Hacker News: relistan

New comment by relistan in "What Is a Dickover?"

relistan — Sat, 30 May 2026 07:51:41 +0000

This is now the word

New comment by relistan in "Naphtha shortages in Japan"

relistan — Sat, 30 May 2026 07:39:15 +0000

They did say "everything I can find" which, while not citing references, you would also have found it you tried to Google this at all. Here's one

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/business/what-is-naphtha....

here's another one:

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/asia-pacific/2026/05/19/ple...

It's wider than Japan, it's in other countries in Asia. It's directly tied to the war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But it's pretty clear you have your own axe to grind.

New comment by relistan in "A SQL-Inspired Query Language Designed for Event Sourcing (2025)"

relistan — Sat, 16 May 2026 11:12:14 +0000

Having built two production, scaled evented systems over the last decade, I don’t see the need for this. Properly designed events flatten to a table schema in a regular DB quite easily. Tools like Trino/Presto and therefore Athena, let you deep query on a JSON field, as well (e.g. against a Parquet-based event store on block storage), so if you use a standard envelope, the bodies are all still available without having to provide the schema for every event. This works to quite huge amounts of data given that you do rollups and/or snapshots.

New comment by relistan in "Erlang/OTP 29.0"

relistan — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:21:46 +0000

I am a Go dev, too. I consider Go my main language. The BEAM has a very, very similar architecture to the M:N scheduler in Go. Goroutines are not dissimilar to BEAM processes. You can similarly run thousands of processes on the BEAM. But Go does not have a real Phoenix equivalent and there are reasons to use Elixir and BEAM, especially on the web side, including some of what I already mentioned above.

New comment by relistan in "Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'"

relistan — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:19:11 +0000

At least they can patch all of them to fix it at once. 16 year old new drivers are harder to patch.

New comment by relistan in "Erlang/OTP 29.0"

relistan — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:10:23 +0000

Elixir and Phoenix is a better production platform than Django.. I’m not throwing shade on Django, many production systems use it happily. I’m saying that Phoenix/Elixir is better, partly because of the BEAM and OTP and partly because of the language and the framework. Real concurrency. Better performance. Far more robust in production. The language is pre-compiled, and while not statically typed, that alone provides one more safety layer. It’s functional, which avoids a lot of the ugly patterns in both Rails and Django. It has a built-in fast and reliable KV store. It has distribution between the nodes if you want it (e.g. for a distributed cache). It enables you to debug with a remote shell connected live to the running system. There’s a lot more than I can add here.

New comment by relistan in "I Bought a “Junk” PSP From Japan"

relistan — Sat, 16 May 2026 07:59:08 +0000

Contrast that with my personal experience of items from the UK (specifically the UK, my experience is different elsewhere) where “untested” almost always means “I tested it and I know it’s broken but I want to try to get a better price anyway”. Especially when testing would involve plugging it in with the adapter it comes with and seeing that it doesn’t light up, for example.

New comment by relistan in "Flickr: The first and last great photo platform"

relistan — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 05:58:01 +0000

And, thank you for that! Still my favorite site on the internet.

A Mermaid Planning Tool for AI

relistan — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:28:38 +0000

Article URL: https://relistan.com/mermaid-tool-for-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47429490

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by relistan in "Unpowered SSD data retention test:no data corruption on USB sticks after 6 years"

relistan — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:31:52 +0000

I found a similar (though much smaller! 1GB) Kingston drive from about 2008 that had been in storage since I moved overseas. 14 years later it still had all the data on it.

New comment by relistan in "EU mandates replaceable batteries by 2027 (2023)"

relistan — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 09:27:08 +0000

It’s not clear to me from this, but I hope that the “removability” component of this means the end of “disposable” vapes with a fixed lithium battery installed. I can’t even count the number of these I’ve seen littering the roadside. Ideally this raises the cost of that business model enough to also eliminate some vendors from that product category (“disposable” vapes), which is primarily aimed at/used by children anyway.

