Hacker News: lanstin

New comment by lanstin in "What Is a Syslog Server?"

lanstin — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:08:16 +0000

cheaply dropping log msgs you cannot handle is absolutely essential for an observability system - otherwise excess load can take down the logging infra which can (if msgs aren't dropped) take down the prod network/app trying to send reliable log msgs.

Audit logs are a distinct feature.

New comment by lanstin in "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"

lanstin — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:34:45 +0000

I mean I use coffee quite a lot to prop up my software career. I don’t really find purity to be useful for anything except to answer questions like “should I steal this money now that I am alone” or “should I backstab this friend who pissed me off today.”

New comment by lanstin in "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"

lanstin — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:35:49 +0000

I think we'll find that the people doing that, like the people spending all their time and energy reading slasher pulp fiction in the 1950s, won't be doing as well as the people learning to enhance the power of their education and their expertise via LLMs and strategic alternating between GenAI and thinking about problems. And eventually, if society ever steadies up a bit, people will learn the useful ways of using technology in school and youth; and we'll be glad to be alive to see such marvels.

Assuming we can re-establish the will for democracy and taking care of the whole group.

New comment by lanstin in "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"

lanstin — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:29:45 +0000

Yeah, I have to say some of this deskilling argument sounds like Socrates complaining about the invention of writing ruining people's ability to truly own the text. I really don't mourn my lost assembly skills or my lost C skills. And I'm not missing the details of whatever web framework du jour my Claude is vibing for me on my extremely useful dataviz internal tools; and I have learned how to rein the agents in to not ruin my high-performance Go code and yet debug concurrency issues. Maybe coding qua coding is what some people find their summum bonum, but for me programming is instrumentive - to build real things in the world that do things to make something better. When I want pure virtuosity of intellectual construction, I read maths papers in arxiv.

(Not to say that the current state of the art with LLMs merits borrowing money for a multi-trillion spend on hardware that will be obsolete in 5 years, but for me that is a different issue).

The master decrying the invention that resulted in more wisdom for more people than anything prior:

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." (quoting from https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439)

New comment by lanstin in "A look under our trunk: what's in our compute"

lanstin — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 22:24:11 +0000

I just took a Waymo in San Jose, having taken a few from San Francisco - it dropped me off in a place that would have made sense in SF (across the street from my destination at a light, avoiding a U turn) but was terrible in the suburban streetscape where the road was literally 10 lanes 4 / 4 / 2 turning and no one would ever drop someone off like that instead of U turning so they didn't have to cross scary giant traffic.

So weird little things for scaling, but overall it was a good ride till that point. Also, the dropoff was at a hospital/clinic and Lyft for the return trip had no issue with going into the property to the actual destination.

New comment by lanstin in "The Wow signal was a strong narrowband radio signal detected on August 15, 1977"

lanstin — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 03:53:21 +0000

Cool. I was thinking of a book with like some industrial waste accident at solar system scale but natural masters ranks up their with natural Uranium chain reaction in the crust.

New comment by lanstin in "AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward"

lanstin — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:47:19 +0000

I don’t think the results would be as good if you just prompted “make this faster” as compared to “make this multithreaded”. You had high confidence in the cause of the slow down which a non-technical person might not have.

New comment by lanstin in "The Wow signal was a strong narrowband radio signal detected on August 15, 1977"

lanstin — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:21:57 +0000

Someone needs to write a book with a story of how this might have happened.

New comment by lanstin in "Understanding is the new bottleneck"

lanstin — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:54:34 +0000

Me typing into emacs is also not replicable, until I git push. Me with emacs and a good coding LLM can generate systems that I see as good, in my extensive professional judgement. For coding, for production grade code, the LLM will mostly be a tool in the hands of the professional. There is a new category of disposable code, which I think will be useful for many adhoc investigations; in neither case is replicability a serious requirement.

