Hacker News: paulyy_y

New comment by paulyy_y in "So you wanna build a local RAG?"

paulyy_y — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 16:53:10 +0000

Burying the lede here - your solution for avoiding using vector search is either offloading to 1) user, expecting them to remember the right terms or 2) using LLM to craft the search query? And having it iterate multiple times? Holy mother of inefficiency, this agentic focus is making us all brain dead.

Vector DB's and embeddings are dead simple to figure out, implement, and maintain. Especially for a local RAG, which is the primary context here. If I want to find my latest tabular notes on some obscure game dealing with medical concepts, I should be able to just literally type that. It shouldn't require me remembering the medical terms, or having some local (or god forbid, remote) LLM iterate through a dozen combos.

FWIW I also think this is a matter of how well one structures their personal KB. If you follow strict metadata/structure and have coherent/logical writing, you'll have better chance of getting results with text matching. For someone optimizing for vector space search, and minimizing the need for upfront logical structuring, it will not work out well.

New comment by paulyy_y in "US economy added just 22,000 jobs in August, unemployment highest in 4 yrs"

paulyy_y — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 14:48:11 +0000

So much winning!

New comment by paulyy_y in "Belgium bans Internet Archive's ‘Open Library’"

paulyy_y — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 14:16:48 +0000

Humanity just doesn't ever learn. Europe will end up having draconian oversight and censorship that will be abused beyond belief by fascists. When some central entity--subject to the whims of political temperature--controls what you can access, there can be no trust in the durability and integrity of information. Same as in the US really, except there being executed to support the nascent regime without any liberal auspices.

New comment by paulyy_y in ".gitignore Is Inherently Sisyphean"

paulyy_y — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 23:01:02 +0000

Allow/deny list, hope that helps.

New comment by paulyy_y in "Emacs dired-mode as a file manager"

paulyy_y — Fri, 23 May 2025 19:49:24 +0000

The insanity of trying to shoehorn everything into emacs, even calling it an OS, is purely beyond.

New comment by paulyy_y in "In some parts of the US, the clack of typewriter keys can still be heard"

paulyy_y — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 12:48:47 +0000

Yeah, this cacophony of clacks is being recreated at my office by every other eng using a diabolical mechanical keyboard with no respect for the ears of their neighbors.

New comment by paulyy_y in "A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub"

paulyy_y — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 16:01:56 +0000

You'd get the spirit roasted out of you at any FAANG (at least, back when people gave a shit) if you ever sent out a change review with such a dumbass comment.

New comment by paulyy_y in "A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub"

paulyy_y — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 16:00:18 +0000

"Absolutisms are a sign of a bad engineer"

Oh the tasty irony.

New comment by paulyy_y in "CDC data are disappearing"

paulyy_y — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 13:52:37 +0000

What's more depressing is this was completely predictable, totally avoidable, but half the country welcomed this wave of oppression with open arms.

New comment by paulyy_y in "Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?"

paulyy_y — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 15:21:34 +0000

Have you checked out the reception to Devin last week? The only thing it's going after is being another notch on the leaderboard of scams, right next to the Rabbit R1.

New comment by paulyy_y in "PRoot: User-space implementation of chroot, mount –bind, and binfmt_misc"

paulyy_y — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 18:48:23 +0000

Please don't use zero-based footnote citations, people will assume 1 is the first one (because that is the standard in like, all of literature) and muscle-memory click the first link when reading and have to then figure out that you are doing a non-standard thing.

New comment by paulyy_y in "Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM"

paulyy_y — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 15:37:14 +0000

Because it is

New comment by paulyy_y in "Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever"

paulyy_y — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 15:04:39 +0000

IA has been under attack and has gone down for weeks recently. At this point it's a bit silly to place much faith in it as a perpetual store.

New comment by paulyy_y in "Ask HN: How to Learn 'To Think'?"

paulyy_y — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 14:56:01 +0000

Nice try LLM, but we can't teach you to think (yet).

New comment by paulyy_y in "Blocking code is a leaky abstraction"

paulyy_y — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 22:00:04 +0000

Or just use fibers and avoid icky futures.

New comment by paulyy_y in "It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word"

paulyy_y — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 14:10:07 +0000

GP? What happened to the good old "OP"?

New comment by paulyy_y in "Show HN: Reintroducing Cap, the open source Loom alternative"

paulyy_y — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 13:34:15 +0000

Doesn't look anything like the Lucas arts adventure game, I fear.

New comment by paulyy_y in "Ask HN: 19yr old child suffering from internet gaming disorder? Any suggestions?"

paulyy_y — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 21:27:54 +0000

Hands off is probably a bad approach here.

One of my roommates in college got addicted to League of Legends. He'd play it all day long, skip classes, not study, etc.. I don't remember what happened exactly but his mom had to get involved and I think he spent some time back at home (detoxing maybe from constant gaming?) before coming back and being better (even apologized for being the way he was, it's easy to realize how crazy it can get when your on the other side).

Basically, get him out of an environment where gaming is freely available. If not that, at least keep contact and keep the pressure up so that they at least have some influence against the tide.

He's 19, a child who just a year or two ago still lived at home... don't think of yourself as powerless and take the action needed to get him to snap back. Hopefully he's receptive.

EDIT: I think people here who think this is fine are just assuming this is a typical kid gaming at school. If this is seemingly so bad that the OP is going on here, I'd err on the side of the parent having a legitimate concern rather than some helicoptering, especially since it's easy to fall into this trap with a developing mind and in a new environment.

Why is 2FA not required at Apple store?

paulyy_y — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 22:38:36 +0000

About a month ago I set up 2 USB-C security keys as my primary second factor for Apple authentication. On a new device, I would need one of the security keys in order to sign into my account, something which I tested and confirmed at home.

Some time passed, phone broke, and I went to Apple store to get a new one. They needed to adjust some stuff on "Find My" so they had me log into my account on one of their laptops in store. All I needed was my password... no security key.

How could this be? I just confirmed again that it is needed by going through the same journey at home on a personal device - security key needed to log into iCloud.

I must be missing something.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40711973

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by paulyy_y in "Grimoire: Open-Source bookmark manager with extra features"

paulyy_y — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 14:42:45 +0000

Gotta love the generic LLM generated description