Hacker News: nephanth

New comment by nephanth in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

nephanth — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:24:34 +0000

Hell sometimes the ai may look at values in .env or other uncommited stuff. Its execution path may depend on which commands are available in the environment. The specific model and settings. On top of the inherent randomness if you havent set model heat to 0. i suspect it is very hard to get consistent reproducible ai runs

New comment by nephanth in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

nephanth — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:21:50 +0000

But then who's responsible for reviewing and correcting the ai-written code ?

New comment by nephanth in "Debunking Zswap and Zram Myths"

nephanth — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:10:57 +0000

I used to put swap on zram when my laptop had one of those early ssds, that people would tell you not to put swap on for fear of wearing them out

Setup was tedious

New comment by nephanth in "Ask HN: Why isn't there competition to LinkedIn yet?"

nephanth — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 09:58:32 +0000

Indeed ?

New comment by nephanth in "Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud"

nephanth — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 17:29:48 +0000

The EU in its current form is mostly about markets. It routinely pushes for the sacrifice of government monopolies to the altar of the free market (see for a recent example the french train network). Most of its regulations are to ensure a level field for a balanced market.

Hell it pushes for free markets even when it makes very little sense (the eu electricity market and its weird idiosyncrasies are an artifact of that)

It basically bans member governments from printing money and imposes very strict limits of 3% GDP on government deficits. For reference the US deficit was 5.9% gdp this year, Almost twice as much. this greatly limits government control over the economy.

New comment by nephanth in "Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud"

nephanth — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 13:12:31 +0000

Socialist is a very weird term to use here. The eu is the epitome of neoliberalism, even more so than the us

New comment by nephanth in "Reflections on AI at the End of 2025"

nephanth — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 12:52:38 +0000

As someone who worked on transformer-based diffusion models before (not for language though), i can say one thing: they're hard.

Denoising diffusion models benefited a lot from the u-net, which is a pretty simple network (compared to a transformer) and very well-adapted to the denoising task. Plus diffusion on images is great to research because it's very easy to visualize, and therefore to wrap your head around

Doing diffusion on text is a great idea, but my intuition is it will prove more challenging, and probably take a while before we get something working

New comment by nephanth in "Bring bathroom doors back to hotels"

nephanth — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 10:57:21 +0000

In between the beds?? Does that mean the shower was right in the middle of the room ? So that it would be impossible to place a double bed ? This is the weirdest part to me

New comment by nephanth in "One Handed Keyboard"

nephanth — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 12:49:28 +0000

I tried that concept whith my ergodox when i had an arm in a splint, but i couldnt quite get my brain to wrap around it. I could type on the right key, but not press the mirror/switch key at the right moment.

What would have made it easier is if it could infer the right key like an autocorrect

New comment by nephanth in "Why don't you use dependent types?"

nephanth — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 21:39:49 +0000

You are slightly wrong.

Python does allow you to put anything in annotations. ( pep 3107 that defines type annotations says that explicitly [1]).

But it also defines a type checking annotations, which is a specific convention for using pep 3107 annotations. Type annotations were introduced in PEP 484 and updated in a lot of subsequent peps. The python typing system is fully specified in [3].

It does have several implementations, although the reference implementation is mypy

[1]: https://peps.python.org/pep-3107/#rejected-proposals

[2]: https://peps.python.org/pep-0484/

[3]: https://typing.python.org/en/latest/spec/index.html

New comment by nephanth in "Why don't you use dependent types?"

nephanth — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 18:57:49 +0000

Python has static typechecking which, while not perfect, works pretty well as long as you're not actually trying to circumvent it (or manipulating things "too dynamically")

New comment by nephanth in "Stop 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header (2024)"

nephanth — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 14:27:14 +0000

This feels like something that should be opt-in, not opt-out. It feels trivial to have all clients that support it send a header stating they do, and it is ridiculous that the default is to allow sending reacts to clients that don't support them

New comment by nephanth in "Language models are injective and hence invertible"

nephanth — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 11:48:38 +0000

"And hence invertible" <- does every output embedding combination have an associated input ? Are they able to construct it or is this just an existence result ?

New comment by nephanth in "Language models are injective and hence invertible"

nephanth — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 11:39:21 +0000

They are looking at the continuous embeddings, not at the discrete words inferred from them

New comment by nephanth in "Language models are injective and hence invertible"

nephanth — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 11:38:11 +0000

> That would be purely statistic and not based on any algorithmic insight.

This is machine learning research ?

New comment by nephanth in "California lawmakers pass SB 79, housing bill that brings dense housing"

nephanth — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 19:02:54 +0000

As little as one experience is worth,

When I lived in socal, almost every person under 35 i knew there was living in a 2-4bd with roommates.

1bd and studios were very scace, and almost often prohibitively expensive.

So I second that creating a real offer for 1bd and studios would definitely free up family housing.

On top of that 1 and 2-person households still need housing. Building some for them is a good thing in my book

New comment by nephanth in "California lawmakers pass SB 79, housing bill that brings dense housing"

nephanth — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 18:45:16 +0000

> Whether good or bad, it's important to realize this is not true in California, with regard to these laws. They apply everywhere, not only in urban centers.

According to the linked article, the only areas affected by this bills are major transit centers and high throughput public transit stops, which tends to exclude small towns far from cities. If you look at the linked map, affected areas are all concentrated in big cities

Are you commenting on the bill being discussed here or on something else entirely?

New comment by nephanth in "AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents"

nephanth — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 17:32:30 +0000

Of course but configuration for software is exactly what hidden files are usually used for

New comment by nephanth in "AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents"

nephanth — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 17:30:45 +0000

If that is the case then why call it Agents.md instead of integrating it with already existing documentation files or calling it something like "Summary.md"?

New comment by nephanth in "AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents"

nephanth — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 06:13:25 +0000

It is files that are meant to be read by software, not humans. From my point of view this seems like a prime candidate for a hidden directory?