Hacker News: mif

New comment by mif in "A Topological Picture Book, Rendered"

mif — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 04:05:34 +0000

Great app to play around with. I thought I can think of the implicit form for a cube. I couldn’t (how embarrassing). It’s:

f(x,y,z) = max(|x|, |y|, |z|) - const.

New comment by mif in "Reliability Lessons from SQLite – Richard Hipp | SSW (2026) [video]"

mif — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:56:33 +0000

Great talk about testing and how it improves your code, among many other things. SQLite is probably one of the ideals in software development.

Reliability Lessons from SQLite – Richard Hipp | SSW (2026) [video]

mif — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:56:33 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_qzqY1bb7I

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49177701

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by mif in "Latent Space as a New Medium"

mif — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:16:12 +0000

I like how Kevin Kelly brings together the ideas about what could be next. That’s always been his thing, hasn’t it? He is probably on to something here and it’s ok to be vague, I think. I don’t mind at all whether it’s all 100% technically correct.

Here are the bits I enjoyed:

LLMs (or GenAI, in general) as (the most?) efficient compression machines.

Creative or new ideas are the gaps or white space of the latent space. They already exist but become harder and harder for humans to find. It’s the perfect job for computers, therefore.

The concept of “true” is defined in the latent space (or compression) itself.

New comment by mif in "How to earn a billion dollars"

mif — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:31:48 +0000

Free stuff like roads and schools? Or free stuff like polluted water and air?

New comment by mif in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

mif — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:52:32 +0000

I’m not an expert and surprised by the extent of Azure’s technical debt and its consequences. What would be a “minimal” reproducible configuration or setup of services that shows those technical deficiencies in the clearest way? A “benchmark for cloud computing services”, for a lack of a better description.

New comment by mif in "Jeena's Hyprland Demo"

mif — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 10:18:22 +0000

Mine, too. And conky. And how I loved those configurable shortcuts…

New comment by mif in "The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction"

mif — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 02:30:56 +0000

What I didn’t realize until a few months ago about writing, James summarized as

> while “writing a first draft” is intimidating, “reading through all your notes” or moving note cards around on a table, contemplating structure, is not. In fact these tasks are kind of delightful.

Thanks for sharing.

New comment by mif in "Algorithms for making interesting organic simulations"

mif — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 21:47:23 +0000

Reminds me of the Gray-Scott explorer [0], implemented with WebGL (in 2012!!).

Mathematics is beautiful!

[0] https://www.mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/ogl/index.html

New comment by mif in "I Worked for Big Pharma: what I saw will shock you"

mif — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 09:41:58 +0000

I’m not shocked.

New comment by mif in "Demo of kons-9 Common Lisp 3D graphics system [video]"

mif — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 20:16:57 +0000

Thanks for that. I thought about giving lisp a try, lately. This tutorial/presentation has been very insightful and I will try out kons-9 to pick up some lisp.

New comment by mif in "Catcher plays for both teams in same game"

mif — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 05:09:57 +0000

Almost as unreal as the matching dinosaur footprints on two different continents. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41352656

New comment by mif in "Porsche waters down EV ambitions, says transition will take 'years'"

mif — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 07:29:37 +0000

Bye, bye, Porsche.

New comment by mif in "'Goldmine' collection of wheat from 100 years ago may help feed the world"

mif — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 09:12:53 +0000

Hold your horses. I think the title overstates the impact of those old wheat varieties. Yes, genetic diversity is high. But, the reason that today’s wheat is less diverse is only the side effect of one of the most astonishing feasts ever pulled off by a single human: Norman Borlaug. His breeding program in the 1940s was the start of the “Green Revolution“. He’s the guy who saved the billions from starvation.

For further reading about his story, I can highly recommend „The Wizard and the Prophet“ by Charles C. Mann [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327

New comment by mif in "Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal"

mif — Tue, 28 May 2024 07:04:29 +0000

Reminds me of [1]. We are good at estimating the median but not the mean.

[1] https://erikbern.com/2019/04/15/why-software-projects-take-l...

New comment by mif in "Russia Just Found Oil Reserves in Antarctica"

mif — Wed, 15 May 2024 04:08:44 +0000

Current world-wide oil production is c. 83 million barrels per day [1]. With the estimated 511 billion barrels, about 2x of Saudi Arabia’s reserves (2005, [2]), that would last for about 15 years.

[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/world_crude_oil_production

[2] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Energy/Oil/R...

New comment by mif in "Logarithmic Scales"

mif — Thu, 09 May 2024 21:57:19 +0000

The graph named “non-linear growth”, is actually showing linear growth. I know, it’s confusing, but as long as the factor is constant (10), growth is linear.

A quick way to check if something grows linearly is to put it on a log-scale and to see whether it’s a straight line.

Nice explanation, though. We should talk about logs more often.

New comment by mif in "Did we lose our way in making efficient software?"

mif — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 03:57:39 +0000

Reminds me of some of the remarks Joe Armstrong made a while ago [1], and which I came across via another submission a couple of weeks ago (which escapes me). It’s a great talk about the physical limits of computers and computation.

[1] https://youtu.be/lKXe3HUG2l4?si=nMkDTMfvBK1AKCYI

New comment by mif in "Ask HN: Is RAG the Future of LLMs?"

mif — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 23:49:49 +0000

For those of us who don’t know what RAG is (including myself), RAG stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation.

From the video in this IBM post [0], I understand that it is a way for the LLM to check what its source and latest date of information is. Based on that, it could, in principle, say “I don’t know”, instead of “hallucinating” an answer. A RAG is a way to implement this feature for LLMs.

[0] https://research.ibm.com/blog/retrieval-augmented-generation...

New comment by mif in "I fell out of love with academia"

mif — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 03:12:59 +0000

I think we need more people like her to speak out about their experiences. And it doesn’t even matter whether it’s academia or tech or anything else. That’s the only way to try to overcome and recognize „survivorship bias“.

There are billions of people who are not „successful“ in a societally acceptable way. Being „unsuccessful“ is the norm and „success“ is the exception.