Hacker News: nine_k

New comment by nine_k in "447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane"

nine_k — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 03:14:30 +0000

It took 15 if not 20 years to commercialize even such obvious, low-tech thing as radio telegraph, which can literally be built form common house supplies. It happened about 60 years after Maxwell predicted the electromagnetic waves theoretically.

Red LEDs were invented / discovered in 1920s, became commercially successful as indicators in 1960s. Optical fibers were invented in 1920s or so, became a commercial success in 1980s.

Certain things just take time. Do not dismiss a good physical effect, they are much more rare than so-called good ideas.

New comment by nine_k in "447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane"

nine_k — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 22:23:18 +0000

3 PhDs is quite some dedication to science, given that a PhD student life is neither that of plenty nor leisure.

New comment by nine_k in "Keeping a Postgres Queue Healthy"

nine_k — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 22:13:09 +0000

This is fair! This should as you descripbe work with a partial index, and with picking the lowest ID that has status = pending (via that index) which is not locked (via select ... for update skip locked). The query plan should be triple-checked though to actually use the index.

New comment by nine_k in "Keeping a Postgres Queue Healthy"

nine_k — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:33:44 +0000

For (2): the problem is that the index would still need to keep the dead tuples, until Postgres is positively certain that no transaction holds them, and runs vacuum over them. It may speed up things a bit, but would still overflow the disk storage eventually. It may still prevent other tables from being vacuumed, too!

New comment by nine_k in "Keeping a Postgres Queue Healthy"

nine_k — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:21:42 +0000

In short:

* Postgres still has the same problem with vacuum horizon, when a long-running query can block vacuuming of a quick-churning table. (The author uses a benchmark from 2015 when the problem was already well-understood.)

* Stock Postgres still has no tools good enough against it.

* The author's company special version of Postgres does have such tools; a few polite promotions of it are strewn across the article.

My conclusion: it's still not wise to mix long (OLAP-style) loads and quick-churning (queue-style) loads on the same Postgres instance. Maybe running 0MQ or even RMQ may be an easier solution, depending on the requirements to the queue.

New comment by nine_k in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

nine_k — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:06:17 +0000

Of course it worked. Apple turned from a company that sells electronic equipment into a company that sells media consumption devices which double as fashion accessories signaling high social status. Of course the addressable market is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger.

They still sell computers, which count below 10% of the revenue, and are also partly fashion accessories.

New comment by nine_k in "WireGuard makes new Windows release following Microsoft signing resolution"

nine_k — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:23:24 +0000

Because it's a kernel driver anyway?

New comment by nine_k in "Has Mythos just broken the deal that kept the internet safe?"

nine_k — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:02:29 +0000

Yes, I meant the equality.

We already operate on the assumption that P ≠ NP, so little would change if that were proved.

New comment by nine_k in "Has Mythos just broken the deal that kept the internet safe?"

nine_k — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:52:52 +0000

Likely all existing cryptography would become crackable, possibly some of it, very readily.

New comment by nine_k in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

nine_k — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:44:18 +0000

Apple computers are made for those who purchases a computer. They are engineered to look great on a demo shelf.

«During the first Jobsian era at Apple, I used to joke that Steve Jobs cared deeply about Apple customers from the moment they first considered purchasing an Apple computer right up until the time their check cleared the bank.» (Bruce Tognazzini)

New comment by nine_k in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

nine_k — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:19:44 +0000

But uv is a (very-) nice-to-have tool, not the foundation.

Also, uv is open source, and can be forked if the company behind it decides to close it (see Terraform → OpenTofu, etc).

New comment by nine_k in "FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages"

nine_k — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:13:08 +0000

Disabling may be not sufficient (which is pretty insidious), but I still posit that enabling message preview is guaranteed secrecy loss.

But indeed, the idea that disabled notifications are still stored, and not directed to /dev/null immediately, cannot be inferred from just observing the behavior of the phone UI.

New comment by nine_k in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

nine_k — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:37:14 +0000

Indeed, the cost of decent good XR glasses is less than the cost of upgrade to the business class on a flight!

New comment by nine_k in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

nine_k — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:21:06 +0000

JJ has a good chance, because it builds on top of git, not replacing it abruptly.

New comment by nine_k in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

nine_k — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:42:49 +0000

The tool that could replace git must free, ubiquitous, and arguably open-source. This is why I cannot imagine how raising $17M may pay for itself in that case, to say nothing of a 10× return.

It may be a great tool, but I'd be very reluctant to use a closed-source solution as a cornerstone of infrastructure.

New comment by nine_k in "FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages"

nine_k — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:10:36 +0000

This is insidious indeed. Still I would suggest that any secret message, as it leaves the app that handles secrecy, ceases to be secret. This BTW also applies to copy-paste operations, screen readers, etc.

New comment by nine_k in "FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages"

nine_k — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:52:48 +0000

If you care about security at all, you disable any previews on the lock screen. The lock screen is by definition visible to anyone without any authorization. Showing anything on it immediately destroys any secrecy. It must be obvious to anyone capable of elementary logic inference.

If you don't know how to disable it, you use your favorite search engine / LLM / knowledgeable relative to find out, and disable it.

But if you just didn't pay attention, "never thought about it", you don't care about security, and no amount of technical means would help, sorry.

New comment by nine_k in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess"

nine_k — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:50:26 +0000

Does this resemble human language, with syntax, the ability to define new notions based on known notions, etc?

New comment by nine_k in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

nine_k — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:50:21 +0000

But context window exhaustion does not look like mere forgetfulness, but more like loss of general coherence, like getting drunk.

New comment by nine_k in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

nine_k — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:45:47 +0000

If you look at different ancient traditions, you will notice how they struggle with the limitations of language, with its inability to represent certain things that are not just crucial for understanding the world, but also are even somehow communicable. Buddhists dug into that in a very analytical, articulate way, for instance.

Another perspective: cetaceans are considered to be as conscious as humans, but any attempts to interpret their communication as a language failed so far. They can be taught simple languages to communicate with humans, as can be chimps. But apparently it's not how they process the world inside.