Hacker News: luckystarr

New comment by luckystarr in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

luckystarr — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:46:05 +0000

The original plan was to only shut the reactors down when enough renewable energy sources would be available to replace them. The Merkel government wanted to prolong the initially planned phase outs. Then Fukushima happened. Bad optics. So after pressure from the populace they instead of prolonging their runtime (as they wanted initially), they shut them down, but earlier than planned.

Get the facts straight.

New comment by luckystarr in "OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much"

luckystarr — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:01:24 +0000

I tried the way they used "oracles" to verify their implementation against known good ones, and I must say: this works.

Not all implementations are re-implementations, so this approach won't work for everything. But for a new implementation in a new programming language than the original implementation, it works great. Built myself a MIB compiler, checked against smidump. Now it is more correct than the original, because smidump still crashes on some inputs, while mine does not.

So the news is not so much that Anthropic built a C compiler, but HOW.

New comment by luckystarr in "Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed"

luckystarr — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:35:13 +0000

While they are not as efficient or flexible, they are many times more efficient than resistive electric water heaters. I've installed one with in house air intake (due to construction reasons) in my house and it cooled down the basement by a few degrees (and removed air moisture as an added bonus). In summer the thermal capacity of the ground heats up the basement again, in winter it's a bit cooler, but it still works efficiently.

New comment by luckystarr in "Doubting U.S. resolve, Europe looks to bolster its own nuclear arsenal"

luckystarr — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:29:27 +0000

Not sure how to take this. While your statements are objectively true, there are a lot of reasons the US won't attack the EU, even if the reasons are mainly economic.

Russia on the other hand is shit at waging their war in Ukraine but they achieved their objectives (land bridge to Sevastopol, etc.).

So the worry is not that Russia will wage a well fought war, but some war at all, even if they are shit at it, because it will do extensive damage either way. And we know for a fact that they don't shy away from it.

New comment by luckystarr in "/dev/null is an ACID compliant database"

luckystarr — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 10:27:29 +0000

Now make an algebra out of the CAP theorem. It's not already one, isn't it? Didn't read the paper.

New comment by luckystarr in "EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy"

luckystarr — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 13:25:05 +0000

Newer wind turbines don't have a gearbox and are almost completely silent. When standing next to one, the loudest components are the electrical inverters/transformers.

New comment by luckystarr in "Show HN: Rust macro utility for batching expensive async operations"

luckystarr — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:44:48 +0000

The API is great. Will definitely try it out. I have a use case already. How difficult would it be to extend this to support timed flushes? Like, every 200ms or so, regardless the fill of the buffer?

New comment by luckystarr in "One person was able to claim 20M IPs"

luckystarr — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 20:21:35 +0000

My hunch: it's not a real captcha on their page femboy.cat, but actually a script which "claims" the address in the ipv4.games game. Nothing to see here, move along.

New comment by luckystarr in "Show HN: Nia – MCP server that gives more docs and repos to coding agents"

luckystarr — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 20:54:07 +0000

For thorny problems I let the agent give me a simplified flow-chart in mermaid syntax. LLM's brain-farts are easily visible then. I correct the flow-chart "Ah, you're right!" and then let it translate it to code. Works wonders.

New comment by luckystarr in "Geocities Backgrounds"

luckystarr — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 15:34:51 +0000

That page can't be very old because it doesn't use any frames!

New comment by luckystarr in "AccountingBench: Evaluating LLMs on real long-horizon business tasks"

luckystarr — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 22:25:57 +0000

Well I've seen worse bookkeepers. "You know, you approved of the budget, but where are our customers payments in the balance sheets? We can't find them!" - "Uhm..."

New comment by luckystarr in "The borrowchecker is what I like the least about Rust"

luckystarr — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 23:08:00 +0000

I believe it. I experienced this once, as I tried to have everything owned. Now I just clone around as if there's no tomorrow and tell myself I'll optimize later.

New comment by luckystarr in "Mercury: Ultra-Fast Language Models Based on Diffusion"

luckystarr — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 13:36:58 +0000

I'm kind of impressed by the speed of it. I told it to write a MQTT topic pattern matcher based on a Trie and it spat out something reasonable on first try. It hat a few compilation issues though, but fair enough.

New comment by luckystarr in "Just Ask for Generalization (2021)"

luckystarr — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 20:33:22 +0000

I remember vaguely that this was observed when training GPT-3 (probably?) as well. Just trained on and on, and the error went up and then down again. Like a phase transition in the model.

New comment by luckystarr in "Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage"

luckystarr — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 11:57:56 +0000

I started my most ambitious project in February. A few years ago I wouldn't have even dreamed of ever starting let alone finishing it, but now I have a Claude Code Max Pro subscription and it goes forward in a steady pace. I expect the first version of it to be finished within the year. Even it's written mostly by AI, it's still a lot of work to get it to do the right thing, but I'm getting better at it.

New comment by luckystarr in "Developing with GitHub Copilot Agent Mode and MCP"

luckystarr — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 11:12:42 +0000

Playwright MCP is intriguing. I'll definitely give it a run today. Anybody got any tipps or gotchas?

New comment by luckystarr in "Tools: Code Is All You Need"

luckystarr — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 15:44:21 +0000

I always dreamed of a tool which would know the intent, semantic and constraints of all inputs and outputs of any piece of code and thus could combine these code pieces automatically. It was always a fuzzy idea in my head, but this piece now made it a bit more clear. While LLMs could generate those adapters between distinct pieces automatically, it's a expensive (latency, tokens) process. Having a system with which not only to type the variables, but also to type the types (intents, semantic meaning, etc.) would be helpful but likely not sufficient. There has been so much work on ontologies, semantic networks, logical inference, etc. but all of it is spread all over the place. I'd like to have something like this integrated into a programming language and see what it feels like.

New comment by luckystarr in "You Must Listen to RFC 2119"

luckystarr — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 23:58:34 +0000

RFC 821, the original. I operated a mail relay some lifetimes ago and I knew this one by heart.

New comment by luckystarr in "LaborBerlin: State-of-the-Art 16mm Projector"

luckystarr — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:29:15 +0000

Interesting that the film material had better color retention than the old projectors. I never thought about it before and assumed that the washed out colors of old 16mm projections came from bad recordings.

New comment by luckystarr in "LaborBerlin: State-of-the-Art 16mm Projector"

luckystarr — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:24:06 +0000

Some films were recorded with a lower frame rate due to some reason. As for variable and standstill, I think this would only be needed when investigating a recording in detail. Not sure if they really need it. Perhaps they just want it to cover more use cases.