Hacker News: mnd999

New comment by mnd999 in "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges"

mnd999 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 14:40:17 +0000

Why does a robotic vacuum cleaner need to connect to the internet at all? Mine doesn't (Neato Botvac D85) and it works fine.

New comment by mnd999 in "We are the builders"

mnd999 — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 23:19:31 +0000

Not if all the slots are booked up online. Look at what happened with driving tests. They moved it online and all the tests are booked by bots and sold to the highest bidder.

New comment by mnd999 in "Software Supply Chain Security"

mnd999 — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 16:41:15 +0000

Yeah, this has to be the way. Suppliers get paid.

New comment by mnd999 in "GQL: A New ISO Standard in Graph Query Language"

mnd999 — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 15:03:01 +0000

The major vendors are adopting it. Most people don't read the ISO SQL spec to learn SQL. They read their vendors documentation.

New comment by mnd999 in "The Shingle Spit in Whitstable"

mnd999 — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 09:33:14 +0000

Is that you Chris? I think I did a CS poster project with you.

New comment by mnd999 in "Tesla Has a Design Problem"

mnd999 — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 11:21:20 +0000

It likely won’t meet European safety standards so there’s a whole market it will just miss. But maybe it’s too big to be practical in European cities anyway.

New comment by mnd999 in "Twitter Now Showing Ads for Nonconsensual 'AI Undress' Apps"

mnd999 — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 17:21:31 +0000

I’ve had ads for drugs, cloned credit cards and devices for stealing cars with keyless entry all in the last month on a major social network. Reported, but they don’t seem to care.

New comment by mnd999 in "Airbnb is deploying AI to block New Year's Eve bookings that could be parties"

mnd999 — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 12:07:40 +0000

Sure, but its NYE. In most neighbourhoods there are going to be parties anyway, AirBnB or no.

New comment by mnd999 in "Airbnb is deploying AI to block New Year's Eve bookings that could be parties"

mnd999 — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 12:06:48 +0000

Parties are not the problem. Damages, illegality and annoying the neighbours are what they should be trying to detect. It's a shame that people planning a small get together with friends should have to suffer because some idiots like to trash places.

New comment by mnd999 in "Why do programmers need private offices with doors?"

mnd999 — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:55:47 +0000

I've definitely seem benefits from working in open plan. Sometimes it's helpful to overhear what others are doing because maybe they're lacking some information or maybe that thing has already been done elsewhere. Does a fresh graduate with no experience really want to be in an environment where everyone is shut in an office?

Equally, sometimes it's better to be quiet. Sometimes, quiet can be at home but sometimes homes are not quiet or uninterrupted.

Flexibility would be great, but I think a private office will always be seen as more prestigious, so those with that facility are unlikely go give it up so sit in a cube / open plan with the team, even where that would actually be beneficial.

New comment by mnd999 in "Build a search engine, not a vector DB"

mnd999 — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:14:16 +0000

My views are my own and as such I do not disclose my employment or otherwise on here.

I did think twice about posting it, as I don't usually but it's relevant and i might be helpful so why not? If you don't like it, thanks for the downvote.

New comment by mnd999 in "Build a search engine, not a vector DB"

mnd999 — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 09:08:00 +0000

Neo4j are mixing vector embeddings with knowledge graphs - https://neo4j.com/generativeai/

New comment by mnd999 in "CUDA vs. ROCm: A case study"

mnd999 — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 08:24:48 +0000

It doesn’t even work on half of the GPUs (Navi23 hello). It’s like they’re not even trying which is insane when there’s so much cash on the table.

New comment by mnd999 in "PostgREST: Providing HTML Content Using Htmx"

mnd999 — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 18:49:51 +0000

I’m sure you know this but the reason for taking computation off the database is that it’s much easier to horizontally scale a stateless middle tier than it is to scale a sql database.

Some DBAs I’ve worked with even advocated for taking sorting off the database. I wasn’t entirely convinced by that one.

My server side language in this case was Scala, so it wasn’t slow, just memory hungry.

New comment by mnd999 in "PostgREST: Providing HTML Content Using Htmx"

mnd999 — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 18:40:56 +0000

I think it started as pretty much crud and then just grew features that were more complex backend logic. But I was the one brought in to fix it, not the original architect - he had left the company at this point so I don’t know the whole history.

New comment by mnd999 in "PostgREST: Providing HTML Content Using Htmx"

mnd999 — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 08:38:56 +0000

The only postgREST app I ever worked on was awful. Why? Because like most of these ‘simple’ frameworks it’s only simple until your requirements get complicated. Then the original authors had to resort to writing a ton of stored procedures on the database to get back the results they wanted and that led to scalability problems. The solution, as always, is go back to SQL.

New comment by mnd999 in "Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth"

mnd999 — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 14:24:00 +0000

Yes, but any unknown password is enough to put most people off, particular if the contents of the wallet is unknown.

New comment by mnd999 in "Homelessness reaches highest reported level in the U.S. in 2023"

mnd999 — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 14:21:51 +0000

There isn’t really a left in the US. You have right and righter.

New comment by mnd999 in "Google Groups ending support for Usenet"

mnd999 — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 09:13:00 +0000

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

New comment by mnd999 in "Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth"

mnd999 — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 08:35:34 +0000

I think ‘readily accessible’ was the important bit.