Hacker News: shawnz

New comment by shawnz in "Single log line is 49KB+ (ext4) / 110KB+ (btrfs) of systemd-journald disk writes"

shawnz — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:07:50 +0000

Designing a new on-disk format seems like a pretty far reaching architectural decision... I don't think that's an appropriate target for a drive-by fix from a new contributor

New comment by shawnz in "Pixel Watch 5"

shawnz — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:30:26 +0000

It's a shame they weren't able to launch this with the previously rumored Tensor CPU: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-watch-5-tensor...

New comment by shawnz in "How Claude marks AI-generated content"

shawnz — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:16:58 +0000

There is already some intentional randomness in token selection, because it actually improves the quality of responses if you intentionally don't always pick the most likely next token.

You can hide data in that randomness without impacting the quality of the response by using a sufficiently "random looking" pseudorandom bit stream instead of real random numbers.

I previously worked on a project to do that here: https://github.com/shawnz/textcoder

New comment by shawnz in "Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD"

shawnz — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:42:59 +0000

What's the incentive for third parties to contribute, knowing just one guy stands to benefit if the project gets monetized in such a manner?

New comment by shawnz in "The simple elegance of the integrated timing belt loopback fastener"

shawnz — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:23:34 +0000

If you printed teeth, you'd have to make sure the teeth in the top loop are precisely aligned in relation to the teeth in the bottom loop based on the length of the belt, right? That seems like it could be limiting

New comment by shawnz in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

shawnz — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:10:15 +0000

I confess I have instructions in my CLAUDE.md to avoid such cliches. But I think it's important to consider that we don't really know what subtext an LLM is associating with a given idiom/analogy/etc. It could be much different than the subtext a human would associate with that choice of words, conveying additional details which are only meaningful to the LLM itself. So impeding its ability to talk in the manner it prefers could subtly hinder its performance.

New comment by shawnz in "5k menus from the New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection (1880-1920)"

shawnz — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 18:41:01 +0000

Related, in a sense: "Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26210774

New comment by shawnz in "How Alberta Eradicated Rats"

shawnz — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:23:47 +0000

See also this exploration from Strange Aeons: https://youtu.be/vMOMa-4D1yQ?si=t1uxfY1pEDh2a44Y

New comment by shawnz in "Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”"

shawnz — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:52:24 +0000

Yeah, I know chargebacks are a frequent vector for abuse and of course I don't mean to imply that customers doing chargebacks ought to always implicitly be given the benefit of the doubt.

Given that you are responsive to inquiries, it makes sense that you'd rarely if ever have a legitimate chargeback -- because there's no reason for a customer to resort to chargebacks if the vendor is willing to work with them to resolve legitimate issues.

But I know of many examples of people needing to resort to chargebacks due to ineffectual customer support, and then having their accounts banned and being cut off from other unrelated services from the same vendor as a result. I don't think that's an appropriate response and vendors should be careful not to let that happen if they instate such a policy.

New comment by shawnz in "Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”"

shawnz — Wed, 27 May 2026 02:14:45 +0000

You'd better be promptly responsive to legitimate customer support inquiries if you are going to have a policy like that

New comment by shawnz in "What color is your function? (2015)"

shawnz — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:04:49 +0000

Your entire codebase is already at risk of being blocked by a spinlock or CPU-intensive operation, so what's the difference?

New comment by shawnz in "CPanel and WHM Authentication Bypass – CVE-2026-41940"

shawnz — Fri, 01 May 2026 01:58:01 +0000

cPanel is 30 years old, are you saying it's not battle tested, boring, proven, and widely audited?

In fact PHP is only a few months older than it.

New comment by shawnz in "Claude Opus 4.7"

shawnz — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:30:22 +0000

Thinking summaries might not be useful for revealing the model's actual intentions, but I find that they can be helpful in signalling to me when I have left certain things underspecified in the prompt, so that I can stop and clarify.

New comment by shawnz in "Claude Opus 4.7"

shawnz — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:27:51 +0000

Note that for Claude Code, it looks like they added a new undocumented command line argument `--thinking-display summarized` to control this parameter, and that's the only way to get thinking summaries back there.

VS Code users can write a wrapper script which contains `exec "$@" --thinking-display summarized` and set that as their claudeCode.claudeProcessWrapper in VS Code settings in order to get thinking summaries back.

New comment by shawnz in "Taking on CUDA with ROCm: 'One Step After Another'"

shawnz — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:57:24 +0000

> Supporting only Server grade hardware and ignoring laptop/consumer grade GPU/APU for ROCm was a terrible strategical mistake. A lot of developers experiments first and foremost on their personal laptop first and scale on expensive, professional grade hardware later.

NVIDIA is making the same mistake today by deprioritizing the release of consumer-grade GPUs with high VRAM in favour of focusing on server markets.

They already have a huge moat, so it's not as crippling for them to do so, but I think it presents an interesting opportunity for AMD to pick up the slack.

New comment by shawnz in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

shawnz — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:13:11 +0000

I don't think it's a single axis even in the original poster's conception, since you could be both incorrect and also not pragmatic.

But if a fix needs to be described as pragmatic relative to the alternatives, that's probably because it couldn't be described as correct. Otherwise you wouldn't be talking about how pragmatic it is.

New comment by shawnz in "Chrome extension adjusts video speed based on how fast the speaker is talking"

shawnz — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:17:02 +0000

Damn, I was working on exactly the same idea not too long ago. It never really went anywhere because I couldn't find a speech rate detection algorithm that worked well enough to make it practically useful. I hope some more mathematically inclined people take a look at this idea and find a way to make it work.

New comment by shawnz in "Claude Code conducts A/B tests on core features"

shawnz — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:39:35 +0000

While I agree with the sentiment here, you might be interested to see that there are a couple hack approaches to override Claude Code feature flags:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/21874#issue...

https://gist.github.com/gastonmorixe/9c596b6de1095b6bd3b746c...

New comment by shawnz in "An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward"

shawnz — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 03:47:00 +0000

I mean, yeah, it's entirely possible that the operator is a teenager, isn't it?

New comment by shawnz in "AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it"

shawnz — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:49:03 +0000

This is essentially Jevons' paradox