Hacker News: phrotoma

New comment by phrotoma in "Boron Buckyballs: B80 cages in the lab"

phrotoma — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:09:09 +0000

Thanks for taking the time to explain!

New comment by phrotoma in "Introducing Boron Buckyballs: Theory that B80 cages can’t be made is disproved"

phrotoma — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:39:15 +0000

Having only just learned what DFT is by reading this article, could someone familiar with the field opine on how significant it would be to discover a physical system that conflicts so much with its predictions?

New comment by phrotoma in "Valve P2P networking broken for more than 2 months"

phrotoma — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:00:33 +0000

Eternal September.

New comment by phrotoma in "Social Cache Busting"

phrotoma — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 10:59:57 +0000

It's not slick, but I've always labeled this as; answering the question they want to answer (rather than answer the question that was asked).

New comment by phrotoma in "Gaussian Point Splatting"

phrotoma — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:52:08 +0000

I love this site design. It uses the entire width of the monitor rather than a slender column of pixels down the middle with large blocks of unused space on either side, with a font for my old man eyes.

New comment by phrotoma in "Gorilla: A fast, scalable, in-memory time series database (2016)"

phrotoma — Mon, 25 May 2026 10:43:17 +0000

It doesn't really, except I suppose that both are called "databases". DuckDB is intended for OLAP, while Gorilla is specifically designed for time series data. You would never do something like "INSERT INTO users ..." with Gorilla.

New comment by phrotoma in "DeepSeek reasonix, DeepSeek native coding agent with high caching and low cost"

phrotoma — Mon, 25 May 2026 10:33:10 +0000

Is "harness" in this context ~= "agent"?

New comment by phrotoma in "Constraint Decay: The Fragility of LLM Agents in Back End Code Generation"

phrotoma — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:34:25 +0000

"constraint decay" isn't this just another name for the (already well understood) idea of "context rot"?

New comment by phrotoma in "The C64 Dead Test Font"

phrotoma — Sun, 24 May 2026 09:52:58 +0000

> Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of wherever.

New comment by phrotoma in "Accelerando (2005)"

phrotoma — Sun, 17 May 2026 11:47:44 +0000

Same. Although tbf this is a defining feature of many of my favourite sci-fi novels. Whenever I revisit the Sprawl or the Bridge trilogies I always notice something I completely missed before.

New comment by phrotoma in "Show HN: Nibble"

phrotoma — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:59:12 +0000

Intermediate Representation. It's an architecture independent "halfway point" that happens during compilation, in between reading the source code and writing the binary. It's part of the approach that makes it possible for LLVM to "plug-in" a new target architecture by just adding a bit that turns IR into machine code for the new chip.

I'm oversimplifying because it's all black magic to me, but I do know that acronym.

New comment by phrotoma in "K3sup – bootstrap K3s over SSH in < 60s"

phrotoma — Tue, 05 May 2026 10:10:19 +0000

> you've strayed off the golden path & are attempt to do something the wrong way (in Talos world).

In this case the urge to make a tweak is synonymous with the urge to make the product _function_.

I admire their dedication to the schtick, but the upshot is that since you cannot reach inside to make Talos actually work in environments that aren't supported by that golden path, running the product on many devices is "Talos Wrong".

That's their perrogotive, but it's obnoxious in a "Windows 11 doesn't work on your perfectly functional laptop" kinda way.

New comment by phrotoma in "K3sup – bootstrap K3s over SSH in < 60s"

phrotoma — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:49:11 +0000

My primary use case for K3s is small machines, cheap VPS, Pi, etc. Would love to hear from folks who have had success with Talos in those spaces but last time I gave it a shot the welded shut hood prevented me from doing the little tweaks necessary to get running in those environments.

In the cloud or on prem I suspect folks are having better luck than I did, but also open to being wrong about this.

New comment by phrotoma in "K3k: Kubernetes in Kubernetes"

phrotoma — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:43:02 +0000

K8s encourages thinking about workloads as "cattle not pets". App running in K8s falls over? Blow it away and let K8s recreate it, etc.

However clusers themselves often become the new pets. Many orgs do not reach a level of operational maturity where they can blow away and recreate whole clusters without downtime and toil.

A meta-pattern has emerged where higher order tooling managers a whole fleet of clusters. This is an implementation of that meta pattern which uses K8s itself as the higher order tool to manage other clusters.

It's not a new idea, just a new implementation of the pattern.

New comment by phrotoma in "K3k: Kubernetes in Kubernetes"

phrotoma — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:36:50 +0000

Thanks. I knew I'd seen this idea before but couldn't remember the project name.

New comment by phrotoma in "Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey"

phrotoma — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:16:39 +0000

It is very close, but what's more interesting to me is that it's actually amusing. I've yet to see an LLM actually be originally funny (entirely possible I've missed the crossing of that line) and the opening lines put a wry grin on my face.

New comment by phrotoma in "Show HN: Site Mogging"

phrotoma — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:11:07 +0000

Er shit, thanks for the correction. That's what I thought I was linking to. I'm not good at reddit.

New comment by phrotoma in "Show HN: Site Mogging"

phrotoma — Fri, 01 May 2026 13:54:25 +0000

For completeness, x-maxxing morphed out of "minmaxing" in gaming culture.

https://old.reddit.com/r/rpg_gamers/comments/kew14o/ok_what_...

It was fine before they got hold of it.

New comment by phrotoma in "Apple accidentally left Claude.md files Apple Support app"

phrotoma — Fri, 01 May 2026 13:25:36 +0000

Yesterday my google home mini gave me the current temperature in farenheit. I live in Canada and use a pixel. Dumbest fucking AI going. May as well give it to me in coulombs per hectare.

New comment by phrotoma in "I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it"

phrotoma — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:05:04 +0000

Upvoted because you're correct.