Hacker News: meisel

New comment by meisel in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

meisel — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:12:50 +0000

Yeah the author really should’ve taken some responsibility here. It’s true that the services they used have issues, but there’s plenty of blame to direct to themself

New comment by meisel in "The Rise of the Em-Dash in Hacker News Comments"

meisel — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:07:58 +0000

Gotta love starting the y-axis above 0

New comment by meisel in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

meisel — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:48:24 +0000

What % of users actually care that much about local LLMs? It appears to still be an inferior (though maybe decent) service compared to ChatGPT etc., and requires very top-end hardware. Is privacy _that_ important to people when their Google search history has been a gateway to the soul for years? I wonder if these machines would cost significantly less (or put the cost to other things, e.g. more CPU cores) without this emphasis on LLMs.

New comment by meisel in "The Om Programming Language"

meisel — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:07:29 +0000

Yeah show me the 5-line HTTP server

New comment by meisel in "Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption"

meisel — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:43:33 +0000

Why did Ladybird even attempt this with Swift, but (I presume) not with Rust? If they're going to go to the trouble of adding another language, does Rust not have a better history of C++ interop? Not to mention, Swift's GC doesn't seem great for the browser's performance.

New comment by meisel in "Apple patches decade-old iOS zero-day, possibly exploited by commercial spyware"

meisel — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:17:39 +0000

I wonder what the internal conversations are like around memory safety at Apple right now. Do people feel comfortable enough with Swift's performance to replace key things like dyld and the OS? Are there specific asks in place for that to happen? Is Rust on the table? Or does C and C++ continue to dominate in these spaces?

New comment by meisel in "Both GCC and Clang generate strange/inefficient code"

meisel — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:48:08 +0000

If you're doing enough divisions with the same divisor, it'd be faster to do what compilers do for division by a known constant, where they multiply by an integer reciprocal and shift

New comment by meisel in "GPT-5.3-Codex"

meisel — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:09:51 +0000

I wonder if their "5.3" was continuously being updated, with regenerated benchmarks with each improvement, and they just stayed ready to release it when claude released

New comment by meisel in "Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode"

meisel — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:15:48 +0000

My experience with AI with its predecessor, Xcode 26.2, was _really_ bad. One bug made it objectively unusable, and there were lots of fun issues/huge functionality gaps on top of that. Apple doesn't really seem to "get" agent-based coding, but I'm curious to see the results of other braver souls with 26.3.

New comment by meisel in "Julia"

meisel — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 13:33:41 +0000

> Julia emits light, over an ever-changing spectrum

Haven’t heard of this feature in Julia lang, must be new in v1.12.4

New comment by meisel in "Zig Libc"

meisel — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:45:35 +0000

> It’s kind of like enabling LTO (Link-Time Optimization) across the libc boundary, except it’s done properly in the frontend instead of too late, in the linker

Why is the linker too late? Is Zig able to do optimizations in the frontend that, e.g., a linker working with LLVM IR is not?

New comment by meisel in "Software Survival 3.0"

meisel — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:06:34 +0000

> Gas Town has illuminated and kicked off the next wave for everyone

That sounds pretty hyperbolic. Everyone? Next “wave”?

New comment by meisel in "Package management is a wicked problem"

meisel — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:21:43 +0000

This all just sounds like problems we see when making new features, of any sort, for customers. A feature is never objectively done, there are many opinions on its goodness or badness, once it’s released its mistakes can last with it, etc.

If this is a wicked problem, then so is much of other real-world engineering.

New comment by meisel in "It looks like the status/need-triage label was removed"

meisel — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 22:08:48 +0000

To be clear, is AI actually at play here, aside from the fact that the repo is for Gemini? It just looks like two simple rules that interact poorly, that we could've seen in 2015.

New comment by meisel in "Test your square brackets"

meisel — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:57:04 +0000

The real solution is that as soon as you need square brackets, switch to a better language than bash

New comment by meisel in "Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip (2024)"

meisel — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 21:43:28 +0000

Looks like it beats everything in the large text compression benchmark for enwik8, but loses to several programs for enwik9. I wonder why that is.

New comment by meisel in "Chinese AI models have lagged the US frontier by 7 months on average since 2023"

meisel — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:12:26 +0000

How much less? Their companies clearly have access to the latest GPUs.

New comment by meisel in "It's hard to justify Tahoe icons"

meisel — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:50:19 +0000

What is with the annoying snow going over the text? That is a pretty “arbitrary” graphic element

New comment by meisel in "Huge Binaries"

meisel — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 14:18:49 +0000

> Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist

I see this often even in communities of software engineers, where people who are unaware of certain limitations at scale will announce that the research is unnecessary

New comment by meisel in "Scientists discover beer bottle in the Mariana Trench (2024)"

meisel — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 16:49:58 +0000

I'm curious what objects do/don't survive at the water pressure. I guess bottles are strong enough