I do a lot of guessing and validating in learning maths. It is pretty efficient way to build that conceptual understanding. I even try to predict the next big theorem as I am listening to a lecture or reading a text book. It's engaging.

And honestly, I am enjoying learning this new way to make code I am pleased with. Using the LLM effectively and for quality deliverables is different from typing in many surface ways, but modularity of thought, iterative design and implementation, simplicity and generality, documentation, all still pay off.

New comment by lanstin in "Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful"

lanstin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:09:57 +0000

As an Oxford undergrad I read a lot of Bourbaki on topology, to supplement the lectures; they were recommended by the lecturer. I loved their style of writing and the cleanliness of the approach. I have not been assigned Gödel's paper but have read them in classes where the proof was demonstrated. Maths is hard tho, I agree on that, and maths reading very hard, and reading these books outside of class where you are forced to keep going till you understanding is only rarely worth it outside of professional life.

New comment by lanstin in "Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful"

lanstin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:57:00 +0000

Or delightful if you used to have pi digit contests in math camp as a middle schooler.

New comment by lanstin in "Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful"

lanstin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:54:35 +0000

The extraneous stuff is honestly fabulous, IMO of course. Just being able to listen to a four part fugue sensibly is a rare but accessible pleasure. And amusing dialogs as an instantiated dialectic for showing the truth synthesized from apparent opposites, is a great pedagogical learning.

New comment by lanstin in "Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful"

lanstin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:51:21 +0000

I had my copy signed by Prof Hofstadter; a treasure to this day. Led to a maths degree, years of organ playing classes, a career in software, and a Zen practice going on 20 years. And I'm pescatarian. I even wrote a few haiku when my babies were little. Hmm, time for another listen to a Tocatta and Fugue.

New comment by lanstin in "Don't use your phone while you poop"

lanstin — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:24:10 +0000

The Sunday Times - all the news that is fit to print.

New comment by lanstin in "Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice"

lanstin — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:02:05 +0000

It’s a big universe and there are a lot of years, so chemical evolution seems like a decent tool for God to use. Much like General Relativity is a more efficient way to rule the world than assigning angels to push the planets thru the sky. And a passing familiarity with birth defects will prove to most hard hearted people that each specific fact of biology is not designed by a loving creator. Unless you believe this messy but gloriously complex universe to be the best of all possible worlds, right up till you lie to your friend, it is difficult to believe whole heartedly in a loving creator.

New comment by lanstin in "Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice"

lanstin — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:57:54 +0000

Honestly just more “biology has enormous areas without enough data that need filling in” causing previous generalizations (e.g. the central dogma of information flow being replaced by protein regulation of gene expression, non-coding DNA, even neurons and egg cells being produced thru life) to be overthrown, more than anything, IMO.

New comment by lanstin in "Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice"

lanstin — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:52:02 +0000

They aren’t saying two totally different independent life creating event, they are saying that the earliest life depending on some external chemicals for parts of what is now covered by metabolism, and the tree of life diverged before those metabolic paths evolved inside the organism, so not totally the same emergence of life twice, but more stuff that reproduces and evolves but doesn’t meet modern standard for life.

New comment by lanstin in "GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2"

lanstin — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:22:54 +0000

I thought work was finished to allow Hurd to use Linux device driver code as is?

New comment by lanstin in "GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2"

lanstin — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:19:47 +0000

Firefox isn’t io bound it is spending a ton of CPU parsing network buffers and rendering UI.

Nginx is IO bound in general - for my headless go stateful server, i could get syscall6 up to 20% of the profile time. It was a fight between GC in the gRPC code allocating for headers and the syscall6 for top single profile footprint.

New comment by lanstin in "GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2"

lanstin — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:16:14 +0000

Not true in a data center - 20% less work for same CPU is like 25% more cores needed for any applications where the scaling is driven by CPU utilization. That is $ - and people have made things so far from efficient many medium size companies have 100k cores to pay for.