Hacker News: manjalyc

New comment by manjalyc in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

manjalyc — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:59:34 +0000

Ironic considering the article just reeks of AI.

- AI loves to use "consumers" instead of just saying people or Americans

- "You’ve spent time and budget on it, yet your audience can’t name a single company they think is doing it well. "

- "The small moments that used to make the web worth visiting are disappearing."

- "The brand that builds that recognition first gets to define the standard."

Nearly every sentence has an AI-ism...

New comment by manjalyc in "Google Gemini Is Down"

manjalyc — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:52:05 +0000

If you switch IPs you can usually get a message or two through during these outages. This has been a consistent issue with Gemini for the past few months, but has increased in frequency and duration of outages, especially since 3.5.

Early on this outage it was just the 3.5 pro models affected, then flash started having issues, and now flash-lite is not being responsive.

Slightly related, but has anyone else using the gemini cli noticed that over the past few months, usage of the Gemini 3 pro models frequently times out or hangs? Antigravity cli has been better about this but the quotas are just so low with the 5-hour window bs.

New comment by manjalyc in "IPv6 zones in URLs are a mistake"

manjalyc — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:07:57 +0000

On the other hand, seperating concerns by process boundaries leads to more secure, composable and stable code. By not reinventing the wheel, you avoid a whole class of problems. Of course a stable API or library might be better, but convenience always wins out.

New comment by manjalyc in "Epic celebrates "the end of the Apple Tax" after court win in iOS payments case"

manjalyc — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 11:45:50 +0000

The difference is apple doesn’t let you modify your device to use other services. Their contractual obligation goes beyond the service itself. That’s why EPIC won this case.

New comment by manjalyc in "Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts"

manjalyc — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 22:14:19 +0000

What does the G in GaaS mean?

New comment by manjalyc in "Tesla Robotaxi Videos Show Speeding, Driving into Wrong Lane"

manjalyc — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 20:27:24 +0000

The reason I brought up roomba wasn't to talk about Lidar or vision necessarily. It's more a story about how the first-mover in a technological space became entrenched in what works and became resistant to investing in newer technologies. The result was rival companies taking away marketshare from a market roomba once defined. Roomba has since incorporated lidar and other innovations after being stagnant for a decade, but its too late - their competitors now dominate the market.

To complete the analogy, Tesla is invested in vision-only technologies, while its competitors are making gains with Lidar and other tech that Tesla refuses to acknowledge. It's very reminscent of Roomba in the mid 2010s.

The Matic is a cool little robot though.

New comment by manjalyc in "Tesla Robotaxi Videos Show Speeding, Driving into Wrong Lane"

manjalyc — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 19:53:45 +0000

A fun anecdote - a lot of people may remember Roomba from forever back with their automated little vacuums. Roomba's market share declined significantly because they failed to adopt Lidar technology as quickly as their competitors, instead they depended on the bumper for as long as possible. This put them at a disadvantage in navigation and efficiency as their competitors started using Lidar. Combined with aggressive pricing from rivals, expiry of its patented roller in 2022, a weird insistence to not combine vacuum and mopping into one device, Roomba (or iRobot now) is a just little fish in the sea it made.

New comment by manjalyc in "Administering immunotherapy in the morning seems to matter. Why?"

manjalyc — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 12:35:42 +0000

Prof. Barry Marshall is an example of why Evidence-Based Medicine works against community sentiment.

New comment by manjalyc in "Orbit by Mozilla"

manjalyc — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 12:48:54 +0000

Ignoring 95% of a uniform market to target the 5% of users who all have niche and conflicting preferences is a ridiculous strategy for stability, growth, and profitability.

New comment by manjalyc in "Becoming physically immune to brute-force attacks (2021)"

manjalyc — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 12:40:43 +0000

I would rather look like a fool than be one. At least then I would have something to be accountable to

New comment by manjalyc in "Fusion – A hobby OS implemented in Nim"

manjalyc — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 11:09:20 +0000

Only the first letter being case-sensitive is a major strike against readability, one of four major pillars. While I’m sure the Nim developers are probably used to it by now, it just seems like a bad design decision Nim is probably burdened with as the result of legacy/interoperabilty.

Even just reading your foobar example at a glance took a moment for me.

And case insensitivity is also generally frowned upon. To have a language with both sensitivity and insensitivity is the worst of all worlds with none of the benefits.

