Hacker News: pstoll

New comment by pstoll in "“Why not just use Lean?”"

pstoll — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:00:47 +0000

Feels like all the write ups that point out the short comings of eg Python for scientific computing.

Sure, except that once you have a community at critical mass around a reasonably good tool, that trumps most other things. Momentum builds. People write tutorials, explainers, better documentation, etc. it hits escape velocity.

Feels like Lean, with Terrance Tao as a strong proponent / cheerleader, is in that space.

Everyone who argues “but language X is better” … may not be wrong, but they are not making the argument that matters. Is it better than the thing everyone else knows and can use and has more people hours going into it to improve it?

Feels like a “worse is better” situation; or maybe “good and popular is good enough”.

New comment by pstoll in "The coming PLG to SLG apocalypse"

pstoll — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:04:18 +0000

PLG. Any article I have to search for an acronym and don’t find it - nope.

New comment by pstoll in "TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression"

pstoll — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 11:48:50 +0000

And a group has published an independent working implementation today, nice to see:

https://github.com/tonbistudio/turboquant-pytorch

New comment by pstoll in "TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression"

pstoll — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 11:44:31 +0000

Good post but link at the end is broken.

“”” For the full technical explanation with equations, proofs, and PyTorch pseudocode, see the companion post: TurboQuant: Near-Optimal Vector Quantization Without Looking at Your Data.“

New comment by pstoll in "TorchLean: Formalizing Neural Networks in Lean"

pstoll — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:48:56 +0000

And the lower precision float variants.

New comment by pstoll in "Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns"

pstoll — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:28:51 +0000

TLDR the recorded media isn’t end-to-end encrypted and they aren’t selling it but instead using it to train their own systems. What is new here?

New comment by pstoll in "Msgvault: fast private email archive and search system"

pstoll — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:50:57 +0000

Ditto - completely appeals to me. I’m good starting with mail.

New comment by pstoll in "psc: The ps utility, with an eBPF twist and container context"

pstoll — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:32:38 +0000

I’m the opposite - I much prefer a structured query language (ahem) for this type of thing. If I’m looking at someone’s (ie my own 6 months later) script I much prefer to see the explicit structure being queried vs “why are we feeling for foo or grabbing the 5th field based on squashed spaces as the separater”.

Nice use of CEL too. Neat all around.

New comment by pstoll in "1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5"

pstoll — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 15:09:10 +0000

Yes only on that page, not the rest of his blog. Guessing he ansible’d it to redirect ;)

New comment by pstoll in "Twelve Days of Shell"

pstoll — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 10:45:46 +0000

Neat idea à la regex golf.

But doesn’t seem to do enough shell escaping or correctly. Also seems underspecified, ie “find 5 lines starting with ‘the” doesn’t require a pipe to head -5.

New comment by pstoll in "Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code"

pstoll — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 15:43:42 +0000

I get what your saying but I think it’s not the best way to describe it - “GPL is property”? Hardly - it’s a societal common good that can be used by anyone interested in helping that common good.

Are parks “proprietary”? I can’t run my car dealership from one, so it’s …proprietary? No. So using the terminology of “proprietary” doesn’t do justice to what it actually is.

New comment by pstoll in "A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z"

pstoll — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 15:25:29 +0000

Lol I was hoping for that too

New comment by pstoll in "NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware"

pstoll — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 21:46:56 +0000

It’s the “no longer evil” marketing without actually proving that “no longer evil.com” is in fact … from from evil.

I was assuming that I could point the nest data stream & control UI to my own hosted thing on eg my local NAS or docker farm. That’s what I think would warrant the moniker “free from evil” in this kind of strong privacy preserving marketing.

New comment by pstoll in "Apache Iggy is a high-performance, persistent message streaming platform"

pstoll — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 10:26:55 +0000

Proposal - every new thing needs a “here are the systems we consider and rejected” entry. I can’t find one on the docs here.

Founders care to comment on if you evaluated if Tremor (https://github.com/tremor-rs/tremor-runtime) would suit what you needed?

Seems to me that the lists of features (and use of rust) have a high degree of overlap.

New comment by pstoll in "Twake Drive – An open-source alternative to Google Drive"

pstoll — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 11:16:32 +0000

My first inclination too tbh.

And then I saw Npm references and thought “in JavaScript?!” But at least it’s typescript.

New comment by pstoll in "Twake Drive – An open-source alternative to Google Drive"

pstoll — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 11:14:44 +0000

In TypeScript, interesting. Not the obvious choice IMO but trying to keep an open mind.

Was that because of team expertise or particular aspects of TS you thought suited the domain?

New comment by pstoll in "PyTorch Monarch"

pstoll — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 23:47:30 +0000

“Service Adverbs - like ‘route’ and ‘fanout’”

Grammarians are going to be big angry here. Ain’t an adverb in sight.

New comment by pstoll in "ProofOfThought: LLM-based reasoning using Z3 theorem proving"

pstoll — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:18:48 +0000

Upvoting the comment that the gitrepo would be way more self stand-alone if it had an intro of the DSL.

New comment by pstoll in "ProofOfThought: LLM-based reasoning using Z3 theorem proving"

pstoll — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:11:09 +0000

I’d argue we aren’t solving those inverse kinematics / kinetics via “number crunching” - but rather that our neuromuscular systems are analog. Which I don’t usually call that “number crunching” in the sense current computers … compute.

New comment by pstoll in "MCP overlooks hard-won lessons from distributed systems"

pstoll — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 17:17:31 +0000

> I can practically see it playing out now: there is some huge incident of some kind, in some system or service with an MCP component somewhere, with some elaborate post-mortem revealing that some MCP server somewhere screwed up

Already happening.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/atlassian-ai-agen...