Hacker News: ragall

New comment by ragall in "Git hosting that never leaves Europe"

ragall — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:38:01 +0000

It actually, clearly, is.

New comment by ragall in "Git hosting that never leaves Europe"

ragall — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:37:48 +0000

This isn't arbitrary and isn't censorship, you moron.

New comment by ragall in "Git hosting that never leaves Europe"

ragall — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 18:17:48 +0000

That's entirely fine.

New comment by ragall in "Bug Blindness"

ragall — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:08:51 +0000

Compare a professional trader's UI to something consumer-grade like Robinhood, or analytics UIs designed for marketers (exposing only a few cute graphs with a handful of predefined parameters) to the dashboards used in physics labs, or simple graphics programs vs. Blenders.

Maximum efficiency for experts requires removing information that would be distracting and redundant for them, but essential for novices to understand the working model of the program, so you're pretty much wrong.

New comment by ragall in "Bug Blindness"

ragall — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 08:07:04 +0000

A mistake that both Dan and the forum users made, was to discuss averages instead of reliability for certain platforms and/or engine types. Most manufacturers have models with wildly different reliability.

New comment by ragall in "Bug Blindness"

ragall — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 08:04:13 +0000

He only gave himself 30 minutes to write the post and publish it.

New comment by ragall in "Bug Blindness"

ragall — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 07:37:09 +0000

That's trivially false. There's a large difference between products designed primarily to have a low learning curve, and products designed to maximize the efficiency of users that have been trained in its use.

New comment by ragall in "OTel isn't going well (and I made a spreadsheet about it)"

ragall — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 05:42:18 +0000

> If I understand that correctly, it means your app always creates traces

Yes, because otherwise what you propose requires modifying the binary in-place and that's too big of a security hole for lots of (production) environments. Some variants of that could work with an out-of-process method like Dtrace or eBPF, but that means mutating the kernel, even more of a no-no.

New comment by ragall in "California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year"

ragall — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 20:53:40 +0000

EU tires focus on low rolling resistance and low breaking distance (due to environmental and safety regulations), NA tires focus on durability (became people drive a lot more) and suitability for a wide range of temperatures (became of the climate).

New comment by ragall in "California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year"

ragall — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 20:45:03 +0000

Precisely because NA drivers drive a lot more, NA compounds are more focused on durability rather than increasing car mileage. EU drivers are alright with less durable compounds because rubber gets cooked after a few years and would have to be replaced anyway.

New comment by ragall in "California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year"

ragall — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:32:33 +0000

Tire manufacturers tend to have different compounds for Europe (focused on lower rolling resistance) and North America (focused on traction and a wider range of working temperatures). I'd guess that California will now simply get the EU variants instead of the NA variants.

New comment by ragall in "California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year"

ragall — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:26:47 +0000

Indeed, I put a full set of CrossClimate2 on my German car and the two back tires were completely toast within 24 months and ~15k Km (on Canada). After that I decided to start using proper summer and winter tires.

New comment by ragall in "Protobuf has LSP support"

ragall — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 05:34:26 +0000

You're wrong on every count: given the small context window of LLMs, the need for interfaces and scehmas is even greater.

New comment by ragall in "Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?"

ragall — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 15:59:35 +0000

Common law is insane, this is just the last example.

New comment by ragall in "The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services"

ragall — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 23:08:25 +0000

> Even the original ones are actually made in China

Wrong.

New comment by ragall in "The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services"

ragall — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:35:07 +0000

Consider that it used to be said that nowadays there is not much class difference in consumption between low, middle, and upper clases in the US, in that the same items are practically available to all. Well, that won't be true shortly, and when only a minority will be able to afford "real" items, made exclusively and entirely by humans, I doubt that democracy will be able to survive, because contempt and animosity between the two groups will inevitably ensue, and democracy can't survive that.

New comment by ragall in "NP-overrated"

ragall — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:13:29 +0000

I studied mathematics, and can attest that the attitude of the professor mentioned in the article is very representative of an older generation of mathematicians. Maybe the younger ones are different.

New comment by ragall in "NP-overrated"

ragall — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:10:07 +0000

Some mathematicians certainly did, but there's a very large undercurrent in CS, as well as Mathematics more in general, of utter disinterest for applications as well as the idea that the more general a solution, the more "worthy" it is. That was really obvious from the words of the professor cited in the article.

New comment by ragall in "NP-overrated"

ragall — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:05:23 +0000

> Saying it's overrated is like saying calculus is overrated because most people don't need to use it every day.

You should stop thinking by analogy.

The article was showing the difference between mathematicians and engineers. For the mathematicians that created Computation Science, the only interesting solutions are complete solutions to general questions, whereas for engineers it's perfectly acceptable to eliminate some corner cases, thereby solving a reduced and simplified version of the general problem.

New comment by ragall in "Don't Look Up"

ragall — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:17:48 +0000

The infra expansion of the hyperscalers is predicated on, and financially justified by, the presumed future growth of OpenAI and Anthropic, and their projected revenue. If the latter is not going to happen, I expect OpenAI and Anthropic to go bankrupt, which will trigger a restructuring of the hyperscalers, which should flood the market with either training HW or training capacity at very low cost, and it's not necessarily the hyperscalers that will benefit the most: I believe some of the GPU clouds are using HW leased or bought form NVidia, and running inside second-tier datacenters, not the hyperscalers.