Hacker News: rbranson

New comment by rbranson in "GPT-6 Sol and Luna"

rbranson — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:59:25 +0000

Astra planner/designer with Sol+Luna subagents has worked well for me to improve context continuity. Luna generates code, Sol reviews code and runs/monitors integration/E2E tests. It's about 20% more usage efficient and 20% faster to finish tasks. I've been very subagent-skeptic for a while but the economics of codegen with Luna have made it click. This just works in Codex with a single-line AGENTS.md instruction.

New comment by rbranson in "GPT-6 Sol and Luna"

rbranson — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:53:00 +0000

Assuming you are doing coding, I'm curious how would you characterize tne majority of your work (language, domain, frontend/backend, etc)?

New comment by rbranson in "Safe Lock-free Primitives with iceoryx2's ByteAtomic"

rbranson — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:20:31 +0000

This is why wait-free and lock-free are separate concepts. Author is not claiming wait-free.

New comment by rbranson in "OpenAI reduces Codex Model Context Size from 372k to 272k"

rbranson — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 02:48:47 +0000

For agentic use it impacts input tokens because the output is fed back into the model as input on subsequent turns.

New comment by rbranson in "OpenAI reduces Codex Model Context Size from 372k to 272k"

rbranson — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:58:35 +0000

Note that GPT-5.6-Sol is ~2x as token efficient as Opus/Fable, so a 258K max is equivalent to ~516K on Claude models. You also may just be fooling yourself, as context rot is still a problem[1][2] and there's evidence compaction can be equivalent or better than longer context windows for agentic tasks[3]. Obviously it would be best if the models could reason over 1M context like they do over 256K context, but they can't yet.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12366 [2] see F1 of GraphWalks 256K vs 1M in Opus 4.8 System Card: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/0b4915911bb0d19eca5b5ee635c80f... [3] https://context-folding.github.io/

New comment by rbranson in "GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse"

rbranson — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 05:11:33 +0000

it does not require training a model from scratch for it to be updated. the entire LLM training process is iterative. essentially each step (there are hundreds/thousands for a training run) yields a complete, usable model. tokens with updated data can be added on top essentially at any time in the future.

New comment by rbranson in "PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you"

rbranson — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:35:52 +0000

You are correct. As a point of comparison: almost ten years ago at Segment we had a single Aurora PostgreSQL instance with ~50T of data, it was used to index potential identity data in a much larger corpus of files stored in S3.

New comment by rbranson in "Project Glasswing: An Initial Update"

rbranson — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:00:35 +0000

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. This is exactly what was reported by curl's creator under the section "Five findings became one": https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-v...

OpenAI makes GPT-5.3-Codex available through their API

rbranson — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 20:03:47 +0000

Article URL: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.3-codex

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142107

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by rbranson in "Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems"

rbranson — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 17:19:50 +0000

Sure, but you still need to design around this problem. It’s going to be a happy accident that everything turns out fine if you don’t.

New comment by rbranson in "Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems"

rbranson — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 16:51:35 +0000

Biggest thing to watch out with this approach is that you will inevitably have some failure or bug that will 10x, 100x, or 1000x the rate of dead messages and that will overload your DLQ database. You need a circuit breaker or rate limit on it.

New comment by rbranson in "Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith"

rbranson — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 01:12:25 +0000

This is explicitly called out in the blog post in the trade-offs section.

I was one of the engineers who helped make the decisions around this migration. There is no one size fits all. We believed in that thinking originally, but after observing how things played out, decided to make different trade-offs.

New comment by rbranson in "GPT-5.2"

rbranson — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 13:24:01 +0000

Bricken isn’t just making this up. He’s one of the leading researchers in model interpretability. See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14257

New comment by rbranson in "Are hard drives getting better?"

rbranson — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 15:25:47 +0000

The 990 Pros have a temperature sensor issue. See https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793#discussionc...

New comment by rbranson in "Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?"

rbranson — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 22:32:21 +0000

It's all wood construction, originally stick victorians with 2x4 exterior walls. My "loudest" neighbor is being picked up on 80MHz at -47 dBm.

New comment by rbranson in "Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?"

rbranson — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 22:13:03 +0000

> It's a much better answer to hook up everything on Ethernet that you possibly can than it is to follow the more traveled route of more channels and more congestion with mesh Wi-Fi.

Certainly this is the brute-force way to do it and can work if you can run enough UTP everywhere. As a counterexample, I went all-in on WiFi and have 5 access points with dedicated backhauls. This is in SF too, so neighbors are right up against us. I have ~60 devices on the WiFi and have no issues, with fast roaming handoff, low jitter, and ~500Mbit up/down. I built this on UniFi, but I suspect Eero PoE gear could get you pretty close too, given how well even their mesh backhaul gear performs.

New comment by rbranson in "Arbitrary code execution in Unity Runtime"

rbranson — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 18:18:51 +0000

This seems pretty bad from the headline but there's no evidence of any in-the-wild exploits or if there is a feasible real-world exploit here. Some other domino(s) have to fall before it allows RCE. For instance, browser-based exploits are blocked by SELinux restrictions on dlopen from the downloads path.

New comment by rbranson in "How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs"

rbranson — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 01:43:32 +0000

Magnetic hard drives are 100X cheaper per GB than when S3 launched, and are about 3X cheaper than in 2016 when the price last dropped. Magnetic prices have actually ticked up recently due to supply chain issues, but HAMR is expected to cause a significant drop (50-75%/GB) in magnetic storage prices as it rolls out in next few years. SSDs are ~$120/T and magnetic drives are ~$18/T. This hasn't changed much in the last 2 years.

New comment by rbranson in "Boring is good"

rbranson — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 06:04:42 +0000

Is it bullshitting to perform nearly perfect language to language translation or to generate photorealistic depictions from text quite reliably? or to reliably perform named entity extraction or any of the other millions of real-world tasks LLMs already perform quite well?

New comment by rbranson in "Reduce bandwidth costs with dm-cache: fast local SSD caching for network storage"

rbranson — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 23:49:53 +0000

> For e-commerce workloads, the performance benefit of write-back mode isn’t worth the data integrity risk. Our customers depend on transactional consistency, and write-through mode ensures every write operation is safely committed to our replicated Ceph storage before the application considers it complete.

Unless the writer is always overwriting entire files at once blindly (doesn't read-then-write), consistency requires consistency reads AND writes. Even then, potential ordering issues creep in. It would be really interesting to hear how they deal with it.