Hacker News: lennoff

New comment by lennoff in "The startup's Postgres survival guide"

lennoff — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:35:54 +0000

wow, i checked the documentation, and you're right. the type is indeed poorly named!

New comment by lennoff in "The startup's Postgres survival guide"

lennoff — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:21:14 +0000

I disagree with the timestamptz advice. I tend to use timestamp (without the timezone), this forces me to use UTC everywhere, so I'm not even tempted to use anything else. I work in fintech, and so far whenever i saw someone storing datetimes with an associated time zone, it always ended with a disaster.

New comment by lennoff in "Emily Bender Sets the Record Straight on "Stochastic Parrots""

lennoff — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:34:20 +0000

afaik before the final sampling, every "next" token has a probability, so theoretically it could select the 10 most likely tokens (based on some kind of sampling algorithm), but you'd end up with exponentially many output-sequences, so nobody does that.

New comment by lennoff in "What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots""

lennoff — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:29:46 +0000

i think it actually makes sense, an LLM just imitates human communication, which happens to be useful from time to time.

New comment by lennoff in "The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)"

lennoff — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 20:08:08 +0000

keep in mind that we have "vibe coding" now, where the goal is exactly to _not_ have a human in the loop (at least not constantly).

New comment by lennoff in "React for Two Computers"

lennoff — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:17:22 +0000

It's fun to theorize about an alternate universe where JavaScript has a LISP-like syntax (Brendan Eich originally wanted "Scheme in the browser"[1], so this isn't so far-fetched!). Indeed, `interpret` sounds like a LISP macro that can "partially evaluate" code (so someone else, ie. the browser can continue to evaluate it).

[1]: https://brendaneich.com/2008/04/popularity/

New comment by lennoff in "React for Two Computers"

lennoff — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 17:27:14 +0000

It seems like that the author by using JSX to express code directly as an AST re-invented LISP? See Greenspun's tenth rule[1].

[1]: https://wiki.c2.com/?GreenspunsTenthRuleOfProgramming

New comment by lennoff in "Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law"

lennoff — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 14:16:52 +0000

How can you ban AI? It's literally designed to produce text that's indistinguishable from text that was produced by a living human being.

New comment by lennoff in "Cryptographic Best Practices"

lennoff — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 10:12:13 +0000

It's sad to see that Web Crypto[1] does not support Ed25519 (yet), only RSA and ECDSA for asymmetric signatures.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SubtleCrypt...

New comment by lennoff in "Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?"

lennoff — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 13:38:54 +0000

Because of the company VPN, I usually teleport to Israel, and I have absolutely no idea how to change the language on a right-to-left layout with a Hebrew alphabet...

New comment by lennoff in "React Source Code as Image"

lennoff — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 13:07:15 +0000

I guess I'll mint an NFT that's going to be a screenshot of this HN thread...

New comment by lennoff in "Making bracket pair colorization faster"

lennoff — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 15:41:13 +0000

Slightly related question: is there a plug-in that can color my code based in scope instead of syntax?

New comment by lennoff in "Nuitka: An extremely compatible Python compiler"

lennoff — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 10:56:04 +0000

Tangentially related question: could Nuitka target WebAssembly, given that according to their overview page, they translate Python into C? Usually when it comes to Python -> WebAssembly, the biggest problem is the lack of GC in the WebAssembly spec (as far as I understand), and I'm wondering if this would be an issue for Nuitka as well...

New comment by lennoff in "The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech"

lennoff — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 14:42:05 +0000

I think the key takeaway is to never believe when someone says "Don't worry, you'll get promoted in no time".

New comment by lennoff in "OSSU: Path to a free, self-taught education in computer science"

lennoff — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 09:18:04 +0000

Is a CS degree important nowadays? I do have one, but literally no one mentioned or asked about my education during an interview, ever.

New comment by lennoff in "GitHub Copilot regurgitates valid secrets"

lennoff — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 12:46:20 +0000

Oh, it does... It generates code that's vulnerable to SQL injections, XSS, etc. It was trained on such code! (hopefully this will improve)

New comment by lennoff in "Concepts for JavaScript developers to know"

lennoff — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 10:50:28 +0000

Iteration protocols[1] are also nice (`Symbol.iterator`[2] and `Symbol.asyncIterator`[3])

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[3]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

New comment by lennoff in "REPL vs CLI: IDE wars"

lennoff — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 14:52:42 +0000

When you evaluate a form deep in a function, how do you handle variables that are defined "outside"? How can you evaluate such expressions?

New comment by lennoff in "Don't encode POST bodies like GitHub Copilot, use URLSearchParams"

lennoff — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 11:07:19 +0000

Well, how can we teach copilot to avoid raw string interpolation in such cases? Sure, some people will correct it, and the AI might improve, but I suspect that the majority of the developers will never notice it, and that'll just reinforce the AI's bad habits.

New comment by lennoff in "Physicists observationally confirm Hawking’s black hole theorem for first time"

lennoff — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 08:59:08 +0000

So black holes can't evaporate? How does Hawking radiation works if the back hole are has to stay the same?