (back) into VR gaming--for the games this time.

New comment by karmakaze in "Meadow: An ultra-compact smartphone without web browser, social media or email"

karmakaze — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:08:15 +0000

These used to be called 'feature phones'. A difference now is that the underlying OS may still be Android-based.

New comment by karmakaze in "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says 'I think we've achieved AGI'"

karmakaze — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:01:18 +0000

> Fridman, the podcast’s host, defines AGI as an AI system that’s able to “essentially do your job,” as in start, grow, and run a successful tech company worth more than $1 billion.

Didn't I see a headline about Zuckerberg (not so secretly) training an AI to do his CEO job?

New comment by karmakaze in "I built an AI receptionist for a mechanic shop"

karmakaze — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 13:41:01 +0000

This particular case was for body work. Being able to upload photos makes for better estimates.

New comment by karmakaze in "I built an AI receptionist for a mechanic shop"

karmakaze — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:41:47 +0000

I tried getting some work quotes not long ago and was surprised by how many local shops still don't have: (1) website that takes info and emails/calls back, (2) voicemail, or (3) having one or both of those and didn't call back all week. I suspected they had all the business they can handle. I did get a call back later in the week from one that said as much.

New comment by karmakaze in "DeepSeek by Hand in Excel"

karmakaze — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:53:43 +0000

I can't wait to read about how DeepSeek V4 works. This video[0] was great to understand MLA.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VLAoVGf_74&t=845s