New comment by relistan in "Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists"

relistan — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:24:06 +0000

While some things are doing great, there's a not insignificant amount of inertia in government for the last decade. This is actively being discussed in the Irish press. And Ireland has a long history of cronyism. I suspected (author clarified below) that is what was leading to the cynicism in the original post.

New comment by relistan in "Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists"

relistan — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:32:57 +0000

Alternatively, it's successful and is expanded to support more artists in the future. Cynicism with governance not unjustified in Ireland, but here we are looking at some actual progress.

New comment by relistan in "I doubt that anything resembling genuine AGI is within reach of current AI tools"

relistan — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 09:31:40 +0000

These things work well on the extremely limited task impetus that we give them. Even if we sidestep the question of whether or not LLMs are actually on the path to AGI, Imagine instead the amount of computing and electrical power required with current computing methods and hardware in order to respond to and process all the input handled by a person at every moment of the day. Somewhere in between current inputs and handling the full load of inputs the brain handles may lie “AGI” but it’s not clear there is anything like that on the near horizon, if only because of computing power constraints.

New comment by relistan in "Perl's decline was cultural"

relistan — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 09:32:34 +0000

Way back, Perl got off the ground really because, in contrast to the C compilers of the era, code written on one Unix ran on the others, usually unmodified. In my first jobs, where we had heterogeneous mixes of commercial Unixes, this was unbeatable. It also wrote like higher level shell, which made it easy to learn for systems people, who really were the only ones that cared about running things on multiple platforms most of the time anyway.

As things became more homogeneous, and furthermore as other languages also could do that “one weird trick” of cross platform support, the shortcomings of both Perl and its community came to the fore.

New comment by relistan in "I know when you're vibe coding"

relistan — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 09:39:14 +0000

My guess is that you're letting the context get polluted with all the stuff it's reading in your repo. Try using subagents to keep the top level context clean. It only starts to forget rules (mostly) when the context is too full of other stuff and the amount taken up by the rules is small.

New comment by relistan in "I know when you're vibe coding"

relistan — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 09:32:20 +0000

I actually had Claude and Gemini both do it and revise each other's work to get to the final doc. Worked surprisingly well.

New comment by relistan in "I know when you're vibe coding"

relistan — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 07:42:39 +0000

To a certain extent you are probably still not using it optimally if you are still doing that much work to clean it up. We, for example, asked the LLM to analyze the codebase for the common patterns we use and to write a document for AI agents to do better work on the codebase. I edited it and had it take a couple of passes. We then provide that doc as part of the requirements we feed to it. That made a big difference. We wrote specific instructions on how to structure tests, where to find common utilities, etc. We wrote pre-commit hooks to help double check its work. Every time we see something it’s doing that it shouldn’t, it goes in the instructions. Now it mostly does 85-90% quality work. Yes it requires human review and some small changes. Not sure how the thing works that it built? Before reviewing the code, have it draw a Mermaid sequence diagram.

We found it mostly starts to abandon instructions when the context gets too polluted. Subagents really help address that by not loading the top context with the content of all your files.

Another tip: give it feedback as PR comments and have it read them with the gh CLI. This is faster than hand editing the code yourself a lot of times. While it cleans up its own work you can be doing something else.

New comment by relistan in "LibreOffice slams Microsoft for locking in Office users w/ complex file formats"

relistan — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 07:39:05 +0000

As AI tools become more dominant, businesses are going to want their documents to be fully read by their AI in whatever format they are in. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fight over all of this brewing in the next couple of years.

New comment by relistan in "DOGE Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for xAI"

relistan — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 13:51:53 +0000

All of this is a mess. But it should never even have been possible for it to fall to a single developer to screw up and commit a key like that.

If there were anything like proper processes in place, controls would have made that very difficult.

Then there are the weird issues about why obvious close ties to xAI here....