Hacker News: metanonsense

New comment by metanonsense in "GPT-5.5"

metanonsense — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:47:22 +0000

I also had a frustrating but funny conversation today where I asked ChatGPT to make one document from the 10 or so sections that we had previously worked on. It always gave only brief summaries. After I repeated my request for the third time, it told me I should just concatenate the sections myself because it would cost too many tokens if it did it for me.

New comment by metanonsense in "Mamba-3"

metanonsense — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 13:37:55 +0000

Impatient execs can also be painful. EDIT: Writing this while I am waiting for Codex to complete, so I may enjoy slow AI more than the usual developer ;-)

New comment by metanonsense in "Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]"

metanonsense — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:02:03 +0000

Tbf, if I did whay they do in this video, my battery life would more like a handful of seconds.

New comment by metanonsense in "'It's ridiculous': publicans bemused by rise of single-file queues to get served"

metanonsense — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 22:29:35 +0000

I think the issue it the (literal) "head-of-line blocking". Some requests can be processed either "concurrently" like tapping a beer from a keg or in parallel by having multiple bartenders, but having all people standing strictly in line makes this difficult.

New comment by metanonsense in "Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems"

metanonsense — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 19:15:49 +0000

only learned about SKIP LOCKED because ChatGPT suggested it to solve some concurrency problem I had. Great tool to learn such things.

New comment by metanonsense in "Deutsche Telekom is throttling the internet"

metanonsense — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 11:53:00 +0000

Honestly a crappy situation. In Germany, Telekom is a monopolistic bully. In evening hours, any service behind Cloudflare more or less stops working (for instance, before I cancelled my subscription, chess.com web assets were delivered with neck-breaking 5kB/s, which made loading a 20MB wasm for stockfish analysis no fun).. but there are absolutely no viable alternatives that aren’t also crappy: Vodafone -> same peering idiocy, Starlink -> king Elon). VPNs make things complicated, but are often the only alternative.

New comment by metanonsense in "We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports"

metanonsense — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:49:45 +0000

I’ve seen this with some of my Indian colleagues, though definitely not all. In fact, most are more than eager to disagree with me :D (even though I’m their superior)

New comment by metanonsense in "Steam "Offline" status leaks exact login timestamps (Valve: Won't Fix)"

metanonsense — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:47:27 +0000

Spending months dealing with folks attempting to blackmail us over ridiculous non-issues has pretty much killed any sympathy I had for bug bounty hunters.

New comment by metanonsense in "65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform"

metanonsense — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 16:40:47 +0000

In my experience, this depends a lot on the subreddits you are subscribed to. Even in that set, the general mood sometimes changes significantly over time, e.g. because moderators change, a flood of new people is coming in because of some trends (AI), or some reddit meta events (eg a post being bestoffed). Generally speaking, a few vocal asshles can spoil your subreddit and drag the overall sentiment down.

New comment by metanonsense in "Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time"

metanonsense — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 19:31:19 +0000

Ironic that I switched to HN from chess.com because Deutsche Telekom‘s peering with Cloudflare (or more its lack of) made the site even more unusable than usual. 5 minutes ago I thought „Maybe it’s time to switch to Vodafone“

New comment by metanonsense in "The seven second kernel compile"

metanonsense — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 16:08:46 +0000

I remember back in 2000 or so when I declined the invitation to a party because I wanted to compile a new kernel in the evening.

New comment by metanonsense in "The key to getting MVC correct is understanding what models are"

metanonsense — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 06:53:27 +0000

But isn’t that exactly what GP meant? There is an original, very precise but also very abstract definition (and what is more abstract than category theory). Then people come along who give a different definition that matches the original one in their specific context („three laws in Haskell“). After that people take these three laws and apply them (sometimes overly simplistic) to other contexts („just give it a flatMap in Scala to get a monad“). And at some point the original meaning got lost, and there are competing definitions out.

New comment by metanonsense in "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work"

metanonsense — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 07:12:46 +0000

I would be very cautious to give an advice like this to my team. Making a thing simple is actually very hard, and many, who hear the words, may just equate „simple thing“ with „first thing that comes to mind“, which may eventually turn into a nightmare of complexity.

New comment by metanonsense in "Open models by OpenAI"

metanonsense — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 06:50:45 +0000

Maybe I am too pessimistic, but as an EU citizen I expect politics (or should I say Trump?) to prevent access to US-based frontier models at some point.

New comment by metanonsense in "YAGRI: You are gonna read it"

metanonsense — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:51:30 +0000

In our product, we have different strategies depending on the requirements. Sometimes, we just delete. Sometimes, we do soft delete with timestamps. Sometimes, we have a history table with or without versioned entities. Sometimes, we have versions in the table. Sometimes, we have an audit log. Sometimes, we use event sourcing (although everyone in the team hates it ;-)

New comment by metanonsense in "TLS certificate lifetimes will officially reduce to 47 days"

metanonsense — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 18:25:48 +0000

I am not saying I‘d do this, but in theory you could deploy a single reverse proxy in front of your HTTP-only devices and restrict traffic accordingly.

New comment by metanonsense in "Maestro – Next Generation Mobile UI Automation"

metanonsense — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 20:07:26 +0000

Cheers, huge Huggins fan here :) Looking forward to Valet

New comment by metanonsense in "The year I didn't survive"

metanonsense — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 06:40:11 +0000

In my opinion, there’s also a third (and certainly controversial) option: suicide is the ultimate expression of freedom, self actualization, and human dignity. I don’t plan to kill myself in the foreseeable future, but the thought that I could gives me hope, power, and removes any fear from my life. A friend of mine is 94 and lives in constant, non-treatable pain, and the thought that she can end her life when she decides to do so makes things bearable for her.

I know that this ultimate freedom is also ultimate selfishness, because the loss is felt by your close ones, not you. But this makes me perhaps an asshole, but not sick.

New comment by metanonsense in "I am rich and have no idea what to do"

metanonsense — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 19:26:48 +0000

Been on a Dylan concert a few months ago, and I really wondered why he did this to himself, at his age, with his money. He seemed so utterly bored.

New comment by metanonsense in "Reads Causing Writes in Postgres"

metanonsense — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:43:54 +0000

Did not see your comment until after I posted mine, but exactly this. The amount of disk io from these sort operations can be massive and very surprising.