Hacker News: rudolph9

New comment by rudolph9 in "Google says criminal hackers used AI to find a major software flaw"

rudolph9 — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:54:44 +0000

Do they have high confidence the actor used a keyboard? Used the bathroom at some point during the attack? Has a mother?

Idk, this doesn’t strike me as news. Google just missed a vulnerability.

New comment by rudolph9 in "$500 GPU outperforms Claude Sonnet on coding benchmarks"

rudolph9 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:27:56 +0000

When Apple gets their shit together.

New comment by rudolph9 in "White House plan to break up iconic U.S. climate lab moves forward"

rudolph9 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:28:43 +0000

A lot of people were sick of the status quo. For better or worse, Trump represented change. Obviously, there are many more factors that contributed, but in my opinion, this is where the momentum was.

New comment by rudolph9 in "The Cost of Indirection in Rust"

rudolph9 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:03:39 +0000

The idea is that performance isn’t a reason not to do it. Other considerations may cause you to choose inline, but performance shouldn’t be one of them.

New comment by rudolph9 in "Gemini 3.1 Pro"

rudolph9 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:01:20 +0000

If I was building an application using massive amounts of calls to the api, I’d probably go with Gemini. For a Copilot, definitely Opus.

New comment by rudolph9 in "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"

rudolph9 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 10:34:58 +0000

> Having your own data center is cool

This company sounds more like a hobby interest than a business focused on solving genuine problems.

New comment by rudolph9 in "America's $3T Nuclear Bet (HALEU) [video]"

rudolph9 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:52:35 +0000

This was a well-made video. I haven’t validated any of their claims, but as someone not particularly familiar with nuclear technology, this was pretty helpful.

New comment by rudolph9 in "Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out"

rudolph9 — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 19:56:27 +0000

It’s worth considering if these package managers would have taken off if they didn’t use git. You get a bunch for free, why not use it while you’re small?

New comment by rudolph9 in "Learning music with Strudel"

rudolph9 — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:35:52 +0000

Is this real library/editor/programming-language ?? I don’t see anything on how it’s made?

New comment by rudolph9 in "Mercury is the closest planet – to every other planet"

rudolph9 — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:55:22 +0000

I would think Venus, since it has the second smallest orbit. If that’s the case, I’m wondering if there’s some mathematical theorem that proves the “closest” planet is always the one with the next smallest orbit, regardless of speed or how closely the two objects’ orbits align in size.

New comment by rudolph9 in "Mercury is the closest planet – to every other planet"

rudolph9 — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:50:32 +0000

What is the mostest closest neighbor relative to mercury?

New comment by rudolph9 in "America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints"

rudolph9 — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 11:56:15 +0000

I’m not sure if it’s going to be a better world for humans, but roads so crowded with wheels that I don’t want to leave my house sounds like an economy where a lot of wheels are being sold.

New comment by rudolph9 in "America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints"

rudolph9 — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 11:43:42 +0000

Best I can tell, it’s resulting in less churn, which isn’t the same as work getting done faster. Maybe it’s a phenomenon unique to engineering, but what I’m observing isn’t necessarily work getting done faster — it’s that a smaller number of people are able to manage a much larger footprint because AI tools have gotten really good at relaying existing knowledge.

Little things that historically would get me stuck as I switch between database work, front-end, and infrastructure are no longer impeding me, because the AI tools are so good at conveying the existing knowledge of each discipline. So now, with a flat org, things just get done — there’s no need for sprint masters, knowledge-sharing sessions, or waiting on PR reviews. More people means more coordination, which ultimately takes time. In some situations that’s unavoidable, but in software engineering, most of the patterns, tools, and practices are well established; it’s just a matter of using them effectively without making your head explode.

I think this relay of knowledge is especially evident when I can’t tell an AI comment from a human one in a technical discussion — a kind of modern Turing Test, or Imitation Game.

New comment by rudolph9 in "America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints"

rudolph9 — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 09:44:59 +0000

What is the economic value of a wheel? If we flood the market with wheels, we’re going to need far fewer sleds and horses. Pretty soon, no one might need horses at all — can you imagine that?

New comment by rudolph9 in "America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints"

rudolph9 — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 09:08:49 +0000

I can’t help but think a lot of these comments are actually written by AI — and that, in itself, showcases the value of AI. The fact that all of these comments could realistically have been written by AI with what’s available today is mind-blowing.

I use AI on a day-to-day basis, and by my best estimates, I’m doing the work of three to four people as a result of AI — not because I necessarily write code faster, but because I cover more breadth (front end, back end, DevOps, security) and make better engineering decisions with a smaller team. I think the true value of AI, at least in the immediate future, lies in helping us solve common problems faster. Though it’s not yet independently doing much, the most relevant expression I can think of is: “Those who cannot do, teach.” And AI is definitely good at relaying existing knowledge.

New comment by rudolph9 in "U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites"

rudolph9 — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 15:29:41 +0000

The enriched uranium was reportedly moved before the bombing. As far as I know, the objective was to destroy the enrichment facilities.

New comment by rudolph9 in "A conversation about AI for science with Jason Pruet"

rudolph9 — Mon, 12 May 2025 23:34:30 +0000

There are notable similarities between a wartime economy and one continually adapting to global warming. While perhaps not sustainable long-term, we may observe short-term economic growth driven by government spending, followed by extended inflationary periods. We might currently be experiencing the first cycle of this kind, with more likely to follow.

New comment by rudolph9 in "MongoDB acquires Voyage AI"

rudolph9 — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 01:54:39 +0000

This

New comment by rudolph9 in "MongoDB acquires Voyage AI"

rudolph9 — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 01:45:26 +0000

Don’t choose Mongo. It does everything and nothing well. It’s a weird bastard of a database—easily adopted, yet hard to get rid of. One day, you look in the mirror and ask yourself: why am I forking over hundreds of thousands of dollars for tens of thousands' worth of compute and storage to a company with a great business operation but a terrible engineering operation, continually weighed down by the unachievable business requirement of being everything to everyone?

New comment by rudolph9 in "Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything"

rudolph9 — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 22:38:14 +0000

Under the hood tika uses tesseract for ocr parsing. For clarity this all works surprisingly well generally speaking and it’s pretty easy to run your self and order of magnitude cheaper than most services out there.

https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/