Hacker News: patwolf

New comment by patwolf in "AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart"

patwolf — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:28:51 +0000

Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.

New comment by patwolf in "What came after the 486?"

patwolf — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:02:37 +0000

Pentium marketing was next level. You could buy plushies of Intel workers in bunny suits. The first IMAX movie I went to was called "The Journey Inside", and it was basically a big ad for the Pentium.

I always wondered if some of that was to offset the negative publicity from the FDIV bug in the early Pentiums.

New comment by patwolf in "Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming"

patwolf — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:25:16 +0000

These rules apply equally well to system architecture. I've been trying to talk our team out of premature optimization (redis cluster) and fancy algorithms (bloom filters) to compensate for poor data structures (database schema) before we know if performance is going to be a problem.

Even knowing with 100% certainty that performance will be subpar, requirements change often enough that it's often not worth the cost of adding architectural complexity too early.

New comment by patwolf in "PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon"

patwolf — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 19:41:55 +0000

I owe much of my career to an SSD. I had a work laptop that I upgraded myself with an 80GB Intel SSD, which was pretty exotic at the time. It was so fast at grepping through code that I could answer colleagues’ questions about the code in nearly real time. It was like having a superpower.

New comment by patwolf in "Ghostty – Terminal Emulator"

patwolf — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:04:40 +0000

I use it on MacOS, but it doesn't support tabs.

New comment by patwolf in "Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model"

patwolf — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:10:12 +0000

The first time I got a photo scanner, I was blown away that I could see myself on a screen. I eventually got a digital camera, and the novelty started to wear off. Now I can make myself the lead in a blockbuster movie, but that feels boring.

New comment by patwolf in "DoNotNotify is now Open Source"

patwolf — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:35:02 +0000

I found that writing rules was tricky when I didn't know exactly what content would be in a spam/promo notification. I ended up having claude code up a filter that asks an AI to review the notification first, which seems to be working well.

Thanks for making it open source. I've been wanting something like that for a while, but I'd been putting it off since I didn't want to learn the underpinnings of the notification service.

New comment by patwolf in "The tech monoculture is finally breaking"

patwolf — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 12:53:54 +0000

I got one of these for my kid a few years ago. He liked to browse Spotify on my phone, and I thought it would be a good screenless alternative. But honestly it just sat in a drawer, and I didn't have the patience to maintain and sync playlists to it.

It's easy to be nostalgic for the iPod era, but having to sync music is something I'm fine keeping in the past.

New comment by patwolf in "China and Canada announce tariffs relief after meeting between Carney and Xi"

patwolf — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:13:59 +0000

> In the deal struck on Friday, Canada will allow only 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles into the Canadian market at the 6.1% tariff rate.

I was wondering how Canada would prevent this from damaging their auto industry, and capping the total numbers of cars is how they're doing it.

New comment by patwolf in "I’m leaving Redis for SolidQueue"

patwolf — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:26:47 +0000

I've been looking at DBOS for queuing and other scheduling tasks in a nodejs app. However, it only works with Postgres, and that means I can't use it in web or mobile with sqlite. I like that SolidQueue works with multiple databases. Too bad it needs rails.

New comment by patwolf in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

patwolf — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:14:09 +0000

I wish it had generated the articles themselves. I'd like to know if it imagining IBM growing enough that it could acquire OpenAI, or OpenAI sinking enough that it could be acquired by IBM.

New comment by patwolf in "PGlite – Embeddable Postgres"

patwolf — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 12:40:29 +0000

Glad to see it working in react native. It always surprises me that RN doesn't natively support wasm. I've had to avoid other wasm-based libraries, like loro, for that reason.

New comment by patwolf in "The Cities Skylines Paradox: how the sequel stumbled"

patwolf — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:10:08 +0000

The funny thing is that CS1 probably wouldn't have been as successful had EA not dropped the ball on the SimCity franchise. There was a decade between SimCity 4 and SimCity (2013/5), and when it finally came out it was a completely underwhelming.

On the bright side, maybe another developer can pick up the reins and release the next generation's city builder game.

New comment by patwolf in "You can now buy used Ford vehicles on Amazon"

patwolf — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 17:58:20 +0000

Most dealership websites in the US list cars as New, Pre-Owned or Certified Pre-Owned, meaning Certified is distinct from Pre-Owned.

New comment by patwolf in "650GB of Data (Delta Lake on S3). Polars vs. DuckDB vs. Daft vs. Spark"

patwolf — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 13:52:52 +0000

I worked at a company that dumped Databricks once the first bill came. I guess it was an order of magnitude more expensive than what they expected. It was less expensive to rebuild the pipeline from scratch with a different product.

New comment by patwolf in "The history of Casio watches"

patwolf — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 18:46:06 +0000

According to this their most recent innovation was in 2023 with a "virtual community where people can co-create and interact with one another via digital platforms like NFTs and the metaverse."

New comment by patwolf in "Shiller PE Ratio"

patwolf — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 14:51:45 +0000

Just a reminder that a market crash isn't the only way the Shiller PE Ratio can return to "normal". It can go back down if earnings go up. Or if previous dips in earnings roll outside of the 10-year window used to calculate the ratio.

New comment by patwolf in "Why haven't local-first apps become popular?"

patwolf — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 15:17:20 +0000

From my time using Notes I remember lots of manual replication config to get anything to properly work offline, and even then I struggled to get it to work reliably. So while they might have solved it, I don't think their solution was very good.

New comment by patwolf in "Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?"

patwolf — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 13:40:30 +0000

There was a mention of something like that in Starship Troopers as well.

Heinlein describes life on an earth-like planet with low radiation as being "like a kid who takes ten years to learn to wave bye-bye and never does manage to master patty-cake".

New comment by patwolf in "Pnpm has a new setting to stave off supply chain attacks"

patwolf — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 11:47:08 +0000

It's common to have npm auditing enabled, which means your CI/CD will force you to update to a brand new version of a package because a security vulnerability was reported in an older one.

I've also had cases where I've found a bug in a package, submitted a bug report or PR, and then immediately pulled in the new version as soon as it was fixed. Things move fast in the JavaScript/npm/GitHub ecosystem.