Hacker News: nrclark

New comment by nrclark in "GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse"

nrclark — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:45:28 +0000

That's around 100k/year if used at the same rate for every workday. So the question becomes: does it make your engineer X% more productive, where X is some multiplier based on their salary? There are some software engineers out for sure who are expensive enough that this is worth it.

New comment by nrclark in "Fox to buy Roku"

nrclark — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:42:59 +0000

I don't see this happening any time in the near future. The extra hardware cost is nontrivial, and there's a software support burden. Cellular bandwidth also isn't free, and probably wouldn't be covered by the value of any ads/telemetry that it carried.

New comment by nrclark in "Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute"

nrclark — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:15:38 +0000

OK, but SpaceX is not printing money out of thin air. And neither does the stock market. Somebody will be left holding the bag eventually.

New comment by nrclark in "India's surprise baby bust"

nrclark — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:44:18 +0000

> Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture.

Highly subsidized? I have to assume you're not talking about America. I pay $3200/mo to send my kids to a very middle-of-the-road preschool. That's almost $40k/year just in childcare costs so that my wife and I can go to work. The difference between a 1-bedroom apartment and a 3-bedroom apartment is an extra $20k/yr or so in my area. Then there's health care premiums, taking them out for activities sometimes, etc.

I can ballpark the cost of having preschoolers in my area as $30k/yr each. And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly see any government subsidies helping me carry that burden.

New comment by nrclark in "Why Janet? (2023)"

nrclark — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:12:46 +0000

PEGs are a great replacement for a complicated regex, and can express a lot of things that are hard to do with a regex. But they're also more verbose, and fewer developers are familiar with their usage. PCRE regex is kind of the lingua franca of text-matching, and making it available would be helpful for newcomers imo.

New comment by nrclark in "Why Janet? (2023)"

nrclark — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 19:15:08 +0000

Something I'd observe here: without expressing an opinion about PEGs vs regexes, I'd note that regexes are much more widely used. They're also completely sufficient for an awful lot of text processing tasks. PCRE regexes would be a great inclusion to the stdlib, and would probably be popular.

New comment by nrclark in "Why Janet? (2023)"

nrclark — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 19:06:58 +0000

Tcl is pretty good at functional-programming type stuff, and it can absolutely do anything that you could do with a macro. It isn't Algol-like at all imo, maybe beyond some superficial syntax. It feels a lot more like if LISP and Bash had a baby out of wedlock.

(I've written a lot of Tcl over the years and it'll always have a spot in my heart)

New comment by nrclark in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

nrclark — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:29:08 +0000

Not the parent, but yes I would/do write that way for effect.

New comment by nrclark in "Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?"

nrclark — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:43:57 +0000

We use a Docker Compose setup for our team's devcontainer. It's defined right in the repo alongside the Dockerfile used to build our image. Our build scripts are all set up to start/stop/use the container automatically. Integration with Vscode's devcontainer system will come next.

It's been a great way for us to make sure that developers and CI/CD get exactly the same build environment, mount-points, paths, network access, permissions, etc.

It's been a super solid tool overall, and I'm pretty happy with it. The only thing that would make our setup better would be if we could figure out how to go rootless/daemonless with it.

New comment by nrclark in "Mounting tar archives as a filesystem in WebAssembly"

nrclark — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 06:33:18 +0000

Tar doesn't need to imply gzip (or bzip2, or zstd, etc). Tar's default operation produces uncompressed archives.

New comment by nrclark in "Hear your agent suffer through your code"

nrclark — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:16:32 +0000

out of curiosity - any reason not to use it?

New comment by nrclark in "Mounting tar archives as a filesystem in WebAssembly"

nrclark — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:06:43 +0000

You only have to decompress it first if it's compressed (commonly using gzip, which is shown with the .gz suffix).

Otherwise, you can randomly access any file in a .tar as long as: - the file is seekable/range-addressible - you scan through it and build the file index first, either at runtime or in advance.

Uncompressed .tar is a reasonable choice for this application because the tools to read/write tar files are very standard, the file format is simple and well-documented, and it incurs no computational overhead.

New comment by nrclark in "USD Purchasing Power in Real Time Since 2000"

nrclark — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:55:17 +0000

This isn't very surprising. Typical US economic policy aims for 2-3% annual inflation. That counter shows an average 2.6% inflation across 26 years, which is kind of right in the range we'd expect.

It's debatable whether this is good longterm policy - but it's been the norm in the US for decades.

New comment by nrclark in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

nrclark — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 13:32:49 +0000

If Windows wants to commit to quality and user experience, they can do it by moving closer to the experience that made a generation fall in love with it.

  - Turn Notepad back into a text editor.
  - Remove ads from your operating system. Yes it feels like a license to print money, but it makes your users hate your product. 
  - Stop charging money for Freecell and Minesweeper.
  - Converge your three control panels back into one. The classic control panel was not broken.
  - Drop the mandatory Microsoft User accounts. Nobody wants this except your bean counters.

When 3 out of these 5 happen, I'll believe that Microsoft is actually recommitting to their users.

New comment by nrclark in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

nrclark — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 03:31:56 +0000

Not the grandparent, but I've used most of the OpenAI models that have been released in the last year. Out of all of them, o3 was the best at the programming tasks I do. I liked it a lot more than I like GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro. Overall, I'm not at all convinced that models are making forward progress in general.

New comment by nrclark in "Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver"

nrclark — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:17:07 +0000

I get your point about camera vs lidar. Humans do have other senses in play while driving though. We have touch/vibration (feeling the road surface texture), hearing, proprioception / acceleration sense, etc. These are all involved for me when I drive a car.

New comment by nrclark in "How I Became a Quant (2007) [pdf]"

nrclark — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:32:14 +0000

Kind of reads 25 people's stories about "How I became a parasite". Why not create new things, instead of making a career out of leeching the wealth created by others?

New comment by nrclark in "Chase to become new issuer of Apple Card"

nrclark — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:49:10 +0000

I’ve disputed fraud a couple of times on my Chase cards. It was.. fine? Uneventful and simple.

New comment by nrclark in "Vietnam bans unskippable ads"

nrclark — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 16:57:31 +0000

Interesting, I wonder if this will spike VPN traffic into Vietnam.

New comment by nrclark in "2025: The Year in LLMs"

nrclark — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 14:47:41 +0000

Agree. Even asking it can anchor your thinking.