Hacker News: khuey

New comment by khuey in "METR and Redwood Offer Holy %^ Postmortem of the HuggingFace Hack"

khuey — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 18:44:51 +0000

If the folks at OpenAI aren't qualified to be operating these systems who would be?

New comment by khuey in "There's no reason for software to be slow anymore"

khuey — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 17:49:15 +0000

One obvious reason to have an LLM output a high level language even if you are never going to read the code is because it will require fewer output tokens and therefore be cheaper.

New comment by khuey in "Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding"

khuey — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 15:49:06 +0000

Yes, it's management with little concern for human factors because you can abuse or and even fire your reports and summon new ones of equal competence at will.

New comment by khuey in "An OpenAI Strategist Says AI Labs Should Rival Government Power"

khuey — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:11:13 +0000

Governments are famously tolerant of other actors seeking to rival or usurp their power.

New comment by khuey in "Branchless Rust: Making a Filter 4x Faster by Removing an If"

khuey — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:35:39 +0000

You should try writing it out. Doing it without introducing another unpredictable branch is harder than it looks.

I discussed this with a coworker earlier this week and the best they were able to come up with was

    for &x in input {
        out.push(x);
        n += (x > threshold) as usize;
        out.truncate(n);
    }

which works but is ugly af imo.

New comment by khuey in "Branchless Rust: Making a Filter 4x Faster by Removing an If"

khuey — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 04:15:34 +0000

Worth noting that as written the "trick" results in memory usage proportional to the size of the input rather than the output. If the filter rejects most of the input the difference could be quite noticeable.

New comment by khuey in "After Losses, Retail Investors Flock to 3x Leverage as 2x Product Are Restricted"

khuey — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:36:51 +0000

Yes, diversification results in lower returns than investing in just the best performing asset class.

New comment by khuey in "After Losses, Retail Investors Flock to 3x Leverage as 2x Product Are Restricted"

khuey — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:34:38 +0000

Many people don't have a "rest of their portfolio".

New comment by khuey in "After Losses, Retail Investors Flock to 3x Leverage as 2x Product Are Restricted"

khuey — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 05:21:01 +0000

Generally the default fund in a decent 401(k) (employer managed but largely employee funded retirement plan) will be a "target date retirement fund" that contains a mix of equities and bonds according to the expected risk tolerance of someone at that age, and generally the equity component is also split between US and foreign equities.

e.g. Fidelity's fund for people planning to retire around 2050 https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/summary/31579...

New comment by khuey in "Why I am not going to buy a computer"

khuey — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:55:58 +0000

Unless you've checked it for accuracy why would I read your AI-generated documentation when I can ask my AI (which in a month or two will be a newer, better model than what you used to generate that documentation) to read the code and summarize it for me?

If you did check it for accuracy then I don't understand how you compressed months of work into minutes.

New comment by khuey in "Meta's AI models are powering the first wave of Genesis Mission projects"

khuey — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:37:32 +0000

My memory is a bit fuzzy but I think you're correct.

New comment by khuey in "Meta's AI models are powering the first wave of Genesis Mission projects"

khuey — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:39:17 +0000

We've seen b before. React was controversially released with a similar clause and ultimately Facebook dropped it and used a standard open source license. Their lawyers really love this idea for some reason.

New comment by khuey in "Who's afraid of Chinese models?"

khuey — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:16:34 +0000

Painfully slow tok/s though.

New comment by khuey in "The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel"

khuey — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:03:20 +0000

If you show up at a US port of entry without any sort of anything the default decision is to deny entry (exceptions for Canadian citizens and citizens of a few small islands). If you show up at a US port of entry with an ESTA/visa you will most likely be allowed entry. Refusals are relatively rare.

Commercial carriers such as airlines are also not allowed to transport people who need ESTAs/visas and do not have them to the US, so in practice it's relatively difficult to even get to the port of entry without a visa.

New comment by khuey in "The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel"

khuey — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:58:04 +0000

That already happens. Witness all the random "bans" and "pauses" Trump has instituted against various nationalities and groups of people at the border.

New comment by khuey in "We're Building Postgres in Rust. Using the LLVM of Databases"

khuey — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:38:06 +0000

As someone who doesn't follow databases that closely, how is this different from Amazon Aurora (other than being open source)?

New comment by khuey in "Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop"

khuey — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:15:58 +0000

IMO the threat model is more letting the agent loose on issues/PRs in a public Github repo and it getting tricked into running a malicious payload.

New comment by khuey in "Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke"

khuey — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:14:02 +0000

If Unity had 2.5 users anyone had heard of before the switch you can see where the motivation might (at least emotionally) come from.

New comment by khuey in "We scaled PgBouncer to 4x throughput"

khuey — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 21:36:19 +0000

I have bad news for you about where ClickHouse comes from then.

New comment by khuey in "Your code is fast if you're lucky"

khuey — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 21:26:22 +0000

In the one statement case, clang emits LLVM IR where the last operation in each branch is the store. In the two statement case, clang emits LLVM IR where the last operation in each branch is the [pointer math](https://llvm.org/docs/GetElementPtr.html).

The SimplifyCFG pass in LLVM pulls the identical-in-all-but-one-operand store IR instructions into a successor block with a [select instruction](https://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#select-instruction) that will ultimately become a conditional move. But the pointer math differs by two operands (because there are two different pointers and one is being decremented and one is being incremented) so SimplifyCFG stops immediately and never reaches the stores.

This sort of brittle behavior where semantically identical code produces different optimization results is common in optimizing compilers unfortunately.