Hacker News: maest

New comment by maest in "Paging Through a Parquet File in DuckDB: File_row_number or Offset?"

maest — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 02:56:56 +0000

You handle this by paginating inside a transaction

New comment by maest in "Our position on open-weights models"

maest — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:58:29 +0000

The US routinely goes to war to secure cheap oil, so I didn't think that's a good example

New comment by maest in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

maest — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:45:44 +0000

A much larger percentage of bond traders are institutional, compared to equities, where retail is very active in some names.

So I wouldn't really give too many points to "the general public" for this one.

New comment by maest in "The Tower Keeps Rising"

maest — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:44:15 +0000

> two orders of magnitude more productive

Shipping 100x more features per day?

New comment by maest in "GPT-5.6"

maest — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 22:44:37 +0000

omp.sh is unreadable. I've tried understanding what exactly this is and it's just a wall of edgy sounding slop.

New comment by maest in "A global workspace in language models"

maest — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:50:53 +0000

Dozens of GBs of compressed text is an unfathomable amount of information from a human POV.

New comment by maest in "Should DayQuil Be Legal?"

maest — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:30:21 +0000

Btw, the cosmetics industry functions similarly, but worse. Although I suppose the health dangers are lower (the monetary ones are not).

For anti aging stuff, the workhorse ingredient is retinol (with a few formulation variations).

However, it is very difficult to buy _just_ retinol - most beauty brands bundle up retinol with a bunch of other ingredients. This has a couple of issues:

1. You won't know your retinol dosage. These creams almost never tell you the retinol proportion and concentration.

2. You're overpaying by _a lot_. The luxury name brand cream will cost maybe 10x more than the similarly sized $9 bottle of retinol from the ordinary, but it will only contain some fraction of retinol.

Tbf this has been slowly changing and I see even La Roche Posay sells retinol bottles for $50. Insane markup, but smaller than what was the case 5 years ago.

This is all compounded with the fact that it's very difficult to tell if your anti aging cream is actually working from your own experience:

- its effect is slow acting

- it's difficult to compare the result with the counterfactual, unless e.g. you only use it on half your face

New comment by maest in "The 100k whys of AI"

maest — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:01:39 +0000

> the biblical whitewashed tomb.

What does this mean?

New comment by maest in "Kirkland Roundabouts"

maest — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:54:34 +0000

I'm all for hating bad infrastructure, but this roundabout seems pretty straightforward? Maybe it's different when you're actually driving on it, but from a topdown view it's clear it's a central roundabout with some extra sidelanes to avoid the roundabout if you're immediately turning right.

New comment by maest in "Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible"

maest — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 01:00:09 +0000

"fair" involves a value judgement and requires a moral system. "even" is pure mathematics.

> I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly?

Agreeing with that is easy. Agreeing with which jobs should be compensated more highly is hard. Because everyone has different morality systems.

> To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands

I know people who strongly believe Bezos and other billionaires are being compensated for the value they've brought to their customers via their businesses.

New comment by maest in "Three of our worst VC stories"

maest — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 05:42:59 +0000

He's a very MAGA guy, though.

New comment by maest in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"

maest — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 05:42:02 +0000

> Everyone picking the S&P 500 over its competitors chooses that.

I'm fairly confident most people deciding to allocate to s&p trackers have no idea about rules-based vs committee-based governance. They just pick the default. And that default can quickly change if the S&P starts making weird/unpopular decisions in a highly publicized situation.

New comment by maest in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"

maest — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 05:37:41 +0000

> a man convicted of fraud

Most practitioners in the field see that as a very strong signal of future fraud.

New comment by maest in "What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications"

maest — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:52:25 +0000

That's "growth hacking" for you

New comment by maest in "Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book"

maest — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:21:26 +0000

You can rotate any solution by 90 degrees, which would toggle the square colour of your bishop, so it doesn't ultimately matter.

New comment by maest in "Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book"

maest — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:20:30 +0000

> In other words, after arranging the five black pieces, it must be impossible to place the white king anywhere without it being in checkmate.

I think this is a bit ambiguous and, strictly speaking, wrong for the solution as given.

In particular, this asks for the king to be in check _mate_. Does this require all black pieces to defend each other? Otherwise, white king on the board would not be in checkmate if you place it next to a queen and can immediately capture.

From the solution, you can see it's not a checkmate requirement, just a check requirement.

New comment by maest in "I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left"

maest — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:56:11 +0000

> It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good.

Negative externalities. The company makes money using a free resource and disincentivises future development.

I'm sure you can see why killing the most popular business model for open source companies is bad for the ecosystem, right?

New comment by maest in "What British people mean when they say 'sorry'"

maest — Sat, 09 May 2026 03:12:23 +0000

You need more hints that it's rude to take up a seat with your bag?

New comment by maest in "Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA"

maest — Wed, 06 May 2026 23:50:36 +0000

Only because you typo'd twice: it's "pervasive".

New comment by maest in "Days without GitHub incidents"

maest — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:11:56 +0000

Does this logic still applies if the company is getting other benefits from having me as a user? (Genuine question, I can see arguments for both sides)

For example, if I am using the free tier of a service and "paying" by seeing ads, should I have similar expectations?

I'm not saying that's how users pay for github - in that case it's more subtle, for example by giving up control of some of their stack and bolstering github already near monopolistic network effect.