Hacker News: mau

MicroGPT

mau — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 21:27:24 +0000

Article URL: http://karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/microgpt/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47018557

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mau in "Why German Strings Are Everywhere?"

mau — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:09:21 +0000

German-style strings is a way to store array of strings for columnar dbs. The idea is to have an array of metadata. Metadata has a fixed size (16 bytes) The metadata includes the string length and either a pair of pointer + string prefix or the full string for short strings. For some operations the string prefix is enough in many cases avoiding the indirection.

This is different from Pascal strings.

Building a Storage Engine That Outperforms RocksDB

mau — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 17:06:46 +0000

Article URL: https://tidesdb.com/articles/what-i-learned-building-a-storage-engine-that-outperforms-rocksdb/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46422686

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mau in "EU to build no-fee payments service like Visa/Mastercard and Apple/Google Pay"

mau — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 10:52:24 +0000

https://archive.is/2025.12.29-103247/https://m.independent.i...

AI will make formal verification go mainstream

mau — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 10:44:42 +0000

Article URL: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/ai-formal-verification.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46216274

Points: 6

# Comments: 4

New comment by mau in "LINQ and Learning to Be Declarative"

mau — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 15:48:27 +0000

> Your coworkers and QA will thank you for learning LINQ and ditching the imperative methods that plague your Python brain.

This is a very unfortunate joke: Python has list (and generator) comprehension expression for a long time (2.3?) which are similar to LINQ. At some point in the history many languages stole useful expressions from other paradigms.

Let’s joke on BASIC, it always works.

New comment by mau in "Why Polars rewrote its Arrow string data type"

mau — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 06:57:04 +0000

Arrow supports this string format: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/Columnar.html#variable-...

From the article:

> As luck would have it, the Arrow spec was also finally making progress with adding the long anticipated German Style string types to the specification. Which, spoiler alert, is the type we implemented.

Simple, Efficient, and Robust Hash Tables for Join Processing

mau — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 06:42:52 +0000

Article URL: https://cedardb.com/blog/simple_efficient_hash_tables/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40605922

Points: 40

# Comments: 3

GaLore: Memory-Efficient LLM Training by Gradient Low-Rank Projection

mau — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 06:25:29 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03507

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39688588

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Building a baseline JIT for Lua automatically

mau — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 08:56:00 +0000

Article URL: https://sillycross.github.io/2023/05/12/2023-05-12/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38770048

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Effective Altruism

mau — Tue, 02 May 2023 05:40:45 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35783780

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by mau in "Pydantic V2 rewritten in Rust is 5-50x faster than Pydantic V1"

mau — Sat, 08 Apr 2023 13:14:30 +0000

Congratulations to the team, Pydantic is an amazing library.

If you find JSON serialization/deserialization a bottleneck, another interesting library (with much less features) for Python is msgspec: https://github.com/jcrist/msgspec

LLM Basics: Embedding Spaces

mau — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 08:22:22 +0000

Article URL: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pHPmMGEMYefk9jLeh/llm-basics-embedding-spaces-transformer-token-vectors-are

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35165352

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

New comment by mau in "Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast"

mau — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 06:50:46 +0000

I think the GH app is a workaround for this:

> Deploy keys only grant access to a single repository. More complex projects may have many repositories to pull to the same server.

Pex: Python EXecutable

mau — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 04:24:16 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35065237

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by mau in "Apache Kafka Beyond the Basics: Windowing"

mau — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 10:35:00 +0000

I don't know what were the issues Yelp was facing, I have upgraded several times my past Kafka clusters and really never experienced any issues. Normally the upgrade instructions are documented (e.g. https://kafka.apache.org/31/documentation.html#upgrade) and the regular rolling upgrade comes with no downtimes.

Besides this, operating Kafka never required much effort a part when we needed to re-balance partitions across brokers. Earlier versions of Kafka required to handle it with some external tools to avoid network congestions, but I think this is part of the past now.

On the other hand, Kafka still needs to be used carefully, especially you need to plan topics/partitions/replications/retention but that really depends by the application needs.

New comment by mau in "Python 2 removed from Debian"

mau — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 08:36:55 +0000

You can write code that runs in both interpreters. Same syntax can have different behavior.

I guess nowadays, as the py2 compatibility is a thing of the past, most programs would crash when using that interpreter version.

How to spot AI-generated text

mau — Sun, 25 Dec 2022 06:06:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065596/how-to-spot-ai-generated-text/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34124823

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mau in "Boring Python: Code quality"

mau — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 11:34:37 +0000

One thing that is underestimated is keep the tools version in sync between your app dev dependencies and pre-commit. This also includes plugins for specific tools (for instance flake8). A solution would be to define the hooks in pre-commit to run the tools inside your venv.

About typings: I agree the eco-system is not mature enough, especially for some frameworks such as Django, but the effort is still valuable and in many cases the static analysis provided by mypy is more useful than not using it at all. So I would suggest to try do your best to make it work.

Codecov Is Joining Sentry

mau — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 16:00:10 +0000

Article URL: https://about.codecov.io/blog/codecov-is-joining-sentry-heres-what-you-need-to-know/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33970614

Points: 3

# Comments: 0