Hacker News: nickpeterson

New comment by nickpeterson in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

nickpeterson — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:36:23 +0000

the letter but not the spirit, like Amish workers using batteries

New comment by nickpeterson in "A bug which affected only left handed users"

nickpeterson — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:29:50 +0000

Another 13 mini user chiming in. I’m 6’3, and think it’s ridiculous how big phones are. It reminds me of the automobile and tv industry though, where you’re sort of forced into buying something obnoxious if you want to get the better features.

New comment by nickpeterson in "The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth"

nickpeterson — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:09:48 +0000

It feels like something anthropic or OpenAI would pounce on for marketing clout

New comment by nickpeterson in "60% Fable cost cut by converting code to images and having the model OCR it"

nickpeterson — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:09:46 +0000

a pictures worth a thousand tokens

New comment by nickpeterson in "CarPlay Is Additive"

nickpeterson — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:42:44 +0000

Is the mechanism through which CarPlay/Android Auto works locked down? Could a third party make a competing app for iOS or android that would connect to cars and run on the screen? Or perhaps a special piece of hardware to hook in to older cars?

New comment by nickpeterson in "Gun Mistakes in Fiction Writing: Handgun Edition"

nickpeterson — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:27:04 +0000

Michael Mann movies tend to get this right, Heat and collateral have really decent gun sounds. Turns out they are very loud.

Edit: just noticed you mentioned heat already, I need more coffee…

New comment by nickpeterson in "Claude-real-video － any LLM can watch a video"

nickpeterson — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 01:13:35 +0000

I’m currently punishing Fable by making it watch the entire series of 7th Heaven.

New comment by nickpeterson in "Postgres transactions are a distributed systems superpower"

nickpeterson — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 01:11:26 +0000

Only a Sith deals in absolutes

New comment by nickpeterson in "Ray Tracer in SQL"

nickpeterson — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 21:26:32 +0000

SQL in SQL has never occurred to me.

New comment by nickpeterson in "Sony erases digital content from libraries; reminded we don't own what we buy"

nickpeterson — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 11:55:22 +0000

I’ve bought a bunch of movies on appletv, and I think about how angry this would make me, but I’ve never looked into a decent backup solution. I’m not sure if the drm has ever been broken really, but I’d imagine some device could pretend to be an hdmi tv. Anyone ever backup their atv stuff?

New comment by nickpeterson in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

nickpeterson — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:25:19 +0000

You're completely wrong here, they make sure the check clears.

New comment by nickpeterson in "Dolphin Emulator Progress Release 2606"

nickpeterson — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:03:08 +0000

It’s ridiculous get your money back

New comment by nickpeterson in "Half-Life 2 in a Browser"

nickpeterson — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:59:24 +0000

I’ve always wondered a bit about the ssr side of these things a bit. Something like time crisis where the main video is pre-rendered and streamed but the interactive elements (enemies, explosions) are superimposed in front on the client. Feels like you could make a very low bandwidth experience (around the same cost as a YouTube video plus some assets?).

New comment by nickpeterson in "John Carmack on the mistakes around Quake that ruined id software"

nickpeterson — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:40:54 +0000

It’s always interesting when people who excel at an activity express regrets about certain decisions. I find it reassuring that being great at something doesn’t mean flawless.

New comment by nickpeterson in "U.S. science is in chaos"

nickpeterson — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:35:30 +0000

You probably don’t need the word science in the headline.

New comment by nickpeterson in "An Interview with Intel's Kira Boyko: Xeon 6's Product Director"

nickpeterson — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:06:49 +0000

So… chips and cheese?

New comment by nickpeterson in "The Future of Email"

nickpeterson — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:10:22 +0000

They want you to drink your rich chocolate email.

New comment by nickpeterson in "The perils of UUID primary keys in SQLite"

nickpeterson — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:49:22 +0000

They just mean you catch incorrect joins more easily because there is usually no overlap in keys between unrelated tables. Using int, you’re usually going to have some shared values between two unrelated tables.

New comment by nickpeterson in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

nickpeterson — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:54:05 +0000

A lot of oltp databases have modeling conventions for making read only reporting tables. Do tabular dbs have an inverse for transaction heavy data, that later gets batched to a read optimized structure? I kind of think most databases (even oltp workloads) really are read dominated. I feel like DuckDB is really close to working as the ‘main db’ for such systems, but my lack of knowledge for how to handle quick mutations bothers me. It feels like some form of temporal data modeling would solve it but I don’t know.

New comment by nickpeterson in "Scientists “bottle the sun” with a liquid battery that stores solar energy"

nickpeterson — Sun, 17 May 2026 20:01:40 +0000

I think I saw an apple A16 takes about 8 watts, which would be about a square foot of solar panel. So assuming we keep making progress it doesn’t seem insane to me that a laptop where the back of the lcd is a solar panel would be enough?