Hacker News: msanlop

New comment by msanlop in "Show HN: Move to dodge the bullets. How long can you survive?"

msanlop — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 14:04:16 +0000

got 0.1s :)

New comment by msanlop in "Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)"

msanlop — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:37:48 +0000

I'm reminded of Test Pilota Pirx, a polish movie, filmed in part in the US. There's some car chase scenes in american roads, and one scene where the main character gets a beer at a McDonald's[0] while looking around in a mall. I don't know much about the history of censorship but I was surprised as I imagined that would be out of line then

[0] https://youtu.be/20-dt24F6sM?t=1641

New comment by msanlop in "Closing the Chapter on OpenH264"

msanlop — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 15:39:53 +0000

including digital footage with film grain added in post?

New comment by msanlop in "Optimistic Locking in B-Trees"

msanlop — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 11:30:36 +0000

Indeed, generally delegation has become to mean that there is a dedicated server thread that executes critical sections. Where as combining indicates that any thread can become a combiner while acquiring a lock, for a certain period of time. For the project, we used queue-based combining, which seems to be similar to the the lock in the paper.

New comment by msanlop in "Optimistic Locking in B-Trees"

msanlop — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:56:41 +0000

I tried looking for papers on the subject but couldn't find much. There recent research about in-memory B-tree, and there is has been shown that smaller pages (sizes as low as 256/512B) are more performant due to better cache behavior[0]. The general wisdom seems to be that disk-based databases' IO performance is the main bottleneck—but again I couldn't find any concrete data/benchmarks about why those higher sizes were chosen.

[0] There's even some cool research about B-trees that have the layout depend on the probabilistic distribution of the lookups: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3592980.3595316

New comment by msanlop in "Optimistic Locking in B-Trees"

msanlop — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:44:24 +0000

Nice! I actually worked on this recently for my bachelor project. We got some promising preliminary results that showed performance gains on B-trees by using "delegation" on top of optimistic lock coupling.

The way delegation locks work is by having threads delegate their critical function instead of getting exclusive access to shared memory. Think of a client/server model, where the server executes other core's critical sections. For machines with very high core counts, the result is that the shared memory remains valid in the delegate's cache, instead of each new lock holder getting cache misses and fetching memory from other cores (or worse, other sockets).

New comment by msanlop in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2025)"

msanlop — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:58:44 +0000

Location: Switzerland

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, C, Java/Scala, JavaScript/TypeScript, C++, SQL, git, CMake, Docker, GNU/Linux, HTML/CSS

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11wghLICyMQw3O23_LuaXCevhdkJ...

Email: Please refer to CV

I'm a new graduate with a strong curiosity for technology and computer science, mainly looking for opportunities in systems programming or backend development.

New comment by msanlop in "Ask HN: What are the most complicated machines humans have built?"

msanlop — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 01:56:41 +0000

somewhat related: "IMG_0416" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42102506

New comment by msanlop in "Ask HN: What are the most complicated machines humans have built?"

msanlop — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 01:55:52 +0000

One thing that keeps on giving for me me is being able to watch some random youtube video like its nothing. I can click on a random 200 view video from 12 years ago and scrub through it basically no latency. Thinking about how every little packet goes up and down the stack and around the world... The whole infrastructure to make it so seamless.

Meanwhile watching a video from an external drive or my wired SMB NAS fails half the time :|

New comment by msanlop in "Stimulation Clicker"

msanlop — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:14 +0000

> sort of a demo of how we're all dumber than lab mice

Funny you mention that, in the scrolling "breaking news" bar one of the stories was "LAB RATS UNIONIZE AND DEMAND FAIR COMPENSATION"

New comment by msanlop in "A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024)"

msanlop — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 18:17:23 +0000

I tried Orion for a bit but unfortunately it is still a bit too unstable. The one bug that made me put it aside for now was Orion maxing out a CPU for no reason (while locked) and coming to my macbook burning to the touch with almost no battery. This happened to me twice. Otherwise the browser is really good

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

msanlop — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 13:44:09 +0000

>One video is worth a thousand words

>Easily record and share AI-powered video messages with your teammates and customers to supercharge productivity

This is the first thing you see when visiting the website. Ctrl+F finds "AI" 10 times in the page. Like the other commenter said, it probably has nothing to do with AI, but this is what sells at the moment

New comment by msanlop in "Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2025?"

msanlop — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 00:15:23 +0000

I would add "A Bivvy, a Phone and a Drone: Cycling Home from China"[1] to that great list. As well as Ed Pratt Unicycling The World series [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmdxs_0yYwc

[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLocRYksAqGOJnr-Y0eyP8...

New comment by msanlop in "How types make hard problems easy"

msanlop — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 22:52:09 +0000

> get bogged down typing the best possible ways to do it but it's a moving target

As someone who is still learning this is a huge reason why I've come to love dynamic languages. Any project I do involves a lot of rewriting as the code evolves, I found that trying to predict ahead of time what the structures and types will be is mostly a waste of time. The best middle ground for me so far has been using python with type hints. It allows for quick iteration, I can experiment and only then update the types to match what I have, so that I can still get LSP help and all that.

But I could see this being less relevant with more experience

New comment by msanlop in "What every systems programmer should know about concurrency (2020) [pdf]"

msanlop — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 12:50:38 +0000

Spent 4h yesterday looking for a bug in my atomics, and probably 4 more today :^)

New comment by msanlop in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

msanlop — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 14:13:22 +0000

Well Trump is still running on Making America Great Again after having been president

New comment by msanlop in "Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities"

msanlop — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:30:04 +0000

It's too bad this doesn't use .ssh/config

New comment by msanlop in "Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)"

msanlop — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 18:23:18 +0000

> so head takes all of it

Maybe you implied it, but adding to the 'going up' case, there is bullet ricochet -- also reffered to as skipping or bouncing bullets -- that makes it so that bullets will ricochet out at a shallow angle and ride out the wall or floor, making your head hittable without even aiming at it. Here is a instructional FBI video talking about it.[0] And a more modern take.[1]

[0] https://youtu.be/7tUW0cUkNv0?feature=shared&t=240 (I think the date is wrong, other places mark it as being from 1974-5)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT219NKPJh0

New comment by msanlop in "Ask HN: Is anybody getting value from AI Agents? How so?"

msanlop — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 13:38:14 +0000

Do you have examples of this?

New comment by msanlop in "Rclone syncs your files to cloud storage"

msanlop — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 21:57:48 +0000

rclone is not a proper backup tool. It's like an rsync that integrates with all the clouds. You can kinda use it as one though. I had Borg in my todo for a long time too -- experimented with it and restic which are proper backup tools -- they are a little more involved than rclone (and scary, as they can get corrupted and you are essentially reliant on the software to get your files back). I found rclone much simpler to work with. As they always say, any backup is better than no backup!

The simplest thing you can probably do is use rclone to copy your most important files to a B2 bucket. Enable Object-lock on the B2 bucket to ensure no deletion just to be safe. You can then run rclone on server and from your devices with cron jobs to archive your important stuff. This is not a proper backup as I said, if you rename files or delete unwanted stuff it wont leave on the backup bucket but it's usable for stuff like photos and the like, anything you don't want to lose.

(I lied, simplest thing is actually probably just copying to an external hard drive, but I find having rclone cron jobs much more practical)