Hacker News: monomers

New comment by monomers in "You should write an agent"

monomers — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 11:56:51 +0000

What use cases do you imagine for LLMs in home automation?

I have HA and a mini PC capable of running decently sized LLMs but all my home automation is super deterministic (e.g. close window covers 30 minutes after sunset, turn X light on if Y condition, etc.).

New comment by monomers in "Chat Control faces blocking minority in the EU"

monomers — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:40:23 +0000

It would be possible to proactively pass a law that is incompatible with future attempts, right?

E.g. in this case something like a "right to chat secrecy" law.

New comment by monomers in "Piano Keys"

monomers — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 07:36:18 +0000

That design you describe is what is pictured at the top of the article.

Problem is that then the keys are not equally spaced chromatically (e.g. larger spacing between B and C than between C and C#).

You could probably get used to play like that, but it would be ineficient in terms of space for both the fingers and the mechanics of the piano (hammers, strings).

So what you do, in reality, is move some of the black keys down a bit (C#, F#) and some up (Eb, Bb) so that the spacing between the center of the keys is regular.

I don't think that's what's described in the article though?

New comment by monomers in "Why Fennel?"

monomers — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 19:37:26 +0000

I like Janet a lot, and have been using it for small personal projects for about a year.

But it does come with some design decisions that I'm a bit ambivalent about and for which I haven't found a good explanation:

- No persistent data structures. I guess this has something to do with limitations of the GC?

- unhygienic macros combined with lack of namespaces. XOR those two choices would be fine, but the combination is janky

- Somewhat peculiar choices in syntax. It's neither Scheme, nor is it Clojure. # starts comments, ; is splice, @ marks literals as mutable...

New comment by monomers in "Glojure: Clojure interpreter hosted on Go, with extensible interop support"

monomers — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 10:25:00 +0000

> lot of clojure developers could benefit from this immensely.

Curious what you think Clojure developers could benefit from specifically.

Having done web services in both languages I much prefer the experience in Clojure. E.g. found error handling in Gin to be very cumbersome (AbortWithStatusJSON and such). The deployment story is nicer in Go, tho.

Clojue CLR is behind JVM support (and performance), but it has been a thing from the start, not just a "port".

New comment by monomers in "Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing"

monomers — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 18:12:42 +0000

The German social contract for a long time was that the working class gets low wages, which keeps German exports competitive and combined with the large internal market, prices low. In return for making the owning class wealthy, workers also get a relatively good social support system and job security.

I'm not sure this model ever applied to A & CH, and might be starting to collapse in D as well.

New comment by monomers in "Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase"

monomers — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 08:30:10 +0000

I'm missing clarity about how do I escape Instant DB when I need to, and how to make it part of a larger system.

Say I have an InstantDB app, can I stream events from the instant backend to somewhere else?

New comment by monomers in "What is the significance of the character "j" at the end of a Roman Numeral? (2013)"

monomers — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 17:24:26 +0000

There is no standard writing system for Swiss German. So she might have used it, but it would be unclear to most Swiss what it means/how it should be pronounced.

New comment by monomers in "Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land bridge for Oceania cargo"

monomers — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 11:18:22 +0000

> train composed of heavy-axle rail cars has an upper limit of about 160 tons.

1000 axles sounds doable, but maybe not very practical.

New comment by monomers in "Htmx, Rust and Shuttle: A New Rapid Prototyping Stack"

monomers — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 16:11:11 +0000

I think it doesn't need to be for relative time intervals like "1 min ago".

New comment by monomers in "Toyota to restart Japan production on Wednesday after system failure"

monomers — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 09:15:45 +0000

In IT we (wrongly) use the word "production" to refer to the systems in operation serving customers: ie. the car that has left the factory. I don't know much about cars, but Toyota has a reputation for high reliability there.

In manufacturing, production lines instead refer to a previous step in the lifecycle, still in the factory. That's where you can pull the andon cord.

New comment by monomers in "The Silicon Valley elite who want to build a city from scratch"

monomers — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 23:07:59 +0000

> mexico, el salvador, iran, afghanistan

None of those are in South America or Africa. Maybe it would be good to first understand the problem, including the geography, before proposing ideas.

New comment by monomers in "Python: Just Write SQL"

monomers — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 23:30:49 +0000

There's a whole family of libraries like that. Yesql is the first I became aware of. The repo has an (incomplete) list of ports to other languages: https://github.com/krisajenkins/yesql#other-languages

New comment by monomers in "Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools"

monomers — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 22:01:37 +0000

From own experience, yes. When I switched to 8th grade it was a bit further, so I biked there.

New comment by monomers in "Google Street View returns to Germany after 10 Years"

monomers — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 17:27:34 +0000

I'll grant you they might want more, but they definitely require more than they _need_, like those two examples I mentioned: as long as I get its mail it's none of its business where I live, and it should definitely not have anything to do with church funding. To be clear I'm also not defending Google. I just wish Germany had a higher standard for privacy vis-a-vis the public institutions.

New comment by monomers in "Google Street View returns to Germany after 10 Years"

monomers — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 08:12:31 +0000

The state keeps collecting all the data it wants, though. For example, you are mandated to declare where you live and what your religion is. Germany only takes privacy seriously when it comes to private companies.

New comment by monomers in "How many people have ever lived on Earth?"

monomers — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 16:46:49 +0000

It can't be exponential. If in 1800 there was 1G people, in 1900 2G people and in 2000 6G people, and we fit an exponential curve thought that we get less than 10 people alive in the year 0.

New comment by monomers in "Concord bank offers a 100-year CD"

monomers — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 22:16:13 +0000

Oh, I agree. There's many good reasons to celebrate population stagnating: economic, social,ecological. But it's not going to be a painless transition from the last 2-300 years of a system predicated on growth.

New comment by monomers in "Concord bank offers a 100-year CD"

monomers — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 08:18:52 +0000

Practically all models estimate peak population to happen somewhen in the second half of the 21. century. And most countries outside of Africa are likely to go the way of Japan far sooner.

New comment by monomers in "Concord bank offers a 100-year CD"

monomers — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 07:55:00 +0000

With global population stagnating in the coming decades I wouldn't bet on inflation staying the same. I think it's more likely that we are headed into a deflationary crisis worse than 1930 Germany.