If you want to understand why at a deeper level I would recommend reading readability or the case insensitivity sections in any programming languages book. Personally, I enjoy Programming Languages, Principles and Practice (Louden & Lambert)

EDIT: Yes, I get it, it doesn't affect YOU. But it doesn't mean it doesn't affect other people. Non-english languages and/or speakers are an easy example. It also eliminates a whole class of human error, and maybe that only affects non-experienced juniors, but they exist too. There are other issues with symbols being case insensitive and string values being case sensitive. If you want a practical example a classic one is HttpsFtpConn vs. HttpSftpConn

New comment by manjalyc in "Ask HN: High quality Python scripts or small libraries to learn from"

manjalyc — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 15:22:38 +0000

I agree that sometimes linters can enforce code styles that are more of hassle to deal with than offer any real concrete gain to new developers. But I disagree that only senior developers should use linters. Especially if you are learning a new language, it can introduce you to common conventions in that language, writing cleaner and more idiomatic code, and helps form good habits off the jump instead of building bad habits you will eventually have to change in a professional setting. Sure it can be overzealous at times, but I think on the whole it is a net positive.

New comment by manjalyc in "Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues"

manjalyc — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 13:08:03 +0000

I agree with you, and I think you have misunderstood the nuance of the parent comment. He is not letting google "off the hook", but rather being tongue-in-cheek/slightly satirical when he says that the reality is too troubling for google. Which I believe is exactly what you mean when you call it "anti-social-history, not pro-material-reality ".

New comment by manjalyc in "Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues"

manjalyc — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:56:44 +0000

This is 4th bot I’ve seen today. Before today, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bot on HN, or at least a bot this transparent.

New comment by manjalyc in "Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues"

manjalyc — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:47:18 +0000

The idea that “attention is all you need” here is a handwavy explanation that doesn’t hold up against basic scrutiny. Why would Google do something this embarrassing? What could they possibly stand to gain? Google has plenty of attention as it is. They have far more to lose. Not everything has to be a conspiracy.

New comment by manjalyc in "Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues"

manjalyc — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:41:51 +0000

They indeed are, just in a very polemic way. What a funny time we live in.

New comment by manjalyc in "YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox"

manjalyc — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 11:21:38 +0000

Code generally does not enter the YouTube code base without a lot of review namely (1) performance tests and (2) code reviews from multiple teams. Lines like this almost certainly get flagged/increased scrutiny. It would be very hard to imagine multiple people didn’t know about this and assign the blame to a single person.

New comment by manjalyc in "Java JEP 461: Stream Gatherers"

manjalyc — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 13:22:51 +0000

Yep, and I love writing Scala as much as I hate writing Java, but I wouldn't say its maturity is in the same league as Java, C/C++, etc.

New comment by manjalyc in "Java JEP 461: Stream Gatherers"

manjalyc — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 13:15:52 +0000

Yea, I don't imagine native stream parallelism will help when CPUs are already loaded. Presumably you're using Spring or Rx, in which case you probably can leverage reactive streams and/or Managed Blockers, but thats really just taking advantage of async patterns and not necessarily parallelism. The only case I could envision having a concrete benefit is if you used your own fork-join pool leveraging virtual threads instead of the global fork-join pool to prevent platform threads from hogging CPU, and then used reactive streams that leveraged the virtual threads. Although this would (theoretically) raise responsiveness, it would almost certainly come at the cost of throughput. All that is to say, parallelism generally only provides as much value as you have idle CPU cores.

New comment by manjalyc in "Java JEP 461: Stream Gatherers"

manjalyc — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 12:45:26 +0000

> Not only do virtual threads cope very poorly with I/O other than network I/O, you still get memory barriers.

Which is why I said you probably don't want to use the paradigm I outlined for I/O, but if you did you would want to leverage Java's Managed Blockers and async Completeable Futures for those exact reasons.

> Virtual threads makes the memory overhead lower since you don't need full separate stacks and reduces the cost of spawning new threads, neither of which was ever an issue with streams since they use the common thread pool. Virtual threads don't significantly increase the per-thread performance.

Of course virtual threads don't significantly increase per-thread performance? They make the overhead of spawning multiple threads minimal-to-zero compared to native OS/platform threads, minimizing the cost of jumping from sequential streams to parallel streams. Also, parallel streams don't have to use the global fork join pool, you can use your own fork-join pool? Which is possible in Java, because once again, streams are treated as a first-class citizen and can leverage nearly all other parts of the language efficiently and natively (although I will say Java's verbosity/boilerplateness can suck if you want to leverage your own fork-join pool, but that's widespread complaint of Java not specific to its streams)