Hacker News: pstoll

New comment by pstoll in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

pstoll — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:41:13 +0000

The women who made up the workforce of telephone switch operators would like to have a word.

Meaning - every new technology has both been perceived as a threa and often forced change in society. Agree maybe “it feels different” this time, but don’t you think everybody before us just said the same thing?

Also not clear if this is an actual called action.

New comment by pstoll in "[dead]"

pstoll — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:22:40 +0000

wtf it's paywalled after the first little bit. was not expecting that from a "blog".

I'm looking for a place to direct people to see the math behind it, seemed like it had potential.

New comment by pstoll in "Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP"

pstoll — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 01:28:27 +0000

Did they finally make a viable version of spanner for themselves?

New comment by pstoll in "Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future"

pstoll — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:05:12 +0000

Except that Mac ultra M3 they talk about is now only being sold in the 96 GB configuration. It’s no longer being sold in larger Ram configurations by Apple Apple because of the global RAM shortage. And you can not add memory after purchase because it’s integrated/soldered on.

New comment by pstoll in "Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus"

pstoll — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:40:39 +0000

Agreed on - it took a long time to get to the “so what is new here” vs the broader topic of distributed consensus. Stylistically would prefer more upfront “here is what is novel here”

New comment by pstoll in "Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus"

pstoll — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:37:58 +0000

TBH I’m doubtful of most people building their own crypto libs and distributed consensus implementations. But maybe cloudflare can pull it off. Good to see them pushing the state of distributed consensus.

Take aways:

* it’s not in prod yet. I suspect those many round trips are going to get expensive on median aka typical redistributed deployments. Curious to see how it goes once in the wild.

* they say it isn’t likely suitable for eg databases.

* they talk about formal verification, which is good and feels appropriate.

Looking forward to seeing more!

New comment by pstoll in "Tell HN: Meta is down"

pstoll — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:04:30 +0000

“In the building” the building happened to be their secure data centers, not their offices.

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.